Best books… Misha Glenny

Misha Glenny, the author and journalist, picks his six favourite books. His bestselling book Mcmafia is the inspiration for his Edinburgh Fringe show, currently on at the Assembly Checkpoint (assemblyfestival.com)

Fallen Bastions by G.E.R. Gedye, 1939 (Faber £20). A beautifully written account of how the shadows of dictatorship fell across central Europe in the late 1930s. It affected me greatly when I first read it, in my early 20s, and I am now compelled to return to it as I start to catch glimpses of those same shadows again.

Cosa Nostra by John Dickie, 2004 (Hodder £12.99). Without question, the most comprehensive and compelling narrative history of the Sicilian Mafia. Dickie’s clear but engaging style successfully demolishes some of the more ludicrous myths about the Mafia, without ever minimising its terrible impact. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Michael Glenny, 1967 (Vintage £7.99). My father’s greatest triumph as a translator is also, to my mind, the finest novel of the 20th century, exposing so many aspects of human vanity and conceitedness while forcing us to examine deeper forces of good and evil within us.

The German Genius by Peter Watson, 2010 (Simon & Schuster £11.99). This brilliant history reveals how Germany’s fragmented political structure in the early 19th century facilitated one of history’s greatest intellectual ferments, often forgotten due to subsequent events.

Night Frost in Prague by Zdenek Mlynár, 1980 (out of print). This painstaking reconstruction of the events surrounding the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 opens up the motivation and workings of the Soviet leadership like few others. A gripping study into the nature of power.

Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of

the Imagination by Vesna Goldsworthy, 1998 (Hurst £22). A smashing, funny and shrewd examination of how the Balkan region has been demonised and misrepresented in Anglo-american culture, from Dracula all the way through to Dynasty.