Once again I have prepared a list of suggested books for the Oxford Union Library Committee to consider. On this occasion I compiled the list with a fellow committee member.
Here are the books I suggested, and which i would recommend to others, together with some notes about them, largely adapted from the Amazon website - but, if you want to purchase them in hard copy as opposed to kindle versions, do support your local bookshops if possible - you will miss them if they disappear:
Peter Heather
The Restoration of Rome ; Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders. Pan £12.99
In 476 AD the last Roman Emperor was deposed by a barbarian
general, the son of one of Attila the Hun’s henchmen, and the Imperial
vestments were despatched to Constantinople. The curtain fell on the
Roman Empire in Western Europe, its territories divided between
successor kingdoms constructed around barbarian military manpower. But
if the Roman Empire was dead, the dream of restoring it refused to die.
In many parts of the old Empire, real Romans still lived, holding on to
their lands, the values of their civilisation, its institutions; the
barbarians were ready to reignite the iIperial flame and to enjoy the
benefits of Roman civilization, the three greatest contenders being
Theoderic, Justinian and Charlemagne. But, ultimately, they would fail
and it was not until the reinvention of the Papacy in the eleventh
century that Europe’s barbarians found the means to generate a new Roman
Empire, an empire which has lasted a thousand years.
ISBN 978- 1447241072
Chris Wickham
Medieval Rome:Stability and Crisis of a City 900-1150 Oxford UP £35
This analyses the history of Rome between
900 and 1150, a period of major change in the city. It does not
merely seek to tell the story of the city from the traditional Church
standpoint, but rather engages in studies of the city's processions,
material culture, legal transformations, and sense of the past, seeking
to unravel the complexities of Roman cultural identity, including its
urban economy, social history as seen across the different strata of
society, and the articulation between the city's regions. This
new approach serves to underpin a major reinterpretation of Rome's
political history in the era of the 'reform papacy', one of the greatest
crises in Rome's history, which had a resonance across the entire
continent. This book is the most systematic analysis ever
made of two and a half centuries of Rome's history, one which saw
centuries of stability undermined by external crisis and the long period
of reconstruction which followed.
ISBN 978-0199684960
James Hannam
God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science Icon Books £10.99
This sets out to reveal the roots
of modern science in the medieval world. The adjective 'medieval' has
become a synonym for brutality and uncivilized behavior, yet without the
work of medieval scholars there could have been no Galileo, no Newton
and no Scientific Revolution. James Hannam
debunks many of the myths about the Middle Ages, showing that medieval
people did not think the earth is flat, nor did Columbus 'prove' that it
is a sphere; the Inquisition burnt nobody for their science nor was
Copernicus afraid of persecution; no Pope tried to ban human dissection
or the number zero. The book is a celebration of the
forgotten scientific achievements of the Middle Ages - advances which
were often made thanks to, rather than in spite of, the influence of
Christianity and Islam. Decisive progress was also made in technology:
spectacles and the mechanical clock, for instance, were both invented in
thirteenth-century Europe. Charting an epic journey through six
centuries of historythe book brings back to light the
discoveries of neglected geniuses like John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and
Thomas Bradwardine, as well as putting into context the contributions of
more familiar figures like Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and St
Thomas Aquinas.
ISBN 978-1848311503
Mark Greengrass
Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517-1648. Penguin (History of Europe V) £12.99
From peasants to princes, no one was untouched by the spiritual and
intellectual upheaval of this era. Martin Luther's challenge to church
authority forced Christians to examine their beliefs in ways that shook
the foundations of their religion. The subsequent divisions, fed by
dynastic rivalries and military changes, fundamentally altered the
relations between ruler and ruled. Geographical and scientific
discoveries challenged the unity of Christendom as a belief-community.
Europe, with all its divisions, emerged instead as a geographical
projection. It was reflected in the mirror of America, and refracted by
the eclipse of Crusade in ambiguous relationships with the Ottomans and
Orthodox Christianity. Chronicling these dramatic changes, Thomas More,
Shakespeare, Montaigne and Cervantes created works which continue to
resonate. The book is a rich tapestry that fosters a deeper understanding of Europe's identity today.
