Books of 2023 from Aspects of History

It’s been a great year for fiction and non-fiction, but these books are my first amongst equals. Every Spy a Traitor by Alex Gerlis follows Agent Archie, a Russian mole in MI6 across a twenty year period. From his recruitment in the 1930s, through the Second World War and into the Cold War of the 1950s. The style and atmosphere effortlessly convey the period, with the edge of a modern spy thriller. There is also a gin dry humour that underpins the novel.

John McKay’s Target Arnhem is a classic war story of daring and resilience. It doesn’t shy away from describing the full horror of total war, as the story takes the reader from Gestapo torture chambers to the brutal killing ground of Arnhem. McKay’s narration captures the raw emotion of civilian and soldier alike caught up in some of the heaviest fighting of WWII, overcoming unimaginable adversity in their battle for survival.

A Suspicion of Spies, Tim Spicer’s insightful biography of Wilfred ‘Biffy’ Dunderdale gives centre stage to this extraordinary character who often features as a daring bit part player in World War II espionage books. Dunderdale’s 40-year career of ‘licensed thuggery’ spanned the Dreadnought era to the Atom bomb. Spicer’s book provides an invaluable insight into the key role Dunderdale and MI6 played in gathering information during WWII and the Cold War.

The landmark event of 2024 for maritime enthusiasts was the appearance of The Price of Victory, third volume of Nicholas Rodger’s Naval History of Britain covering 1815-1945. This was a triumph over serious illness in recent years, but also in an awe-inspiring task of synthesis and analysis. It is an accessible narrative for every part of the period, covering social, technological and personnel aspects, whilst the references and biography point to rich sources for further study.

One source that was not available for Nicholas Rodger is Nick Hewitt’s acclaimed Normandy, The Sailors’ Story, providing a fresh perspective that takes the reader beyond the familiar images of the armada of amphibious shipping and the battleships and other bombarding units to show how it was the totality of British seapower that delivered victory.

The year saw the sad passing of maritime historian Richard Woodman. He had steeled himself in a long battle with cancer by producing a stream of major historical works and maritime fiction. His last work, To High Barbary, sadly unpublished, matched his earlier account of forgotten exploits of officers of the East India Company, the compelling novel Beyond Madagascar.

Unruly, by David Mitchell. I have a lot of time for Mitchell. Upstart Crow is a brilliant series and his new venture, Ludwig, is not far behind. So, I was pleased to find Unruly to be up to the standards I would expect of his work. As I read, I could hear his hilariously cantankerous voice injecting his own brand of humour into the familiar stories of this nation’s past. Definitely worthy of your time.

Rebellion, by Richard Cullen, is the first book in a new series (The Black Lion) dealing with a fascinating, and under-explored, period of England’s history when we came close to having our first French King. The story follows a young orphan – Estienne Wace – who enrolls as a squire in the service of Earl William Marshal as that great soldier navigates the stormy waters of life under King John, culminating in the Baron’s rebellion and the subsequent invasion by Prince Louis of France in 1216. The book ends with a satisfying hook that leaves you keenly anticipating the next release.

Male dominated and violent, seventeenth-century Italy was no place for the female artist. Even so, Artemisia Gentileschi broke through that ceiling and in Disobedient, the novel that Elizabeth Fremantle was born to write, her story is resurrected.  Brilliantly researched and wonderfully detailed, it brings to life Artemisia’s struggles, her defiance and the ripening of her great talent – and, of course, the creation of those paintings which still shock us today.

Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare’s Book is a meticulously researched, joyously detailed story of the genesis of the First Folio, without which Shakespeare’s plays might not have survived. In every respect, it was a shifting political and religious world. Despite its dangers and difficulties, friends, colleagues, opportunists and operators, heroes and villains all connived to collect and print the plays. How thankful we are. Endlessly fascinating and impressive.

Finally, but by no means least, Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing is a collection of her journalism, essays, including the Reith Lectures, reflections on her early writing, her health and the genesis of her Wolf Hall trilogy. She is sharply brilliant as always and it is poignant read.

