Best books… Roy Adkins

The historian picks his favourite books connected to Gibraltar. His new book,

Gibraltar, co-written with Lesley Adkins – marking the 240th anniversary of the Great Siege – is now out in paperback (Abacus £12.99)

Brothers at Arms by Larrie D. Ferreiro, 2016 (Vintage £13.99). Ferreiro shows how America’s independence was won thanks to the financial and military assistance of France and Spain. Some of the fiercest fighting of the American Revolution was in Europe, culminating in 1782 with a floating battery attack on Gibraltar during the Great Siege.

The Royal Navy at Gibraltar

by Tito Benady, 1992 (out of print). This highly readable book charts the long association of Gibraltar with the Royal Navy, from its capture in 1704, through to the Battle of Trafalgar and up to the Second World War.

Mary Celeste: The Greatest Mystery of the Sea

by Paul Begg, 2005 (Routledge £17.99). Found abandoned in December 1872, the merchant ship Mary Celeste was taken into Gibraltar. This book describes how the facts were embellished in the salvage hearings there. When Arthur Conan Doyle later turned them into a short story, he altered the ship’s name to Marie Celeste, which became a cliché for unexplained desertion.

Deadly Visitations in Dark Time: A Social History of Gibraltar

by L.A. Sawchuk, 2001 (out of print). Successive cholera epidemics in the 19th century are used by the anthropologist Larry Sawchuk to construct a wide-ranging social history of the Rock.

Defending the Rock: How Gibraltar Defeated Hitler

by Nicholas Rankin, 2017 (Faber £9.99). Gibraltar’s role during Spain’s Civil War and throughout the Second World War is described in this definitive military history.

Fall of a Sparrow

by Sam Benady and Mary Chiappe, 2010 (out of print). The fictional Bresciano mysteries are set in Gibraltar, Spain and Morocco. This one takes place during the Great Siege, when the half-English, half-Genoese Giovanni Bresciano has a murder to solve.