jessie childs tale of swashbuckling intrigues in tudor england, traitors of god: terror & faith in elizabethan england (bodley head £25), evokes a john le carré-esque underworld of political double-dealing and “espionage” (as the elizabethans called it). it was a time when moles were planted in Catholic seminaries and Elizabethan diplomacy created a mirror war of priest against priest, informer against informer. In crisp prose, Childs recreates a world of heroism and holiness in Tudor England.
tim butcher’s study of the bosnian serb who assassinated archduke franz ferdinand in sarajevo in 1914, the trigger: hunting the assassin who led the world to war (chatto & windus £18.99) , is a triumph of punctilious scholarship and research. Gavrilo Principe set in motion an unintended chain of events that culminated in carnage the likes of which the world had never seen. at 19, princip was not of an age to be executed; instead, he died in captivity at Theresienstadt in 1918, having contracted tuberculosis. Butcher (author of the bestselling Congo narrative river of blood) has written a wonderfully absorbing book on the nature of one man’s political grievance and its dire consequences.
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Partisan Diary: A Woman’s Life in the Italian Resistance, by Ada Gobetti (for a price of £22.99), was originally published in Italy in 1956 with a foreword by Italo Calvino . (The author displays an “ironic modesty” and “simplicity” in writing, Calvin wrote approvingly.) The act of keeping such an anti-fascist diary during the German occupation of Italy carried an automatic death sentence. Gobetti wrote down her entries in cryptic English that only she could understand; at the end of the war, she deciphered the notes for eventual publication. By chance, the Germans never suspected that her Turin address, the now legendary 6 Via Fabro, was a nerve center of the resistance. Her diary, a key historical document, is exciting and unforgettable.
Eric Hazan is not a professional historian, but he has the historian’s knack for fruitfully trawling through archives. the story of a people of the French revolution (verse £ 20) recounts the turmoil of 1789 in all its guillotine blood and popular fury. Hazen has chosen to write an “everyone’s story” that focuses on the experience of ordinary housewives, journalists, printers, and sans-culottes. the combination of bottom-up testimony with the author’s quick intelligence gives the story a vivid immediacy.
carrie gibson, a former journalist for the guardian, sees the west indies as a “crossroads” for people, trade, plants, animals, slaves and disease. empire’s crossroads: a history of the caribbean from columbus to the present day (macmillan £25) is an ambitious undertaking. Aside from the accident of having been under British rule, Barbarians, Saint Lucians, Guyanese, and Jamaicans have little in common with one another. if you were to overlay a map of europe on the caribbean, jamaica would be edinburgh; trinidad, north africa; and barbados, italy: the islands are that far apart. With exceptional narrative verve and a flair for synthesis, Gibson compresses the stories of the islands into a powerful and vivid narrative.
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hugh trevor-roper, the conservative historian from cambridge, served in british intelligence during the 1939-45 conflict and became an expert on soviet and nazi espionage. his essays on the cold war, collected in the secret world: behind the curtain of british intelligence in world war two and the cold war (ib tauris £25), condemn the “sleazy trio” of Cambridge agents – Maclean, Burgess and Philby – who betrayed their countrymen to the Soviet Union. trevor-roper sees a priestly or hieratic aspect to his betrayal, as they sent unsuspecting novices to “our friends” in the kremlin and certain death. The essays, first published in The Spectator, New York Book Meet and Review, exude a sharp elegance.
richard vinen, in national service: conscription in britain 1945-1963(allen lane £25), offers a fascinating history of the British conscription and its personnel and personalities. the topic has been largely neglected by scholars, but venen fills the gap brilliantly. the notion that conscription served a disciplinary purpose (the “short sharp shock”) is retrospective, they say. The reality is that Britain needed reserve troops in the event of a nuclear conflict and to fight its various decolonization wars.
in zeppelin nights: london in the first world war(bodley head £25), jerry white portrays the british capital as a bustling hub of the allied war effort. Whether they liked it or not, Londoners of all backgrounds were involved in the carnage in the trenches. Every day, blind and disabled servicemen arrived by hospital train at Waterloo from Flanders and the Somme. with mud still clinging to their boots, they took the battlefield to the heart of the metropolis. white deploys sources ranging from unpublished memoirs to diaries and interviews to write a top-notch social story.
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