My book of the year is Helen Castor’s spellbinding The Eagle and the Hart, a beautifully written and convincingly argued study of first cousins and bitter rivals Richard II and Henry IV. In her ability to evoke time and place, and to get under the skin of medieval power politics, Castor is without equal.

I also enjoyed Keith Lowe’s superb Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos, the tragic story of the first major European city to be liberated by the Allies and James Holland’s Cassino ’44, the third and final volume of his astonishingly visceral Italy trilogy.

Finally, N. A. M. Rodger’s The Price of Victory, which brings to a close a monumental 3-volume naval history of Britain that spans 14 centuries and has taken the author more than 30 years to complete.

The House of War, Simon Mayall. Mayall is a soldier’s soldier, former cavalry officer, Arabist, whose career included stints advising the Sultan of Oman, US Generals in Iraq, and the UK Ministry of Defence. 

This rip-roaring account of over a thousand years of conflict between Islam and Christendom is narrative history at its finest, telling the stories of the Arab Conquests, crusades, fall of Constantinople, Knights of St John, siege of Vienna and finally Allenby’s entry into Jerusalem in 1917.   

Anybody whose work or travels take them to the Middle East or Turkey should read this book.  It’s full of resonance and relevance to the world we live in today, as Mayall says in his introduction “truly history is not dead.”

I did not read as many books this year as usual as I was preoccupied with completing my own latest Frank Merlin book, Death Of An Officer (out May 2025). Of those several excellent historical fiction books I did manage to get to in 2024, these are my 3 picks:

Cabaret Macabre, by Tom Mead. Magic and mayhem at a Hampshire country house in 1938. A fiendishly complex and ingenious Golden Age locked room mystery with some distinctly oddball lead characters. This is the third in a series and I look forward to catching up on the others.

After The Flood, by Alec Marsh. This is the fourth in Marsh’s entertaining Buchanesque series featuring his unlikely heroes, Ernest Drabble and Percy Harris. In this one the two men are in Turkey, along with Drabble’s new wife, Charlotte, who is kidnapped almost as soon as they get to Istanbul. A rollicking yarn laced with humour.

The Queen’s Avenger, by Anna Legat. A terrific retelling of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots through the eyes of her Scottish confessor. Vivid, atmospheric and compelling. Superb historical fiction.

A work of uncommon scholarship and style. The Eagle and the Hart, chronicling the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, is a story about power and tragedy – and how those two are often wedded together. Drama, insight and a wry humour infuse every chapter. The Eagle and the Hart is one of the great history books of the last ten years, let alone just 2024.

The ending of The Eagle and the Hart features Prince Hal ascending to the throne – and the promise of deliverance after decades of decline. Dan Jones carries on the story with Henry V. Jones astutely gives due weight to Henry’s years of campaigning in Wales, cutting his teeth as a soldier and statesman. Henry comes across as human (a lover of music and literature, who learned from the reigns of his father and Richard II), as well as heroic. An enjoyable book about an admirable king.

William Boyd cuts loose and has some fun in his latest novel, Gabriel’s Moon, a spy thriller which harks back to the golden years of Eric Ambler. The protagonist, Gabriel Dax, is an author who is drawn into a plot which confounds and intrigues him – and nearly gets him killed. Boyd injects pace, humour and twists into his story to keep the reader turning the pages. He had me on hello, when it’s revealed that the girlfriend of Dax works in the Wimpy.

R.N. Morris, Death of a Princess. The final (?) in the Shadows of Empire trilogy brings a tired and worn-out Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky to a spa town where a suspicious death and a revolutionary group are going to create some rather nasty mayhem. I do hope this isn’t the last of Virginsky because I know nothing about Russian history and thoroughly enjoy being immersed in what is to me an alien world. This is the mark of the good historical novel! I have to mention the cracking murders in Roger’s books too, gruesome without overwhelming the reader in ick.

Pat Barker, The Voyage Home. Barker finishes her Women of Troy trilogy with The Voyage Home, and it raises all the right questions. The Penguin website described one of the books as “timely” which is sad, because it means that we haven’t learned anything since Euripides put on his play “Trojan Women” in Athens in 415 BC. Barker uses her sources – Homer and Greek tragedy – with respect and creates a modern version that forces us to examine our own world and admit its flaws. Her writing is precise and beautiful, her characters perfectly drawn. Euripides would approve.

