15th October 2013
Philippa chooses her top ten history books
Taken from The Times
1. Captain Swing by E.J Hobsbawm and George Rude (Lawrence and Wishart,1969 ) This is a great classic of radical history writing. Captain Swing was the name and disguise adopted by a number of 18th-century working class rioters defending their traditional rights. It’s an inspiring example of how to write a history of a secret movement: detailed, localised and passionate.
2. Perkin: A Story of Deception by Ann Wroe (Jonathan Cape, 2003 ) A biography of a deceit written as lyrically and tenderly as a novel with the close observation of a history. It tells the story of the young pretender that Henry VII was to name “Perkin Warbeck”, but the author persuasively suggests he was one of missing Princes in the Tower, the Plantagenet Prince Richard.
3. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer (Pluto Press, 1984 ) Still the best and the only lengthy authoritative account of black people in England from the earliest immigrants – Roman centurions – onward. It’s an unknown history in our national story. Put it on the reading list.
4. The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich (Phaidon, 1950) Everything is art to Gombrich and his discussion of cave paintings, early pottery and Egyptian art is as knowledgeable and sympathetic as his views on modern art. This is a history with the emphasis on art as a historically based form; enormous and beautifully produced.
5. History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe by Rodney Bolt (Bloomsbury, 2005) I fell in love with this book, which is a mostly fictional account of the survival of Christopher Marlowe after he faked his death to go on writing and publishing his wonderful plays (ie, the Shakespeare canon). Mostly fictional because some of it is fantasy, some of it is entrancing speculation and some a wonderful evocation of the time and locations of Shakespeare’s writing. Bolt seduces the reader into the palm of his hand and you believe everything he says.
6. The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson (Victor Gollancz, 1963 ) The classic radical account of the emergence of a working-class consciousness and the resulting campaigns. Observed meticulously with emotional and passionate detail, this massive (900 pages), authoritative and beloved book was the standard bearer for the new history that emerged in England postwar. It continues to illuminate historical studies today.
7. Down the Common: A Year in the Life of a Medieval Woman by Ann Baer (Michael O’Mara Books, 1996) Cautiously subtitled “a novel”, this is a month-by-month account of a medieval woman’s life, completely persuasive and ringing with truth. If a medieval peasant woman had ever written a diary it would be like this.
8. The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield (Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, New York, 1935) This is an elegant broad-brush view of history that looks at the collapse of the unified values of the Victorians under pressure from circumstances and minority groups in society, including the suffragettes. It’s so beautifully and persuasively written that it would be discourteous to disagree.
9. Hidden from History by Sheila Rowbotham (Pluto Press, 1973) Every woman, every feminist and every historian should read this book. It tells of the oppression of women from the 17th century onwards and the long years of struggle for equality. It is (as it were) seminal.
10. The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (Oxford University Press, 1973) Put simply, I love this book. It describes the literature of the English countryside with meticulous literary criticism and precise geography (three around Farnham), the long tradition of the pastoral and the relationship of people to the land. Deeply moving, it is a lovesong from a great writer and historian to the people and the land that he loved and understood.