Secondhand History Bargain Book Box SP4125

Secondhand History Bargain Book Box SP4125

Nineteen vintage Pelican and Penguin histories: E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, A.J.P. Taylor’s English History 1914–1945, Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station, Lawrence Stone twice, Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, Goodwin’s French Revolution, Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and three books on Lenin. The reading list of a 1970s history undergraduate who kept everything.

1. To the Finland Station — Edmund Wilson — From Michelet to Lenin stepping off the train in Petrograd in 1917: the history of the idea of revolution, written as a story. The best literary history of socialism, in the Fontana Modern Classics edition.
2. Lenin and the Bolsheviks — Adam B. Ulam — Ulam’s big intellectual history of the Bolshevik party from the 1880s to Lenin’s death, and the standard Cold War-era account. Fontana.
3. Lenin — David Shub — The biography by a Menshevik who knew him, hostile and well informed. Pelican Original, with the red profile cover.
4. Robert Owen: Report to the County of Lanark / A New View of Society — ed. V.A.C. Gatrell — The cotton-mill owner’s plans for a new society, from New Lanark. Pelican Classics.
5. English History 1914–1945 — A.J.P. Taylor — The Oxford History volume with the footnotes that are better than most books. Taylor at his most readable and most opinionated. Pelican.
6. The Making of the English Working Class — E.P. Thompson — Luddites, Methodists, radicals and weavers, rescued from the enormous condescension of posterity. The most influential history book of the twentieth century, in the Pelican edition.
7. Khrushchev’s Russia — Edward Crankshaw — The Observer’s Soviet expert on the thaw, revised edition. Pelican.
8. The English Revolution 1600–1660 — ed. E.W. Ives — Essays on the causes and course of the Civil War, with the orthodox-minister woodcut cover.
9. The History of Myddle — Richard Gough — A Shropshire parish in 1700, family by family, pew by pew, by a man who’d lived there all his life and knew who’d been hanged. Edited by David Hey; Penguin.
10. The Making of Modern Britain: Life and Work from George III to Elizabeth II — T.K. Derry & T.L. Jarman — Social and economic history for schools, with the Harwell reactor on the cover.
11. The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy — C.B. Macpherson — Four models of democracy and where each came from, by the Canadian political theorist. OPUS paperback.
12. The French Revolution — A. Goodwin — The compact Hutchinson history, from the fall of the Bastille to Napoleon.
13. Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and Social Change 1900–1967 — Arthur Marwick — How two wars reshaped British society. Marwick’s big argument. Pelican.
14. Social Change and Revolution in England 1540–1640 — Lawrence Stone — Problems and Perspectives in History: Stone’s essays and sources on the century before the Civil War.
15. The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 — Lawrence Stone — Preconditions, precipitants and triggers: Stone’s structural explanation of the war, in the orange Routledge paperback. Set on every early modern course for twenty years.
16. The World We Have Lost — Peter Laslett — England before the factories: family size, age at marriage, who lived with whom. The book that founded historical demography. University Paperbacks.
17. The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century — Anil Seal — The Cambridge School’s founding text on Indian politics under the Raj. Cambridge University Press.
18. What Is to Be Done? — V.I. Lenin — The 1902 pamphlet on the vanguard party. Panther Modern Society edition.
19. The New Cold War: Moscow v. Pekin — Edward Crankshaw — The Sino-Soviet split as it was happening, 1963. Penguin Special, 4/6.