IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, I recommend, Brendan Simms's inspiringly ambitious, Three
Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire,
1714-1788 (Allen Lane, £30/offer £27). Simms revises boldly the story of
Britain's ascent to superpower status in the 18th century and her even more
dramatic decline after the American Revolution of 1776. No one interested in
empire should miss this elegantly written scholarly book.
Munro Price's The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions 1814-1848
(Macmillan, £20/ £18), illuminates the history of 19th-century France
through the central figures of Louis Philippe d'Orleans and his sister
Madame Adelaide. Louis Philippe was made King by the revolution of 1830,
only to be exiled by the revolution of 1848. He ended his days in Surrey.
Price is rare among historians for recounting original archival work in
wonderfully lucid and engaging prose.
Sir Robert Peel put subsequent prime ministers to shame with his good
historical sense. After the Battle of Waterloo, he encouraged (and helped to
finance) the collection of French pamphlets and books that are now part of
the British Library's most treasured resources. Douglas Hurd's Sir Robert
Peel: A Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25/£22.50) is a
fascinating account of the life and work of this cultivated but still
controversial man: a conservative who nevertheless hoped to be remembered
fondly “by those whose lot it is to labour”.
This has been a striking year for books on the former Soviet Union. Simon
Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25/
£22.50) recounts the story of the Georgian cobbler's son who became the Red
Tsar. To understand fully the monsters of history, it is always necessary to
humanise them first. Montefiore offers a portrait as chilling as it is
intimate.
Orlando Figes's The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Allen
Lane, £25/£22.50) is the most haunting history I have read in years. Based
on extensive original research and carefully collated personal testimony, it
reveals what private life was like for millions under Stalin's tyranny.
Figes is appropriately modest in the face of the searing sadness that he
records: he does not over-analyse, or attempt to explain away the pain.
Instead he honours the lives Stalin blighted by writing about them
beautifully. I pride myself on rarely crying, but this book did move me to
tears, and filled me with enormous respect for its exceptionally talented
author.
Private life from a very different angle is cleverly caught in Alison Light's Mrs
Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree, £20/£18). Ostensibly a book about
Virginia Woolf's fraught, often contemptuous, relations with the women who
cooked and cleaned for her, this is also a book about dependency in the
deepest sense of the word. The Bloomsbury Circle congratulated itself on
being independent and fearlessly innovative, but at its centre was a coterie
of conventional servants whose lives were no less complex than those of the
famous names they supported. This book is informed by Light's own experience
of caring for a sick spouse, and her frank recognition that, like so many of
us, several generations back, she would have been a servant herself, not a
writer. I think Virginia Woolf would have been riveted by Light's book.
Two books on battles that I have admired are Ian Patterson's Guernica and
Total War (Harvard, £8.99/£8.54): a short but piercing account of the
1937 bombing of the Basque town that Picasso's painting helped to turn into
an image of total war (or war by obliteration of whole civilian
populations); and Max Hastings's magisterial Nemesis: The Battle for
Japan, 1944-45 (Harper Press, £25/£22.50. This is a counterpart to his
earlier Armageddon, about the struggle for Germany in the same period. It is
truly cathartic to reach the end of the Second World War in Hastings's
company and arrive at his closing quotation from Tolstoy's Pierre Bezukhov:
“‘What comes next, then? What am I going to do?' And immediately he knew the
answer: ‘Nothing. I'm just going to live. Oh, it's marvellous!'”
Departing from chronology, my last two choices are historical travel books.
Natalie Zemon Davis's Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus,
a 16th-century Muslim Between Worlds (Faber, £20/ £18), traces the life of
the first geographer of Africa. Graham Robb's The Discovery of France
(Picador, £18.99/ £17.09), is the result of 14,000 miles on a bicycle and
four years in the library archives. It is an astonishing, eccentric book
that defies linear narrative to detour, circle back, swerve and dodge
between the centuries. Robb carries the reader along on flawless prose, over
France's terra incognita, probing, discovering, and getting to know a
country still deeply at odds with itself. There is information in this book
to surprise even the most avid Francophile, and to delight anyone who is
even vaguely thinking of boarding the new Eurostar.
Bestsellers 2007
1. Vulcan 607 by Rowland White
Corgi, £6.99
The story of the bomber raid that opened the Falklands conflict.
2. A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
Macmillan, £25
3. Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Penguin, £7.99
4. 3 Para by Patrick Bishop
HarperPress, £18.99
5. The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty by William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, £8.99