D.V. Bishop, A Divine Fury. Bishop produces a terrifying fourth installment in the Cesare Aldo series. Renaissance Florence is the star of this series, as our hero Cesare Aldo once more finds himself on night patrol, chasing after killers through the dark streets, while battling with his family’s demands in the daytime. His sympathetic sidekick Strocchi is really developing as a husband, family man and all round decent person. The plot, sinister and satisfyingly twisted, revolves around churches and the religious life with a shocking series of murders. It is always fascinating to read such a convincing account of the way religious belief permeated everyday life.

Paris ’44: The Shame and the Glory, by Patrick Bishop. On the 80th anniversary of the Liberation along comes a masterpiece to do justice to those traumatic years and extraordinary few days in August when some French citizens — men and many women — restored their country’s reputation stained by Marshal Petain, Pierre Laval and Rene Bousquet, all of whom had blood of Jews and resistants on their hands.
Hemingway, Capa, Picasso, Cocteau, JD Salinger….now there’s a cast of wayward, rogueish, super talents — no one better to bring them all into play than a kindred spirit and as fine a writer on war at least than Patrick Bishop. Where this cracking remarkable book sets itself apart from others is that Bishop’s supporting actors, in terms of name recognition, are as fascinating and certainly more modest and less boorish as ‘Papa’ Hemingway who is one of the less attractive characters in the story. Bishop’s mastery of fabulous one liners comes up with a gem to describe the majority of the July 20 conspirators as ‘Von Here’s and von There’s’ — that for me is the best line of any book I have read this year. 

As for the heroine of the story..how was she after she had been mauled by the occupiers, defiled by the collaborators and then had her drinks reserves drained by ‘Papa’ Hemingway and his courtiers…Bishop has it in one: ‘Maurice Chevalier was right: ‘Paris sera toujours Paris.’

Rivals in the Storm, by Damian Collins. Collins has selected perhaps the most fascinating era of this great Briton’s life and written it with brio and elan. It is far from a hagiography — DLG’s warts are exposed too such as his philandering and his cash for honours scheme which found many takers. However, his qualities — of which there were many — are to the fore and at a time when Britain required them most.

This is a spellbinding account of a hypnotic personality, whose energy ran others into the ground and of whom Ramsay MacDonald remarked: “He was like a bit of mercury; when you thought you had caught him he darted off to something else.”
As Collins summarises him: “Lloyd George’s mercurial talents found solutions when no one else could see them, but he also created suspicion and mistrust amongst his rivals.” 

It is to Collins’s great credit that he has more than done justice to DLG and brought deservedly to the public’s eye a man without whom Britain may well have lost the Great War and it is likely as a result Churchill would never have enjoyed his finest hour.

If I could give it six stars I would.

The Lumumba Plot, by Stuart A Reid. This is a cracking read, extremely disturbing both in terms of the violence and the geo political machinations that went on to rid Congo/Zaire of its first elected Prime Minister, post the end of the racist and murderous Belgian rule, the charismatic firebrand and impulsive Patrice Lumumba. A bit of a blow to the solar plexus in this excellent book is Ike Eisenhower. The overseer of military victory in the west in World War II is cast in a very different light when as president he orders the elimination of Lumumba and then goes off to play in a white’s only golf club.

Joseph Mobutu formerly Lumumba’s friend is the ultimate beneficiary after being turned by the Americans and the allure of the dollar….many will recall the leopard skin hat he always donned, something the author says was to ‘present himself as a village chief on a national level’ adding wryly ‘(never mind that the hat was the work of a Parisian couturier)’.

I heartily recommend this book, it reads like a Graham Greene or William Boyd tome, it is absolutely first class.

In a world in which almost everyone seeks easily earned popularity, integrity still matters. And there is no greater model of integrity among historians than Helen Castor, who manages to mix scholarship of the highest order with considerable literary flair. Her latest masterpiece, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV, is her finest work yet. Shakespearean (of course) in its account of two intertwined medieval lives, both of which end in despair. 

