Among my favourites was James Sharpe’s A Fiery & Furious People: A History of Violence in England (Random House), which was satisfyingly detailed, yet with a convincing overarching thesis.ĭouglas Smith’s Rasputin (Macmillan) was similarly thrilling, setting the truths and the myths of the ‘mad monk’ in a robust historical context.ĭaniel Coleman’s Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place (Wolsak and Wynne) links social history, ecology and political history with an exploration of what we mean by ‘home’. This summer I was privileged to be an adviser to the Cundill Prize for History Writing and thus saw hundreds of history books, almost all of which I wanted to read. I much enjoyed reading it and learned more than I care to admit. Her prose is elegant, accessible and free of jargon. Tauris), offers a compendious history of relations between the papacy and Britain from Late Antiquity to the present. The sweep of the volume is broad and the lightly worn scholarship is formidable. Dr Fletcher is primarily an Italian historian, but she has also published books on English cardinals and on Wolsey in his European context, so she is insightful on both British and papal perspectives. Stella Fletcher, in The Popes and Britain (I.B. The question of how the popes felt about Britain is seldom discussed.
Since the English and Scottish Reformations, Protestant Britons have tended to characterise their country as a Protestant one and rabid Protestants have regarded the Pope as the Antichrist. Rather than Ghandi’s non-violence, Ghosh places the insurgency as central to Indian nationalism, and tracks its enduring impact. Finally, Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists (Cambridge) looks at the violence of elite anticolonial militants in India between 19. Her focus on activist, philanthropic women puts gender at the heart of this narrative. She contributes to the important task of writing multicultural elements into Victorian and Edwardian history. In the same period, Anne Summers has produced a wonderfully readable study, Christian and Jewish Women in Britain, 1880-1940 (Palgrave). It helps us rethink the Irish political sphere as a more contested, plural space than previous histories allowed. Senia Pešeta’s Irish Nationalist Women, 1900-1918 (Cambridge) argues for a long and active feminist dimension to Irish nationalist politics, as well as charting the obstacles faced by ‘advanced women’. This is a stimulating book by one of this country’s least flashy public intellectuals and a timely antidote to the much-hyped ‘Thucydides Trap’ thesis that rising and declining powers are destined to clash. The book culminates with how such a war might be fought, at sea, in the air and in both space and cyberspace. Coker has many interesting things to say about the role of ‘irrationality’ in conflict, whether based on honour or resentment, as well as on how culture influences and shapes strategic thinking. His The Improbable War: China, the United States and the Logic of Great Power Conflict (Hurst) explodes the belief that greater economic co-dependency and common interests will prevent the US and China going to war in Asia-Pacific.
Unusually for an international relations specialist, he has an enormous range of historical and literary knowledge, which he deploys to great effect. Dinshaw’s book is a fascinating read, though it still leaves us wondering what really made Runciman tick.Ĭhristopher Coker is one of this country’s leading thinkers about war, past, present and future. Yet Runciman also wrote a string of major books on Byzantine history, most famously his three-volume History of the Crusades, and died at the age of 97 in 2000. Runciman loved anyone royal, adored travelling and, as soon as he could afford it, he resigned from his fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge and lived the rest of his life enjoying travel, friendships and gossip. He was a friend of the literary scholar and theatre director Dadie Rylands and had Guy Burgess as his pupil.
Steven Runciman was a historian of Byzantium, who was also a member of a louche social set in the Cambridge of the 1920s and was photographed by Cecil Beaton. My choice is Minoo Dinshaw’s biography, Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman (Allen Lane).