“The Eustace Diamonds… is a great one to start off with, because, again, it’s one of those wonderful heroines, Lizzie Eustace. She is a wealthy widow and she wants to keep this valuable family necklace—the Eustace Diamonds—and insists that her husband gave it to her. The family are furious. They want it back because it’s an heirloom.” Read more...
The Best Anthony Trollope Books
Francesca Simon ,
Children's Author
“I read the three volumes of Schama’s A History of Britain quickly…they are beautifully written. There’s a rhythm to them. Schama has mastered that real art of history where you give somebody reading it enough of a sense of detail that they feel the historian knows what they’re doing and that you come out of it knowing more, but without getting bogged down in the detail that you don’t need…It’s a page-turner…He manages to capture, at different points of the book, a real sense of what’s distinctive about British history.” Read more...
The best books on Modern British History
Andrew Hindmoor ,
Historian
“Beren and Lúthien is based on Tolkien’s own experience. It was inspired by seeing his own wife, Edith, dancing in a wood, under the moonlight, amongst hemlock flowers. And this created an image in his mind that he kept on reworking throughout his life. But that it the central image. When she died he had the name Lúthien inscribed on her gravestone. When Tolkien died, his children inscribed the name Beren on his.” Read more...
Books Drawn From Myth and Fairy Tale
Alan Lee ,
Cartoonists & Illustrator
“Other writers have tried to capture the world of high finance, and failed, because finance is abstract and complicated. Trollope succeeded because his real interest was in bringing to life the way that money could change human character. There’s nothing abstract or complicated about greed, vanity and weakness.” Read more...
The best books on Financial Speculation
John Gapper ,
Journalist
A Moment Towards the End of the Play is one of the memoirs written by Timothy West, the British actor and audiobook narrator.
Read expert recommendations
“I picked Animal Farm because it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues power, the tendency is to forget principles – instead the ends come to justify the means. Once principles are cast aside, however, it is a short way towards becoming exactly the thing one fought against.” Read more...
The best books on Holding Power to Account
Heather Brooke ,
Journalist
“This is the ultimate dystopia written by someone who wasn’t just one of the greatest of all journalists, but one of the most prescient…He wrote this book in 1948, when he was dying of tuberculosis, in a great burst of passionate determination, because he could see long before other people where totalitarianism and communism were heading. Animal Farm had told it as a kind of dark fairy-tale, but this was the culmination. The intellectual dishonesty of the Left, which refused to see how evil Stalin was, is despicable, and Orwell was brave enough to stand up to his friends as well as his enemies…His hero Winston, named, of course, after Winston Churchill, is betrayed even by the one person he thinks he can totally love and trust” Read more...
Books that Changed the World
Amanda Craig ,
Journalist
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