Richard Davenport-Hines also writes beautifully, and has found a niche documenting the lives of historians in that golden age – for men at least – before utilitarianism, HR and the REF combined to take the human out of the humanities. History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft does what is says on the tin, revealing the eccentricities, backbiting and wit of generation that graced Christ Church – the House – grandest of Oxford colleges.

Craig Brown, a supreme stylist, has reinvented the biography. His tangential portraits of vicious corgis, errant equerries and dynastic rivalries offer, in a A Voyage Around the Queen, a brilliant, vivid and complex portrait of the late lamented monarch, once thought unknowable. 

I have a target of reading 106 books each year: I started this when I was 11-years old, when I read 123. I’m pleased to say that I’ve managed to keep this up for most of the 50-years that have followed, helped enormously in recent years by the advent of audio books. Historical fiction remains a firm favourite. Chris Lloyd’s Eddie Giral series have all been devoured with much pleasure.

This year I have loved Alex Gerlis’ Wolf series, and am grateful to Antonia Senior for introducing me to the peerless but slightly crazy Derek Robinson. Jane Thynne’s Midnight in Vienna has not disappointed.

James Holland has kept me entranced with The Savage Storm, Cassino and Alvesdon and a newcomer, Stephen Fisher, has written a blistering account of one part of Sword Beach: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Forgotten Victory.

I’ve been writing a new account of the Korean War with General Lord Dannatt this year, and have enjoyed a whole range of excellent accounts of that conflict, including Charles Hanley’s Ghost Flames. Wanting to dip my toe into the trans debate I much admired Graham Linehan’s shocking account of the violence of this culture war in Tough Crowd. It’s worth reading, if only to understand what the world is currently up against.

End Game 1944: How Stalin Won the War, by Jonathan Dimbleby. This really is a tour de force of a narrative, arguably, in my opinion, Dimbleby’s best book yet on analysing World War Two. The bitter fighting and enormous scale of the campaigning on the eastern front is writ large here in every page. Dimbleby describes this pivotal year in all its shocking and bloody detail, as Hitler’s all conquering forces were ultimately broken by Stalin’s Red Army, their sheer scale of numbers in men and machines (bulked up by allied Lend Lease supplies) overrunning and destroying an exhausted Wehrmacht. Quite rightly, a main driver of the narrative is the biggest allied offensive of the war, Operation Bagration, which destroyed Hitler’s Army Group Centre, thus opening up the path for Soviet forces to plunge into the heart of central Europe, and ultimately capture Berlin within nine months. A thoroughly engaging and absorbing read.

The Beating Heart: The Art and Science of Our Most Vital Organ, by Robin Choudhury. Clearly I am biased, as this is a title from the list I manage as a publisher for Bloomsbury – but it is still a unique, illustrated narrative, from a first-time author who has the credentials for anyone to sit up and take notice. Professor Robin Choudhury is a world-renowned, pioneering cardiologist whose enthusiasm and knowledge of his subject lifts off every page of this stunningly visual book. Across four millennia, he guides the reader through the cultural history of humanity’s most vital organ, and how from Aristotle over 2,500 years ago, up to the present day, it has been portrayed, celebrated and analysed, to get us where we are today. Both a practical guide and a heart-felt (sorry) tribute from a medical expert who has spent decdeas collecting its visual history.

Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders, Lewis Baston. This is in my ‘I wish I had written this’ category. A riveting, colourful, but most of all insightful journey through modern Europe, with its many ongoing issues, which like tectonic plates, reshape our political and social world – from the west coast of rural Ireland, to the warzone that is Ukraine. The author, a political historian by trade, has donned his walking boots to take the reader on a very personal journey, as he peels away the layers of recent history from the end of the Great War, through to the birth of the Cold War, where the continent was plague by military conflict, ethnic cleansing, and political persecution. What Baston excels in is the discovery of who now inhabits these borders, why they live there, and their views on the future – all whilst a war is being fought to the finish in the east. Both personal and elegiac, in equal measure. I found it a captivating read.

Midnight in Vienna, by Jane Thynne, is an altogether superior historical thriller, one that’s so good you’ll want to ration yourself to a chapter a day, and no more, because to binge it would be to waste the words. I can’t wait to read it again.