ISBN 978-014197852X
Hugh Thomas
World Without End: The Global Empire of Philip II Allen Lane £30.00
Following Rivers of Gold and The Golden Age, this is the conclusion of a magisterial three-volume history of the Spanish Empire by Hugh Thomas
It describes the conquest of Paraguay and the River Plate, of
the Yucatan in Mexico, the only partial conquest of Chile, and battles
with the French over Florida, and then, in the 1580s, the extraordinary
projection of Spanish power across the Pacific to conquer the
Philippines. More significantly, it describes how the Spanish ran the
greatest empire the world had seen since Rome - as well as
conquistadores, the book is people with viceroys, judges, nobles,
bishops, inquisitors and administrators of many different kinds, often
in conflict with one another, seeking to organise the native populations
into towns, to build cathedrals, hospitals and universities. Behind
them - sometimes ahead of them - came the religious orders, the
Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and finally the Jesuits, builders
of convents and monasteries, many of them of astonishing beauty, and
reminders of the pervasiveness of religion and the self-confidence of
the age.
Towering above them all, though moving rarely from
the palace of the Escorial outside Madrid, is the figure of King Philip
II, the central figure in the book. The Venetian ambassador thought him
'the arbiter of the world'. Once the Philippines had been consolidated,
Philip's advisors contemplated an invasion of China: the Jesuit Father
Sanchez called it 'the greatest enterprise which has ever been proposed
to any monarch in the world'. It was an enterprise never undertaken, but
never explicitly abandoned.
Was it a great or a terrible
empire? In contrast to other empire builders, the Spaniards entered upon
arguments with each other about their right to rule other peoples, and
their ruthlessness was often tempered by humanity. Hugh Thomas's
conclusion is unequivocal: 'The speed with which the sixteenth-century
conquistadores conquered such large territories on two vast continents,
and the comparable success of missionaries with large populations of
Indians, stands as one of the supreme epics of both valour and
imagination by Europeans.'
ISBN 978-1846140839
James Anderson Winn
Queen Anne: Patron of the Arts Oxfird UP. £ 30.00
Queen Anne (1665-1714) received the
education thought proper for a princess, reading plays and poetry in
English and French while learning dancing, singing, acting, drawing, and
instrumental music. As an adult, she played the guitar and the
harpsichord, danced regularly, and took a connoisseur's interest in all
the arts.
In this comprehensive interdisciplinary biography,
James Winn tells the story of Anne's life in new breadth and detail, and
in unprecedented cultural context. Winn shows how poets, painters, and
musicians used the works they made for Anne to send overt and covert
political messages to the Queen, the court, the church, and Parliament.
Their works also illustrates the pathos of Anne's personal life: the
loss of her mother when she was six, her troubled relations with her
father and her sister, James II and Mary II, and her own doomed efforts
to produce an heir. Her eighteen pregnancies produced only one child who
lived past infancy; his death at the age of eleven, mourned by poets,
was a blow from which Anne never fully recovered. Her close friendship
with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, a topic of scabrous ballads and
fictions, ended in bitter discord; the death of her husband in 1708 left
her emotionally isolated; and the wrangling among her chief ministers
hastened her death.
Richly illustrated with visual and musical examples, Queen Anne
draws on works by a wide array of artists - among them composer George
Frideric Handel, the poet Alexander Pope, the painter Godfrey Kneller,
and the architect Christopher Wren - to shed new light on Anne's life
and reign. This is the definitive biography of Queen Anne.
ISBN 978- 0199372195
Munro Price
The Perilous Crown: France between Revolutions 1814-1848. Pan £14.99
Using substantial unpublished research as he did in his celebrated The Fall of the French Monarchy,
Price focuses on the amazing political machinations of Madame Adelaide,
sister of King Louis Philippe. Though only mentioned rarely in other
histories of the time this book shows how her intelligence
and behind the scenes wrangling secured her brother the throne, thereby
creating France's only long lasting experiment with a constitutional
monarchy.
Munro Price vividly brings the period alive
with all its instability and political intrigue, while at the same time
illuminating our understanding of a difficult and tumultuous time.
ISBN 978-1447249092
Michael and Eleanor Brock (eds.)
