Bright future for the past

THE year 2002 has been a particularly rich one for history books, supporting the contention that we are enjoying a golden age for the subject, both in publishing and on television.

Simon Schama's History of Britain 1776-2000 (BBC, pounds 25) ends his trilogy with characteristic verve, which is just as well, since he and David Starkey - who has a book coming out soon on Henry VIII's wives- have spearheaded this renaissance.

Austin Woolrych's Britain in Revolution (OUP, pounds 25) is the fitting culmination of a lifetime's study of the English Civil War, and the best onevolume study we are likely to have for a long time.

Equally comprehensive is Spain's Road to Empire by Henry Kamen (Penguin, pounds 25), which explains how militant Castile first expelled the Moors from Iberia and then created the largest empire the world had ever seen.

Meanwhile, in Britain, King Henry VIII found himself facing a rebellion that shook his throne known as The Pilgrimage of Grace (Weidenfeld, pounds 25), which has been superbly reconstructed by Geoffrey Moorhouse.

Over the Channel, The Seven Ages of Paris (Macmillan, pounds 25) covers the extraordinary story of that city from the 13th century to 1969, and no one could have told it better than lifelong francophile Alistair Horne. Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia by Orlando Figes (Penguin, pounds 25) was only published this autumn, but already is becoming recognised as definitive.

William Dalrymple's White Mughals (HarperCollins, pounds 20) and Saul David's The Indian Mutiny 1857 (Viking, pounds 20) both demonstrate an impressive appreciation of the social and political realities that underpinned the British Raj.

The late Sebastian Haffner's Defying Hitler (Weidenfeld, pounds 14.99) has been rightly feted for its insights into the tough moral choices facing educated and intelligent Germans during the rise of Nazism. A book that rated far more notice than it got was Nicholas Courtney's Gale Force Ten (Headline, pounds 14.99), the biography of the brave but sexually perverted Admiral Beaufort, who gave his name to the scale that measures wind speed. Far more widely reviewed was John Grigg's magnificent fourth volume of his life of David Lloyd George (Penguin, pounds 25), which takes the premier up to Armistice Day 1918.

Similarly, Antony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall (Viking, pounds 25) was a tour de force that deservedly turned into an immediate best seller.

The Viking-Weidenfeld Lives series of mini-books produced two notable short biographies this year, in Paul Johnson's Napoleon (Weidenfeld, pounds 12.99) and John Keegan's Churchill (Weidenfeld, pounds 14.99), which astonishingly both managed to say something new about their subjects despite the publishing cottage industries that exist around both iconic warriors.

Likewise, Tom Pocock managed to retell the Nelson story in a new way in The Terror Before Trafalgar (John Murray, pounds 20), principally by concentrating on the threat of Napoleonic invasion in 1802-05.

Those interested in that period will also enjoy the sumptuous illustrations and authoritative text of Philip Haythornthwaite's Wellington's Army: Uniforms of the British Soldier 1812-1815 (Greenhill, pounds 40).

In Batavia's Graveyard ( Weidenfeld, pounds 14.99), Mike Dash relates the horrors 322 passengers and crew of a Dutch East Indiamen underwent after their ship hit reefs off Australia in 1829, mainly at the hands of the maniacal Jeronimus Cornelisz.

It has not all been war and murder, though, Peter Hennessy's The Secret State (Penguin, pounds 16.99) is a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the way that British officialdom organises itself in those departments that have to exist in the penumbra. Secrecy was also a primary consideration for the 15 Nazi civil servants who plotted the industrialisation of the Holocaust in 1942, as brilliantly reconstructed in Mark Roseman's The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (Penguin, pounds 9.99), a book that manages to be both scholarly and gripping.

To rid civilisation of monsters like those 15 genocidal bureaucrats was the ultimate ambition of General Sir David Fraser, whose flawless gem of an autobiography, Wars and Shadows (Penguin, pounds 18.99) is by turns moving and funny, elegiac and hard- hitting.

Happy history-reading this Christmas.

. Andrew Roberts's Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership will be published by Weidenfeld in January.

Copyright 2002
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