Next I would recommend without hesitation James Wilson’s incredible mystery, The Pieces, which moves between the present and the late 1960s to work out what happened to a British Bob Dylan-style folk singer who vanished on the very brink of his international stardom.

It’s an astonishingly good character piece and gripping. Finally, Annie Garthwaite’s The King’s Mother puts you on the inside of the key events and controversies unfolding during the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III, from the battle of Towton in 1461 to Bosworth in 1485, seen through the eyes of their mother, Cecily, Duchess of York. It’s Wolf Hall for the House of York and should not be missed.

Another bumper year, it seems, with a few more “Covid-projects” finally seeing the light of day, not least among them Adam Zamoyski’s Izabela the Valiant and Keith Lowe’s engaging Naples 1944.

Patrick Bishop’s magisterial Paris ‘44, showing us that form might be temporary but class is eternal, and Saul David rightly troubled the bestseller lists with his Sky Warriors on the history of British airborne forces in WW2.

Beyond them, though, Al Murray’s book Arnhem: Black Tuesday was hugely impressive. I’m normally the first to roll my eyes at “celebrity-history books”, but this is genuinely not one of those. It is rather the product of the author’s many years’ obsession with the subject and its lively style and novel approach give it chops galore.  Read them all!  You will not be disappointed.

Saul David’s Sky Warriors tells of the evolution of the British parachute regiment through its brutal birth in the Second World War. And brutal it is. At every turn of the page is a horrific casualty count in operations that often seem so badly conceived as to be suicidal. The ethos produced amongst these men is extraordinary. Arriving on a target in 1944 to find he only has a fraction of his force one commander says; ‘In the Parachute Regiment giving up is not an option.’ David does an excellent job of making sense of Arnhem, and there are gems I’d not heard of such as the last stand made by the Indian Parachute Brigade at Sangshak, Assam (North East India).

Roland White’s Mosquito is an ode to the legendary wooden aircraft of the Second World War. It hints at a different type of air war that might have happened if Britain had not become obsessed with developing four engine strategic bombers. He weaves in the Special Operations Executive and the heroism on the ground that made the action in the air so effective. And White doesn’t shy away from the final tragedy when it happens. This is a celebration of aviation engineering and its impact on human lives; White’s home territory and which he does so well. 

Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac is a fictional account of the life of John von Neumann, pioneer of the mathematical model for quantum physics who worked with Einstein on the Manhattan Project. The title alludes to the type of character who might carry out this work, though used to describe a computer in the novel; the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer, or MANIAC for short. The story of Nazis, mathematical theory, the board game ‘Go’ and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence makes a fascinating and believable novel that is both compelling and elucidating.  

A Court of Betrayal sees Anne O’Brien returning to the early 14th century, finding for her readers a wonderful character, Johane de Geneville. We all know the story of Queen Isabella and her lover, Roger Mortimer, but what about the wife left behind in the Welsh Marches?

There is much of Johane and Roger’s life to cover before the tumultuous events that see Roger fleeing England for his life. Johane is fully formed. What I’ve always appreciated about Anne’s characters is that they are women of the time, with all the restrictions that brings with it. Yet, her female characters remain strong-willed and independent, doing what they can within societal norms. Sometimes we might not like Johane (the treatment of her sisters for one), but we are still very much invested in her, and her story. And this is her story. Johane drives the narrative, even when she is held in captivity with little outside knowledge of events at the king’s court. The symmetry between Roger’s actions and those of Edward II’s favourites is beautifully evoked, and the reader is left feeling that if a woman had been instrumental in all this chaos, she would have had much more sense than to upset everyone in the same way that Roger was previously disgruntled—a lovely touch.

Reading a new Anne O’Brien novel is an absolute treat. Just like Constance of York in a Tapestry of Treason, Johane will long live with the reader.

Arden, by GD Harper is a beautifully crafted tale of two individuals, separated by forty years, with the one entirely unaware of the other, that reimagines the hows, whats and ifs of Shakespeare’s earliest efforts to become a playwright and the story that ‘called’ to him to enable him to do so.

