Suzannah Lipscomb

My first choice has to be Geoffrey Parker’s Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press). It’s a magnificent biography of a mercurial, kind and cruel, brilliant and foolish man, who ruled over much of the known world in the 16th century. In a work of stunning scholarship, Parker draws on an incredible amount of documentary evidence and delivers his findings in elegant prose to produce an epic and vivid life of the emperor, described at his death as “the greatest man who has ever lived”.

Jack Fairweather’s

The Volunteer: The True Story of the Resistance Hero Who Infiltrated Auschwitz (WH Allen) tells the astonishing story of underground operative Witold Pilecki, who chose to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to uncover what was happening there. It is a work of narrative history that reads like a novel, in spare prose that is as compelling as it is harrowing. One is entirely caught up in the awfulness and heroism of Witold’s tale.

Orlando Figes’s

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture (Allen Lane) is an extraordinary, capacious and accomplished biography of three intertwining characters: the writer Ivan Turgenev, the singer Pauline Viardot and Pauline’s connoisseur husband, Louis. Deeply researched and engaging, it is filled with revelations, and takes us fascinatingly into European culture in the 19th century.

Suzannah Lipscomb’s latest book is The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc (OUP)