History Books

What kind of books should we read to get a broader sense of history? Peter Frankopan,  professor of global history at Oxford University, talks us through the books that inspired him.

Every year the Wolfson History Prize sets out to pick the very best history books written in the past year. Historian and Wolfson prize judge, Diarmaid MacCulloch, talks us through the wonderful books that made the 2019 shortlist: history books that are both great reads and serious scholarship.

Racism is not innate but emerges under special conditions, says the King's College professor and author of the sweeping history Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. He chooses five books that inspired him.

Ancient history was a man’s world – but women were considered closer to the gods. The historian and TV presenter Bettany Hughes reveals the secrets of Athenian priestesses, Byzantine empresses and Stone Age fertility goddesses.

The Greek historian and general Thucydides wanted his History of the Peloponnesian War "to be a possession for all time." In that, he's been remarkably successful, with his name still echoing in the corridors of power. But what lessons should we take away from his great work? Translator and classicist Johanna Hanink talks us through books to better understand Thucydides and the mythical Athens he lived in and wrote about.

History is not about understanding the past for the sake of it, it's about understanding human nature, says the historian and novelist Ian Mortimer.

It was a war that devastated Europe and left more than one-fifth of the German population dead. The complex peace agreement that ended it, the Treaty of Westphalia, is still credited with establishing our modern state system. Peter Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University and author of the most recent general history of the war, Europe's Tragedy: A New History of the Thirty Years War, recommends books to read for a nuanced picture of Europe's cataclysmic 17th-century conflict.

In the years immediately after World War II, the Holocaust was little studied. That all changed with the publication of Raul Hilberg's book, The Destruction of the European Jews. Steven Katz, professor of Jewish Holocaust Studies at Boston University and former Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, introduces the best Holocaust books.    

A "powerful and aggravating absence of consensus" came to define the Irish political experience, says the historian Richard Bourke. Here he picks the best books for gaining a range of perspectives on Irish history, singling out James Joyce as offering insight into the divergence of nationalist opinion.

Which history books are ideal to take on holiday, authoritative and yet entertaining? We turned to historian Suzannah Lipscomb—whose most recent book, The Voices of Nîmes, uncovers the lives of ordinary women in Languedoc in early modern France—for her top five.