Offering us two points of view, that of Alice Arden, and Shakespeare himself, we travel through the years that lead to Alice’s crisis and see how Shakespeare was himself plagued by her story. To begin with, Alice is the most likeable character. Young, bright, and vivacious, she pulls the reader along through the years when Shakespeare is not at all the man we might expect him to be. His life is difficult (perhaps because he makes it so, to be honest), but soon his dreams of being an actor and writing plays becomes his driving force. At the same time, Alice’s life is blighted by her marriage to a man of ambition but no regard for the life of his wife, who is deeply unhappy. Shakespeare’s life improves as events rumble towards their awful conclusion for Alice. But he is still somewhat haunted by the tale of Alice Arden, and I adored how her final narrative is teased from those who have knowledge of it that isn’t known by all. It is horrific.

This was such an engaging narrative. I liked neither character at points, but they both had endearing qualities that made it a joy to read this fictionalised account of what might have been.

Agricola: Invader is the first in a new series detailing Agricola’s career. This first book takes us to Britain in the early days of Roman occupation to place our main character at the heart of attempts to subdue the rebellious tribes to the west, ending with the revolt of the Iceni, led by Boudica.

This is a wonderful recreation of Britain in the first century AD. I am fascinated by the period, and Turney has done his homework, plotting the course the advance might have taken and ensuring that the clash between the tribes and the might of Rome is well documented. Agricola might well be a Roman and think in the way of a man with Roman schooling, but he is also a member of a long-settled tribe. He gives us an insight into the advances that being a part of Rome can bring.

But it’s not all politics. There are many battles throughout the story as Agricola grows into his command and position, and I just adored it. Turney is my ‘go-to’ author for tales of Rome – all aspects of it – from the BC to the AD – from Britain to Egypt – from politics to war.

Conrad Black’s The Political and Strategic History of the World, Vol. 1: From Antiquity to the Caesars, 14 A.D. is a monumental tour de force by an historian at the very top of his game. This is a comprehensive overview of the whole of human history from the Bronze Age to the death of the Emperor Augustus, full of arresting apercus and witty discourses, but also of profound observations about human nature and the rise and fall of empires.

Speaking of which, Paul Rahe’s Sparta’s Sicilian Proxy War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 418-413 B.C. shows how human nature – in this case the ludicrous hubris that gripped the Athenian demos in 416 BC – led to the expedition that ended with the horrific catastrophe that overcome their fleet and led to the fall of Athens only twelve years later. Rahe’s work does not rely exclusively on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, of course, but is an invaluable commentary on it.

If only the Athenians had a strategos of the quality of General George C. Marshall, the US Army chief of staff from 1939 to 1945. As General Josiah Bunting shows in The Making of a Leader, a very well-researched and well-written account of Marshall’s formative years. Education, level-headedness, decency and high character are rare but vital attributes in a leader.

This was the year that I launched Spymasters, an Aspects of History podcast covering all aspects of writing about spies – fact and fiction, historical and contemporary. Two of my books of the year are from guests on the podcast. Ilana Berry is a former CIA officer, who ran agents in Iraq. She has turned to fiction, and written a brilliant novel set in Bahrain during the Arab Spring – The Peacock and the Sparrow. It follows a disillusioned CIA officer trying to do his job amid moral murkiness and office politics.

From non-fiction releases, I loved Hugh Wilford’s book, The CIA, an Imperial History. Hugh is a professor at California State University, but this is no dry academic tome. IT is a readable and brilliant account of the origins of the CIA, which shows how it emerged from its links with the old British intelligence networks. Hugh describes how a buccaneering generation of Anti-Imperialist CIA men created an organisation that looked, from the outside, as colonialist its British predecessor. Ground-breaking and though-provoking.

It is a privilege to interview the people writing the books that I love – listen in, if you haven’t already.

Away from spies, I also loved a non-fiction account of the last voyage of Captain Cook, by the American author, Hampton Sides: The Wide Wide Sea. It is a cliché to say that something reads like a novel – but this one really did. I was turning the pages until late at night, utterly gripped, as Cook sailed closer to his sad end. Brilliant stuff. 

