Our Favourite History Books of 2024
From Paris to India, King Richard II to the Commonwealth of England
Christmas Day lies dead ahead and there are few more trusty presents than a quality history book. Here are ten of our favourites, published over the past year.
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How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History by Josephine Quinn
Bloomsbury, 29 February, 2024
'The West' is one of the great contemporary themes in history publishing. What was it? Where did it come from? Did it do good or ill? Is it in the midst of decline or will it return resurgent?
It is with such questions in mind that readers will pick up Josephine Quinn's How the World Made the West. Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford, provides us with a broad and intriguing origin story of our modern world. Her narrative ranges across the centuries and from the Levant to India. Throughout she looks for significant moments of connection and transmission. Described by Rory Stewart as 'A work of great confidence, empathy, learning and imagination', it is a book that teaches us much more about who were are and the unexpected places that made us.
From our February 2024 preview.
The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Fooled the World by Joseph Hone
Chatto & Windus, 21 March, 2024
Those of you looking for a historical page-turner can do no better than picking up Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger. Hone is an academic at the University of Newcastle, where he specialises in the literary culture of the early eighteenth century. This age was the setting for his previous book, The Paper Chase, a gripping micro-history rooted in the alleyways of Fleet Street.
The Book Forger also involves the publishing industry, but its story is set in a very different age – the 1930s. It tells the story of Thomas James Wise, a powerful collector and businessman known for his successes with rare books. Wise, however, is not all that he seems. This becomes apparent to two young booksellers on one fateful night. Their subsequent investigations go on to 'rock the book world to its core'.
From our March 2024 preview.
Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka by Clare Mulley
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 16 May, 2024
By the time that the D-Day landings were taking place, the Polish resistance fighter, Elzbieta Zawacka, had already participated in a series of astonishingly heroic operations in Warsaw. ‘Agent Zo’s’ story is fascinating and in this biography by Clare Mulley, it is told for the first time. Having fled her homeland for Britain, Zawacka was trained in great secrecy in the English countryside. Once her preparation was complete, she was parachuted back into Poland where she became an active fighter against Nazi tyranny.
Mulley is well placed to unpick Zawacka's story, having previously written about the Polish-British agent Krystyna Skarbek. In Agent Zo, she promises to bring a ‘forgotten heroine back to life’.
From our May 2024 preview.
The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It by Daisy Dunn
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 23 May, 2024
Among the military histories that dominate this early spring period (this June brought the 80th anniversary of D-Day), it is refreshing to find Daisy Dunn’s The Missing Thread. Centred on the ancient world instead of the modern one, and focussing on women instead of men, it is a book bristling with invigorating material. Among this are stories about Enheduanna, ‘the earliest named author,’ as well as the Greek poet Sappho and the valiant Telesilla of Argos ‘who defended her city from attack’.
Dunn is a superbly well-equipped guide to this subject. Known as a literary critic, a stylish translator of Latin poetry and a biographer of Roman figures like Pliny the Elder and Catullus, her knowledge is vast. In this book, she has 3,000 years to roam through and a fresh point of view from which she can tell this grand historical story.
From our May 2024 preview.
Paris ‘44: The Shame and the Glory by Patrick Bishop
Viking, 25 July, 2024
In the weeks after the D-Day landings, when the Allied forces confronted the Nazis in the Battle of Normandy, peoples' minds began to fix on Paris. It was here, in one of Europe's greatest capitals, where the German triumphs of 1940 had culminated. The picture of the Führer with the Eiffel Tower rising in the haze behind him framed an astonishing historical moment.
How Paris passed back into French hands; who was there and what they did, is the subject of Patrick Bishop's new book: Paris '44. The liberation of Paris in August 1944 is most closely connected in popular retellings with Charles de Gaulle. But here Bishop searches beyond the political leader and finds many more figures—among them Pablo Picasso and J.D. Salinger— and a great variety of different stories, all of which are presented in this invigorating, suspenseful narrative history.
