MORE TOP PICKS FROM 2022

Four experts highlight some of their favourite new works of history and historical fiction

Olivette Otele

For centuries, volumes about the history of the transatlantic slave trade focused on European abolitionism. But this has changed in recent decades, with scholarship concentrating on American and Caribbean emancipation movements and key figures. In LourenĢo da Silva MendonĢa and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century, José Lingna Nafafé examines the trajectory of an abolitionist prince who spearheaded the legal battle and debates about emancipating Jewish people, indigenous Americans and black Christians in the 17th century.

Nafafé’s outstanding volume underlines a long history of brutality that echoes Caroline Elkins’ Legacy of Violence. Elkins’ sharp analysis explores how violence became a useful tool for the British empire. The book successfully examines how physical, cultural and even archival violence were practices that have been carefully curated and transmitted from one generation to another.

The price paid by those who resisted the British empire was exemplified by the controversial decision to expel islanders from the Chagos Archipelago, a British Overseas Territory in the Indian Ocean, from the late 1960s. In The Last Colony human rights lawyer Philippe Sands shares a troubling and profoundly humane account of the islanders’ battle to return.

It highlights the difficulties faced by those who simply wished to live in a peaceful manner, in a world where the legacies of Britain’s colonial past are still highly disputed.

Olivette Otele is a historian and the author of African Europeans (Hurst, 2020)

Andrew Roberts

Jeremy Black’s A History of Britain in 100 Maps is a beautifully produced and very well-written exposition of what the gems of the British Library’s hugely extensive map collection can tell us about our history over the past thousand years. The range of charts covered goes from before the Mappa Mundi – the vast map of the then-known world created in the 13th century and now held in Hereford Cathedral – all the way up to the current Covid-19 pandemic. Black takes us through scores of maps, all sumptuously illustrated, showing how useful they are in helping us understand the past.

Vic Gatrell’s Conspiracy on Cato Street explores in gripping detail the plot of February 1820 to assassinate the whole cabinet and start a revolution the year after the Peterloo massacre. Gatrell sympathises as much as possible with the desperation the doomed plotters felt that drove them to such a decision. The plot was the most murderous for over two centuries – since the gunpowder plot – and here finds its perfect historian.

Owen Matthews’ superb book Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine explores how Vladimir Putin came to the near-insane decision to invade Ukraine. He explains it largely in terms of the growth in power of ultra-nationalist ideologues around the dictator, just as Putin himself embraced an appallingly skewed view of Russian history. It is a true page-turner that has clearly cost the author friends, and will be used by all serious writers on the current Russo-Ukrainian War as the first draft of its history.

Andrew Roberts is a historian whose latest book is The Chief (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Helen Carr

The imposing cathedrals that pepper Europe are treasure troves of history, but they are also crucibles of human stories. In Heaven on Earth, Emma J Wells flexes her scholarly expertise by shining a light on the histories of 16 great European cathedrals and the people who built them. Her storytelling combines carefully crafted, accessible information on the architectural technicalities of these edifices with animated prose, considerate of how people in the past expressed deep-rooted spirituality through magnificent physical form.

I greatly enjoyed Dan Jones’ Essex Dogs. This is his first foray into novels – and he’s taken the move in his stride, producing an epic piece of unputdownable historical fiction. The book encapsulates the lesser-known guerrilla-style warfare that took place during the first stage of the Hundred Years’ War. The story is told through the eyes of the “Essex Dogs”, a mercenary band of brothers who took part in the 1346 campaign under Edward III that culminated in the battle of Crécy. You feel the filth on your skin and the fear of the sword in this first instalment of Jones’ hotly anticipated trilogy.

Finally, I’d nominate Fierce Appetites by Elizabeth Boyle. This raw, revealing and frequently laugh-out-loud funny memoir artfully weaves Boyle’s own darkest experiences with her scholarship on early medieval Irish prose. She speaks candidly of addiction and motherhood, and explores how these human experiences appear in Irish mythology: ancient and dark but also utterly dazzling.

Helen Carr is a historian, writer and producer. Her latest book is The Red Prince (Oneworld, 2021)

Nick Rennison

Few historical novels this year are as ambitious and as absorbing as Booth by American writer Karen Joy Fowler, rightly longlisted for the Booker Prize. This saga of the dynasty that produced both America’s greatest 19th-century actor and a presidential assassin builds slowly towards the climactic moment when John Wilkes Booth shoots Abraham Lincoln. In a work of great depth and imagination, Fowler provides an epic depiction of a nation and a family divided.

Frances Quinn’s That Bonesetter Woman is much lighter than Fowler’s book but no less engaging. Quinn’s unlikely heroine, Endurance “Durie” Proudfoot, arrives in Georgian London intent on making her way as a bonesetter. Despite the obstacles put in her way by male doctors envious of her skill, and distractions provided by an unscrupulous seducer out to defraud her, she refuses to be beaten in an uplifting, thoroughly enjoyable tale of an underdog biting back.

The arrival of a new novel by Robert Harris is always worth celebrating, and Act of Oblivion is no exception. Set in the 1660s and 1670s, it follows the fortunes of two regicides, Edward 9halley and 9illiam )oʘe, both signatories to Charles I’s death warrant in 1649.

In flight from the dubious Lustice of the restored Charles II, they exile themselves to colonial America – but one dogged investigator is determined to track them down. Harris’s historical thriller summons up a convincing past with his usual skill and inventiveness. Nick Rennison is the author of 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year (Oldcastle Books, 2021)