20 BATTLES – Searching for a South African Way of War 1913-2013, by Evert Kleynhans and David Brock Katz. South Africa has a thriving community of military historians. Much excellent work  has appeared in recent years, although it is little known in the UK. This is a shame, not least because for the first half of the 20th century, South African military history is also British military history. 

The authors, two of SA’s leading military historians, have produced what amounts to a history of the SA army from 1913 to 2013, using a series of case studies of battles and campaigns. They highlight commonalities but also differences between the South African  and British ways of  fighting. The authors argue, that there was/is a ‘South African style of warfare’, based on manoeuvre and mobility, and these assets were all too often wasted by British generals in the two world wars. They are not the only historians to make this argument, and it is generally persuasive. At the very least it is intellectually stimulating, and deserves to be taken seriously by non-SA historians, and put in the broader  context of the Empire coalition armies of the two world wars.

Some of the battles they examine are very familiar (such as the Somme and El Alamein), although the SA role may not be, to a British audience, anyway. Others, the likes of Celleno fought by 6th SA Armoured Division in Italy in 1944, and Operation Boleas, the intervention in Lesotho in 1998, are more obscure. Evert Kleynhans and David Brock Katz have written a fascinating, very readable  book, also available as an ebook, which opens up a field of military history little known outside South Africa.

For the sheer joy of it, try Strike Up The Band: New York City in the Roaring Twenties by Helen Crisp and Jules Stewart, which ranges from Scott Fitzgerald and Aloysius Anthony Kelly, the champion flagpole-sitter, to the ravages of the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

For something a bit more left field try The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter, which  is stuffed with historical examples of random  luck, amazing coincidences and how often such life-upsetting incidents are liable to occur – as well as some informed advice on how you (and others) can avoid such freaks of fate. Though perhaps we would all be better off if the careless English aristocrat who accidentally ran over Hitler whilst driving through Munich in 1931 had been a bit more careless.

Then there’s Einstein in Time and Space: A Life in 99 Particles by Samuel Graydon.  A work which makes for easy reading, rather than the usual weighty tomes on this subject – and you might even learn how to understand relativity. As well as learning something entirely new about the genial genius who unexpectedly became the first world-wide celebrity. Like the time he asked a Long Island storekeeper for a pair of sundials – a curious way to experiment on time-warp and relativity. (His thick German accent blurred the fact that he really wanted ‘a pair of sandals’.)

Emperor of Rome, by Mary Beard. A fascinating analysis of the job of being Emperor – what it entailed, how it changed over the years of Empire, what various post-holders thought of it and ultimately how successful or otherwise they were as they did it. Utterly engrossing and, as it gives such a new perspective on aspects of Roman History simply taken for granted for so long, never less than eye-opening.

The Wisest Fool, by Steven Veerapen. Like Emperor of Rome, an eye-opening new analysis of a subject long taken as read. This examination of the life and reigns of James Ist and VIth gives us a very different man to the tongue-tied, bumbling near-idiot so sneeringly characterised by Henry IV of France. King James, it seems, was wise indeed and no fool. A clever, level-headed man, loving husband and father, able king, wise statesman, an accomplished peacemaker who brought years of war in Europe to an end. Whose infamous physical shortcomings were demonstrated only later in life but retro-fitted (so to speak) by succeeding generations. Re-fitted accurately now by Steven Veerapen and not before time.

Death of a Princess, by R N Morris’s latest novel is one of a series set in pre-revolutionary Russia. Pavel Pavlovich Virginsky, an Investigating Magistrate, becomes involved in the mysterious death of an elderly princess at a sanatorium which he is attending for treatment of a nervous breakdown. His grip on reality is questionable, the circumstances strange and dangerous – the result, an utterly gripping and occasionally breath-taking thriller.

1000 Tudor People, by Melita Thomas. I was and still am blown away by this book. Not only is it rigorously researched but it is beautifully illustrated throughout, making it real treasure. It functions as an encyclopaedia – in the vein of the old Holmes and Routh ‘Who’s Who’, but richer and up-to-date. This is a must-have for even seasoned Tudor experts: a book that warrants the purchase of its own coffee table.