From our July 2024 preview.
You can also read our interview with Patrick Bishop.
The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World by William Dalrymple
Bloomsbury, 5 September 2024
Five years have passed since William Dalrymple's The Anarchy appeared, laying bare the rapine of the British East India Company and demonstrating just how a corporate business, headquartered on Leadenhall Street in the City of London, assumed power over hundreds of millions of people half a world away.
The Anarchy was really a culmination for Dalrymple, bringing to a close many years of study and writing on the activities of the East India Company. His new book, The Golden Road, sees him gazing much further back in time to the glorious era of Ancient India. This is a glittering book, utterly fresh and full of wonders that traces subjects as various as mathematics, science, trade and religion back to their early phases in India. In Dalrymple's words, these then radiated outwards, along a 'golden road' to change the world.
From our September 2024 preview.
Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660 by Alice Hunt
Faber, 26 September 2024
Britain's most senior judge, the great Lady Hale, memorably argued in her book Spider Woman that the seventeenth century was the most important epoch in English history. This was the century in which English society descended into revolution and out of which the Great Britain of today, with its Parliament and representative democracy, eventually emerged.
Right at the heart of this century lies the years that Alice Hunt calls 'Britain's Revolutionary Decade'. This decade, 1649-1660, was the one that saw the end of Charles I and the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell. In recent years, from historians like Paul Lay and Anna Keay, there have been brilliant new works on this time, which continues to be a stubborn blackspot in English historical memory. Alice Hunt's bold and stylish new history, The Republic, reanimates the action of those years once again. It is a perfect autumn read.
From our September 2024 preview.
You can also read an original feature by the author, Alice Hunt, on the execution of Charles I.
The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV by Helen Castor
Allen Lane, 3 October 2024
For an immersive, gripping autumnal read, it will be difficult to beat The Eagle and The Hart. This history pits the prickly King Richard II against his suave cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. Once childhood playmates, the relationship between these two central figures became increasingly tense as they entered adulthood, before it descended into acrimony in the 1390s.
Set in the courtly years of the Middle Ages, readers will find plenty of Christianity, ceremony and chivalry running along with the plot. Helen Castor has a gift for making distant events vivid to us today and The Eagle and the Hart follows in the style of emotionally intense storytelling she displayed in her previous books about Joan of Arc and on the Paston Letters.
From our October 2024 preview.
The Price of Victory: A Naval History of Britain: 1815 – 1945 by N. A. M. Rodger
Allen Lane, 24 October 2024
For many years and to a greater degree than almost anyone else in British history, N.A.M. Rodger has been studying and producing erudite works about the Royal Navy. In The Price of Victory, he brings to a close his great trilogy that details the naval history of Great Britain.
This is a serious book founded on the highest standards of scholarship. Opening in the years following the triumph at Trafalgar and the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the action begins with sailing ships and concludes with the steam turbines and drum boilers of World War Two destroyers. For those with a deep interest in this crucial part of British history, the publication of Rodger's book is an event in itself.
From our October 2024 preview.
Patria: Lost Countries of South America by Laurence Blair
Bodley Head, 7 November 2024
How little we know of South America, Laurence Blair points out in the opening pages of this sparkling new book. Some are aware that an ancient people called the Incas lived in those lands at roughly the same time that the Tudors were on the throne in England. Then there is a dim awareness of the period of Spanish and Portuguese conquest, but otherwise, we are left with a 'strange, continent-sized gap in our memory'.
Having identified this lacuna, Blair gambols off into his brisk, rich and revealing narrative. His focus, in specific, is the 'lost countries' of the continent, those places that were 'dreamed up, dismembered, or disappeared altogether'. Braiding strands of memoir with others of narrative history and journalistic reportage, Patria has a mood that is really quite compelling. For those of you looking for a fresh and immersive read as the nights grow longer, Blair's portrait of this 'lost continent' will make a fine choice indeed.
From our November 2024 preview.
You can read all our upcoming history book previews, here.
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