It’s been another excellent year for history publishing, with new books that offer fresh insights into the past and help us make sense of the present. Here, a panel of historians recommend the titles they’ve most enjoyed this year, from tales of peerless Roman rulers to life in postwar Britain
COMPILED BY MATT ELTON ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON MASKELL
Emily Brand
In exploring how thousands of Indigenous Americans experienced and impacted life in early modern Europe – as travellers, translators, royal employees, or abductees – On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe (Orion) reverses our familiar narrative of the ‘Age of Discovery’. Caroline Dodds Pennock expertly interrogates historical fragments and manuscript sources to tell a story that is grand in scale but also feels heart-rendingly personal. This book delivers a genuinely original and meaningful account of the 16th century that will prove eye-opening even for those familiar with the period.
Part art history, part memoir, Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death (Vintage) is a gentle and beautiful journey though the power of art, love and grief. In gorgeous prose, Laura Cumming moves from an explosion in Delft in 1654 to a transformative encounter with a painting of asparagus and her own meditations on human connections to paintings, to history and to each other. Her passion for the masterpieces of the Dutch golden age is also delightfully infectious.
The Wife of Bath:
A Biography (Princeton University Press), Marion Turner’s ‘life story’ of Chaucer’s most interesting creation – Alison of Bath, serial wife and wandering woman – falls into two parts. The first explores the lives of and opportunities for women in 14th-century Europe in an illuminating social history. The second traces Alison’s literary ‘afterlives’, from Shakespeare to Zadie Smith, and her persistence as a feminist icon. Both combine rigorous scholarship and an eye for entertaining detail.
Emily Brand is a historian and author whose latest book is The Fall of the House of Byron (John Murray, 2020)
James Holland
You can accuse me of fraternal bias, but Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age (Little, Brown), the third volume in my brother Tom’s Rome series, is every bit as brilliant as the previous two. From the year of the four emperors to the golden age of Trajan and Hadrian, he brings this familiar yet unfamiliar world vividly to light more thought-provokingly and vividly than anyone
