Secondhand History Bargain Book Box SP4111

Secondhand History Bargain Book Box SP4111

Nineteen histories, mostly big-format paperbacks, with four hardbacks: Beevor’s Russia, Ackroyd’s London, Inwood’s London, Lawrence James’s Raj, Orlando Figes’s Natasha’s Dance, Paxman’s The English, E.H. Carr’s What Is History?, Hibbert’s Cavaliers and Roundheads, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook’s Rest Is History Returns, The Year 1000, Mark Felton, Michael Jones’s Leningrad and Alan Moorehead. Britain, Russia and the odd detour to Egypt and the Tigris.

1. London: The Biography — Peter Ackroyd — London as a living body, from the Romans to the Millennium, by theme rather than date: fire, crowds, drink, the river, the dead. Ackroyd’s masterpiece and the best book about the city. Vintage.
2. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India — Lawrence James — From Clive to Mountbatten in one volume, sympathetic to the British and clear about what they did. The standard popular history.
3. A History of London — Stephen Inwood — Chronological where Ackroyd is thematic: a thousand pages from the Romans on, with a foreword by Roy Porter. The one to read alongside Ackroyd.
4. Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English at War 1642–1649 — Christopher Hibbert — The Civil War as narrative, from Edgehill to the scaffold, by the master of readable history.
5. Castle of the Eagles: Escape from Mussolini’s Colditz — Mark Felton — British generals held in a Tuscan castle in 1943 dig a tunnel. The true story, from the Zero Night author.
6. The Rest Is History Returns — Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook — An A–Z of historical curiosities from the podcast: Alcibiades to Zulu, with the monkey and the gladiator on the cover. Hardback.
7. A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons — Geoffrey Hindley — The beginnings of the English nation, from Hengist to Hastings, in the Brief History format.
8. The Murder of Tutankhamen — Bob Brier — A 3000-year-old murder mystery: the Egyptologist who argued the boy king was killed, from the X-rays. Later disproved, still gripping.
9. 1603 — Christopher Lee — The death of Elizabeth I and the birth of the Stuart era: one year, told month by month, from the This Sceptred Isle author.
10. Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia — Orlando Figes — From Peter the Great to Stalin through music, painting, literature and the peasant hut. Wonderfully rich, says Antony Beevor; the best introduction to Russian culture there is. Penguin.
11. The English: A Portrait of a People — Jeremy Paxman — Why the English are the way they are, from the weather to the class system, by the Newsnight presenter. Witty, argumentative and affectionate, says the Telegraph. Penguin.
12. What Is History? — E.H. Carr — The 1961 Cambridge lectures that every history undergraduate reads in the first week: facts don’t speak for themselves, and the historian chooses. Penguin, with the Soviet-parade cover.
13. Leningrad: State of Siege — Michael Jones — The 900 days from the inside: starvation, cannibalism and survival, from diaries and interviews. A tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, says the Herald.
14. Wounded Tigris — Leon McCarron — A river journey from the Tigris’s source in Turkey to the Gulf, through a cradle of civilisation drying up. A journey through both time and ecological crisis, says Tom Holland. Hardback.
15. The Russian Revolution — Alan Moorehead — The Australian war correspondent’s 1958 account, from Rasputin to Lenin, in the Panther edition.
16. A History of Modern China — Kenneth Scott Latourette — The Pelican History of the World volume, from the Manchus to Mao. 1954 Pelican.
17. The Year 1000 — Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger — What life was like at the turn of the first millennium, month by month through the Julius Work Calendar. Number-one bestseller; a beautiful window on past history, says Simon Jenkins.
18. The Hundred Days — Antony Brett-James — Napoleon’s last campaign from eyewitness accounts: Elba to Waterloo in the words of the people there.
19. Final Verdict — Tobias Buck — A Holocaust trial in the twenty-first century: a ninety-three-year-old former SS guard in a German court. A thrilling read, says Philippe Sands. Hardback.
20. Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917–1921 — Antony Beevor — The whole catastrophe, Reds and Whites and the foreign armies, in Beevor’s unsparing narrative. Hardback.