Best books… Dan Jones
The historian and broadcaster chooses his favourite books. He will speak at the Daily Mail Chalke Valley History Festival on Saturday 25 June (cvhf.org.uk). His latest book, Powers and Thrones (Apollo £12), is out now
Into the Silence by Wade Davis, 2011 (Vintage £18.99). Writing narrative history is about staying true to the facts while drawing your reader into a story that’s as gripping as fiction. This book is about as good as it gets: the story of the Mallory-era mountaineers who, shaped by the horrors of the First World War, tried to scale Mount Everest.
American Tabloid by James Ellroy, 1995 (Windmill Books £9.99). I’m on a break from history at the moment, writing a fiction trilogy set in the Hundred Years War (volume one, called Essex Dogs, is out in September). Ellroy’s nightmarish vision of JFK-era America and his machine-gun prose isn’t my model, but I groove on its rancid energy.
She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor, 2010 (Faber £10.99). Helen was my university supervisor, and she gave me the bug for the Middle Ages. This study of four powerful women is a modern classic.
Hell’s Half Acre by Susan Jonusas, 2022 (Scribner £16.99). I’m always looking for new voices in popular history; Jonusas’s true story about a serial killer family on the loose in the Old West, published last month, is one of the most compelling debuts I’ve read in years.
My Struggle (Vols 1-6) by Karl Ove Knausgård, 20092011 (Vintage £9.99 each). It’s impossible to describe without sounding deranged why this account of a middle-aged Norwegian’s mundane exterior/intense interior life is so addictive. But once you’re in, you’re in. Dazzling.
The History of Reynard the Fox translated by William Caxton, 1481 (Oxford University Press, £30). Yeah, Dante, Chaucer and Boccaccio are good. But they’ve nothing on the psychotic adventures of a medieval fox who is like Robin Hood, Brer Rabbit and Anton Chigurh rolled into one. I like this translation – but modern retellings also exist.