Summer Reading: Part One

In the first part of our summer reading special, Richard Davenport-Hines, Sarah Dunant, Helen Castor, Anna Whitelock and James Holland share their holiday choices.

Richard Davenport-Hines

Mapping History

The history books that I cherish have a vital sense of place and vivid pictorial power. It is not enough to be exact about facts, canny about human motives and masterful about mentalités if the book is set in a physical vacuum without landscapes, contours, streams and alleys, trees and gallows, sunlight and shadow. Last year I started, and this summer I will finish, Oliver Bullough’s Let Our Fame Be Great: Journeys among the Defiant People of the Caucasus (Allen Lane, 2010), partly a work of contemporary reportage and partly a history of the peoples who live between the Black and Caspian seas. ‘The most ethnically complex place on earth’, Bullough calls the Caucasus: he tells a gruesome tale of hatred, savagery and genocide; but the book is inspiring, showing the worst of times and occasionally the best of people.

Max Egremont is an admirable writer: painstaking in his research, elegantly humorous, coolly fair-minded, a man of deep sympathies but with no swagger to his keen intelligence. His Forgotten Land: Journeys among the Ghosts of East Prussia (Picador, 2011) is a history of a tragic region contested by Hitler and Stalin and later brutally divided between Poland and Soviet Russia. Both books are based on travels, interviews and archival research.  They show the horrors of civilian life on disputed frontiers and the evils of totalitarianism, reminding us that refugees and asylum seekers deserve pity, not rejection. Bullough and Egremont will take me into terrain where I have never been.

Richard Davenport-Hines’ book Titanic Lives will be published by Harper Press in January 2012.

Sarah Dunant

Fortuna

Deep into Renaissance political machinations for a novel on the Borgias (a family much maligned, with only some of it justified), I have reached the stage where a young Florentine diplomat, Niccolò Machiavelli, meets Cesare Borgia on the battlefield of central Italy. What Machiavelli thought 20 years later is history, but those early encounters between two clever Young Turks is a challenge for any novelist. So my summer (holiday? what holiday?) will be spent with Machiavelli. Three books for starters. Two biographies: Niccolò’s Smile by Maurizio Virali (St Martin’s Press, 2001) and a new work by an American Miles J. Junger (Simon & Schuster), rounding off with the classic, Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction by Quentin Skinner (OUP, 2000). By the end I hope to have some sense of the young man who was first so dazzled and later so disappointed by the magnetic Cesare and whose observations of his military career formed the basis for the first major work of pragmatic political philosophy that the post-Christian world had ever seen. Wish me luck. Like Cesare (who believed in fortuna, but was, alas, deserted by it at a key moment), I will need it.

Sarah Dunant is the author of Sacred Hearts (Virago, 2009).

Helen Castor

Macho Italy

I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to get to Italy this summer, but I’ll make up for it by reading about the hard men of the Italian underworld in John Dickie’s Blood Brotherhoods: the Rise of the Italian Mafias (Sceptre, 2011) and the even harder men of Italian cycling in John Foot’s Pedalare! Pedalare! a history of Italian Cycling (Bloomsbury, 2011). I’m looking forward to some top-notch storytelling while I learn about the history of a place and a people that became a nation centuries later than I’m used to in medieval England.

Helen Castor is the author of She-Wolves: The Women who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (Faber, 2010). She discusses her book with Paul Lay in an interview for the first part of History Today's new Book Club series.

Anna Whitelock

Death on the Hackney Slow Train

I am intrigued. Having enjoyed Kate Summerscale’s brilliant Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the newly published Mr Briggs’ Hat: A Sensational Account of Britain’s First Railway Murder by Kate Coloquhoun (Little, Brown) appears to have obvious parallels: an account of a mid-Victorian murder that caused a national stir. This is the story of the killing of 69-year-old Thomas Briggs, a banker, in a first class carriage on a train from Fenchurch Street station to Hackney on a warm summer evening in 1864. As the train reached Hackney Mr Briggs had disappeared. A now blood-soaked carriage contained only his bag, his stick and his hat. Later his battered body was found by the railway tracks. Suspicion fell on a German tailor Franz Muller – but was he the man? There unfolds the whodunit that gripped the country and gave the press a field day: this was Britain’s first railway murder. But can Mr Briggs be as compelling a read as Mr Whicher? Such will be my armchair – or should I say sunlounger – investigation!

Anna Whitelock is the author of Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (Bloomsbury, 2009).

James Holland

War Stories

I’m really looking forward to re-reading Monty and Rommel: Parallel Lives by Peter Caddick-Adams (Preface Publishing, 2011). I read the manuscript and thought it was absolutely fascinating but I am longing to have a look at the final version. The author is an academic and military historian with a vast knowledge and understanding of 20th-century warfare, but he is also a very entertaining and stylistic writer. This is his first book and he sensibly spends a proper amount of time on the commanders’ early years and particularly their experiences in the First World War, which, he argues, had an enormous impact on their subsequent careers. I thought he nailed both of these controversial characters brilliantly – better than anyone who has attempted it before.

James Holland is the author of The Battle of Britain (Bantam, 2010).