Secondhand History & Biography Bargain Book Box SP2742

A substantial non-fiction box spanning political history, military history, biography, and exploration writing. Antony Beevor’s Spanish Civil War, Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia and the Russians, J.M. Roberts’s History of Europe, and Gary Younge’s searing Another Day in the Death of America carry the weight, alongside Graham Greene’s Panama memoir, John Simpson on the Iraq War, and exploration accounts from the Siberian steppes to the Antarctic. Strong Australian and British history threads run throughout.

1. The Spanish Civil War — Antony Beevor — A comprehensive and compelling narrative history of the conflict that prefigured World War II; Beevor draws on newly opened archives to tell the full story of the war’s brutality and political complexity.
2. The People’s Peace — Kenneth Morgan — A major political history of Britain from 1945 to 1990; Morgan traces the rise and fall of the post-war consensus through governments from Attlee to Thatcher with authority and breadth.
3. Liberalism: A Short History — A concise intellectual and political history of liberalism as an idea and a governing tradition.
4. Getting to Know the General — Graham Greene — Greene’s personal memoir of his friendship with General Omar Torrijos of Panama; part travelogue, part political portrait, it captures a complex revolutionary figure through the eyes of one of the 20th century’s great literary observers.
5. Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer — Frank McLynn — A thorough and unflinching biography of Henry Morton Stanley, tracing the brutal self-invention behind the famous journalist-explorer and his role in the colonisation of Africa.
6. Thomas Hardy — Michael Millgate — Part of the Oxford Lives series; a definitive scholarly biography of the novelist and poet, drawing on Millgate’s decades of research into Hardy’s life, letters, and complicated personal history.
7. Russia and the Russians: A History — Geoffrey Hosking — One of the most authoritative single-volume histories of Russia available; Hosking traces the thousand-year story of Russian statehood, identity, and empire with exceptional clarity.
8. A History of Europe — J.M. Roberts — Roberts’s magisterial single-volume history of Europe from prehistory to the 20th century; erudite, readable, and comprehensive.
9. Dear Grace: A Romance of History — Margaret Gillett — A biographical romance centred on Grace Hadow, a pioneering figure in British women’s education and public life; Gillett’s account weaves history and personal narrative together.
10. Another Day in the Death of America — Gary Younge — The Guardian journalist’s harrowing account of a single day — 23 November 2013 — when ten children and teenagers were shot dead across the United States; a devastating portrait of gun violence and the lives it cuts short.
11. The War Against Saddam — John Simpson — The BBC’s veteran war correspondent chronicles the road to the 2003 Iraq War and the invasion itself; a first-hand account from one of the most widely travelled journalists of his generation.
12. The History Today Companion to British History — Edited by Julian Gardiner & Neil Wenborn — A comprehensive reference work covering the full sweep of British history; invaluable for students and general readers alike.
13. The Order of Things: A Life of Joseph Furphy — John Barnes — A biography of Joseph Furphy, the Victorian-era Australian writer whose masterwork Such is Life remains one of the most idiosyncratic and ambitious novels in Australian literature.
14. This Accursed Land — Lennard Bickel — Bickel’s gripping account of Douglas Mawson’s 1912 Antarctic expedition, in which two of his companions died and Mawson himself survived against impossible odds in one of the most harrowing survival stories in polar history.
15. On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers — Kate Marsden — A remarkable Victorian travel memoir; in 1891 British nurse Kate Marsden journeyed thousands of miles across Russia and Siberia to reach and care for lepers in remote exile camps.
16. Accidental Journey — Mark Lynton — A German-Jewish lawyer’s memoir of his family’s flight from Nazi Germany; an account of displacement, adaptation, and survival written with precision and without self-pity.
17. Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the First Americans — James C. Chatters — The story of the controversial 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man skeleton and the scientific, legal, and political battle over what it reveals about the first peoples of the Americas.