World in motion
DOMINIC SANDBROOK chooses the year’s best modern history books, highlighting some of the key moments, places and people of the past century
For students of British political history, 22016 will surely go down as one of the great landmark years, joining the likes oof 1968 in the popular imagination. So it was appropriate that this year opened with Simon Hall’s terrific
1956 1956: The World in Revolt (Faber), a spirited, panoramic look back at the dramatic events that convulsed the world 60 years ago, such as the Hungarian uprising, the rise of Fidel Castro and Suez.
Among other fine global histories oof fraught 20th-century moments, I enjoyed Robert Gerwarth’s The Vanquished:V Why the First WorldW War Failed to End, 1917– 1923 (Allen Lane). It explores the toxic legacy of the conflict in the early 1920s, its narrative sweeping from the newly emerged Baltic States to the ruins oof the Ottoman empire.
This year, as so often happens, politicians loomed very large. If you hought there was nothing fresh to ssay about Winston Churchill, then loook at Kevin Ruane’s tremendously assured Churchill and the Bomb in War and Cold War (Bloomsbury), which has new things to say both about the great man himself and about the diplomatic climate of the 1940s. If you’ve been following the US presidential election, you should enjoy Iwan Morgan’s magnificent Reagan: A American Icon (IB Tauris). It paints aan insightful portrait of the Hollywood actor who defied his critics’ predictions to end up as a Cold War winner. Finally, two titles not technically history books but packed with historical insight. Peter Parker’s H Housman Country: Into the H Heart of England (Little, Brown) is a brilliant book about the cult of the poet’s A Shropshire Lad, and a portrait of early 20th-ccentury British culture, ranging from classical music to Stanley Baldwin’s speeches.
Jonathan Wilson’s Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing
H History of Argentina (Orion) is aan entertaining, superbly researched rread, with plenty to say not just about Diego Maradona, but about the history of a nation that has struggled to live up to its founding ideals as South America’s promised land.
The Hollywood actor defied his critics’ predictions to end up as a Cold War winner