The Thistle and the Rose, by Linda Porter. It’s rare that a history book can genuinely change people’s minds on its subject. Linda Porter manages this with her usual aplomb; her biography of Margaret Tudor completely shifts hoary historical interpretations of the queen as a frivolous woman and recognises her for what she was: a serious political player who gave her brother Henry VIII a run for his money.

From Tudor to Stuart, by Susan Doran. This masterful study of the shift in power from Elizabeth I to James VI and I demonstrates why Susan Doran is one of the UK’s foremost scholars. Brilliantly told and provocative, it questions long-standing assumptions about just how different were the last Tudor and the first Stuart sovereigns of England.

The Triumvirate, by George Behe. Penned by a longtime Titanic scholar, this wonderful book revisits the disaster from the perspective of its three main players – Captain Smith, Thomas Andrews, and J. Bruce Ismay. In doing so, it provides a blow-by-blow account of the sailing and sinking of the world’s most famous liner, providing an extraordinary sense of immediacy. Breathtaking and moving.

Growing up in the 1980s the mythology of the SAS bursting into buildings to free cowering hostages from ruthless terrorists was as powerful as the Iliad. The Iranian Embassy Siege in 1980 brought the Regiment under the microscope, and now we have a full account from Ben Macintyre. As is usually the case, the truth is far more interesting as the Khuzestani guerillas were manipulated by Saddam’s intelligence service and the mastermind Abu Nidal. There is humour combined with Macintyre’s customary pace and I raced through The Siege. The irony, as the dust settled after the storming of 16 Prince’s Gate, was the SAS now had to face unwelcome scrutiny, as we see today with the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan.

The Muse of History by classicist Oswyn Murray takes as its conceit the Ancient Greeks as the inspiration for Western historical thought since the Enlightenment. Perhaps unfashionable in some quarters of academia, the book is a joy to read, thought-provoking and amusing. It’s a lifetime of work but provides a wealth of education for a dullard like me.

A new William Boyd book is an event, and Gabriel’s Moon is no different. I am a devotee of Boyd’s work since reading A Good Man in Africa at an impressionable age, and his latest continues in this vein. An espionage novel, I laughed out loud so often that I couldn’t stop reading as it exacerbated my sleeplessness, an affliction suffered by the hero, travel writer Gabriel Dax who stumbles into spying. I’m delighted Boyd will be writing two further books, chiefly because Dax’s beguiling lover, and handler, Faith Green is such an extraordinarily powerful character. With Bondesque locations (we travel from the Congo to Cadiz, Rome and Warsaw), there is a ruthlessness to Boyd’s MI6 that contributes to a very clever plot.

If you’re yearning for another gripping novel, then look no further than Lucy Ashe’s The Sleeping Beauties, set around WW2 ballet at Sadler’s Wells. The daughter of widowed Rosamund becomes the obsession of Briar, a dancer who is not all that she seems. The story shifts from the beginning of the war to the end, all the while keeping an emotional hold – I loved it.

The House of War: The Struggle between Christendom and The Caliphate by Simon Mayall, published by Osprey this summer, is a series of fluently told and immaculately researched vignettes on the great battles between Christians and Islam. Starting with Umar’s taking of Jerusalem in the 7th Century and ending with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Mayall covers Hattin and Acre, Constantinople and Rhodes, Lepanto and Vienna before returning us to Jerusalem again in 1917. A very readable and fascinating insight to some of the less well known history of the Middle East.

The Irish Jacobite Army, by Harman and Diarmuid Murtagh, published by Four Courts Press, is an immensely valuable new study of the largest body of Irish soldiers ever to go into battle as they fought against the Williamite forces between 1685 and the end of the 17th century. Again very well researched by the man who for many years led the Military History Society of Ireland, it is essential reading for historians interested in the origins of both British and Irish armies.

Sir P – A Hundred Years On, by Dhananajaya Singh, published by Astitva Prakashan is the story of that great warrior, nationalist and statesman Sir Pratap Singh of Jodhpur who raised his own regiment of lancers in the First World War, largely from his own extended family, and led them with such distinction in Palestine. In one particular action they killed 60 Turks with their lances. Told as a series of diary entries, what makes this remarkable biography so fascinating is the extraordinarily wide range of personalities with whom Sir P dealt.

Books of 2024 from Aspects of History