History

27. ‘The 21 Escapes Of Lt Alastair Cram’ by David M Guss (Macmillan, €26.59) The astonishing story of a Scottish officer in the Royal Artillery who jumped from trains, scaled walls and crawled through tunnels to escape from 12 different PoW camps, three Gestapo prisons and one asylum in WWII.

28. ‘Hearts And Minds’ by Jane Robinson (Doubleday, €28) A fine and sometimes moving account of women’s struggle for suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century.

29. ‘Left Bank’ by Agnès Poirier (Bloomsbury, €35) How the intellectuals, artists and writers who poured back into Paris after the Second World War set about testing new ways of living and loving.

30. ‘Operation Chaos’ by Matthew Sweet (Picador, €21) This tale of US military deserters who fled to Sweden during the Vietnam war is as weird and darkly comic a story about Vietnam as you’ll read.

31. ‘Medieval Bodies’ by Jack Hartnell (Wellcome Collection, €35) Art historian Jack Hartnell explores the ways in which people in the Middle Ages thought about their bodies and considers what that tells us about the medieval worldview.

32. ‘Wounds: A Memoir Of Love And War’ by Fergal Keane (Harper Collins, €21) Keane deep dives into his own family’s involvement in the Civil War and War of Independence.

33. ‘Arnhem’ by Antony Beevor (Viking, €35) Despite some extraordinary heroics, Operation Market Garden, the Allied push to capture nine bridges over the Rhine, was a disastrous failure. Beevor shows why.

34. ‘The Imperial Tea Party’ by Frances Welch (Short Books, €18.19) A fascinating account of the way in which the British Royal Family courted their Russian cousins in the run-up to WWI. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t end well for the Romanovs.

35. ‘The Odyssey’ translated by Emily Wilson (WW Norton, €37.60) Not history as such but the inspiration for so much of Western literature and art. This – the first English translation of Homer’s epic poem by a woman – is vivid, fresh and a genuine page-turner.