Margot Asquith's Diary: The View from Downing Street 1914-1916 Oxford UP £30.00
Margot Asquith was the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, who led Britain into war in August 1914. Asquith's early war
leadership drew praise from all quarters, but in December 1916 he was
forced from office in a palace coup, and replaced by Lloyd George, whose
career he had done so much to promote. Margot had both the literary
gifts and the vantage point to create, in her diary of these years, a
compelling record of her husband's fall from grace. She once described
herself as 'a sort of political clairvoyant', but she did not anticipate
the premier's fall, and it is for her candour, not her clairvoyance,
that the diary is valuable.
Margot was both a spectator of,
and a participant in, the events that she describes, and in public
affairs could be an ally or an embarrassment - sometimes both. Her diary
evokes the wartime milieu, as experienced in 10 Downing Street, and
describes the great political battles that lay behind the warfare on the
Western Front. Her writing teems with character sketches, including
those of Lloyd George ('a natural adventurer who may make or mar himself
any day'), Churchill ('Winston's vanity is septic'), and Kitchener ('a
man brutal by nature and by pose'). Witty and worldly, Margot also
possessed a childlike vulnerability: 'This is the 84th day of the war'
she wrote in October 1914, 'and speaking for myself I have never felt
the same person since. I don't mean to say I have improved! On the
contrary...'.
This volume brings together a wealth of
previously-unpublished source material with an introductory essay from
Michael and Eleanor Brock, two of the leading authorities in the field.
ISBN 978-0198229773
Alexander Watsom
Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria - Hungary at War 1914-1918 Allen Lane £30
For Germany and
Austria-Hungary the Great War - which had begun with such high hopes for
a fast, dramatic outcome - rapidly degenerated as invasions of both
France and Serbia ended in catastrophe. For four years the fighting now
turned into a siege on a quite monstrous scale. Europe became the focus
of fighting of a kind previously unimagined. Despite local successes -
and an apparent triumph in Russia - Germany and Austria-Hungary were
never able to break out of the the Allies' ring of steel.
In
this new history of the Great War all the
major events of the conflict are seen from the perspective of Berlin and
Vienna. It is fundamentally a history of ordinary people. In 1914 both
empires were flooded by genuine mass enthusiasm and their troubled
elites were at one with most of the population. But the course of the
war put this under impossible strain, with a fatal rupture between an
ever more extreme and unrealistic leadership and an exhausted and
embittered people. In the end they failed and were overwhelmed by defeat
and revolution.
ISBN 9871846142215
R. F. Forster
Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890 - 1923. W.W. Norton
£22
Having attended Prof Foster's fascinationg Ford Lectures on this material the other year I was very keen to recommend this book.
A searing cultural history of the remarkable generation who transformed Ireland Vivid Faces
surveys the lives and beliefs of the people who made the Irish
Revolution: linked together by youth, radicalism, subversive activities,
enthusiasm and love. Determined to reconstruct the world and defining
themselves against their parents, they were in several senses a
revolutionary generation.
The Ireland that eventually
emerged bore little relation to the brave new world they had conjured up
in student societies, agit-prop theatre groups, vegetarian restaurants,
feminist collectives, volunteer militias, Irish-language summer
schools, and radical newspaper offices. Roy Foster's book investigates
that world, and the extraordinary people who occupied it.
Looking
back from old age, one of the most magnetic members of the
revolutionary generation reflected that 'the phoenix of our youth has
fluttered to earth a miserable old hen', but he also wondered 'how many
people nowadays get so much fun as we did'. Working from a rich trawl
of contemporary diaries, letters and reflections, Vivid Faces
re-creates the argumentative, exciting, subversive and original lives of
people who made a revolution, as well as the disillusionment in which
it ended.
ISBN 978-0393082791
John Lukacs
Five Days in London: May 1940 Yale UP £8.50
A well received account of the events of May 24 - May 28 1940, the debate about continuing the Second World War and the emergence of Churchill as Prime Minister. It is worth recalling that some of the government records of that period are, I understand, still classified.
ISBN 978-0300084665
The list was approved by the Library Committee yesterday afternoon.
