Soviet science fiction set in a capitalist wasteland; the USSR as initially very pro-Jewish; Khrushchev as a great raconteur; Stalingrad in all its horror. Award-winning author Francis Spufford chooses the books that tell the story of Russia in the last century.
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The award-winning writer, currently writing for Treme, the new HBO show from The Wire creator David Simon, says that there is a profundity in the expression of joy in New Orleans because of the constant awareness of mortality. Your end could come from natural causes, a shooting, or the breaking of a levee, so while you are here you need to live with defiant grace and beauty.
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The author of From a Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb chooses five books on the Troubles, and describes his own relationship with Ireland and his journey through the grief at the death of his identical twin in 1979.
The psychotherapist and key negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement says peace depends on talking to the people who are actually perpetrating the violence. Obama seemed to understand that, but progress, he says, is now slipping backwards. He chooses five seminal works on the causes of terrorism.
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Too often, argues the Hoover Institution scholar, universities are places where small orthodoxies elbow aside big ideas; too many Americans are embarrassed to talk about morality in terms of virtue and character, not just rules and intentions. We need to remember that freedom isn't value-free.
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The author of The Zodiac of Paris says French Egyptomania stemmed partly from Napoleon’s obsession with Egypt. He saw himself as a new Alexander, and wanted to secure his status in history by conquering Egypt. She chooses books on France and Egypt’s strange relationship, including the gift of a giraffe and a vaudeville play that caused riots.
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The author shows us the roofs of old Delhi where every family tended their own flock of pigeons, a journey from Belgrade to Pakistan in a Fiat 500 and a village where conflicts were solved by getting stoned on bhang lassi, a potent yoghurt drink and a tragic bandit queen. He chooses the best five Indian journeys.
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For the author and journalist the celebration of the non-rational is one of the things he loves about Spain. Luis Buñuel is almost like a prophet of non-rationality in this very rational world, he says. Webster chooses five books on the wonder of Spain.
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The Agence France Press Dhaka bureau chief recommends that people visit the prisons in Cambodia as a means of understanding the Khmer Rouge regime, a period only just introduced into the local school curriculum.
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The author of Matterhorn and decorated Vietnam veteran says that even in a morally ambiguous war the politics soon evaporate. The soldier on the ground thinks: ‘How do we get out of this alive and help our friends get out of this alive and not let them down?’ His five books tell what it was like on both sides.
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