The best classic books for fans of the past
My favourite historians are delightful, elegant and naughty
In Mad Men, the brilliant TV drama about Madison Avenue in the 1960s, Sally, who must be about ten, is tasked with reading Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to her tyrannical grandfather.
It’s an ordeal reminiscent of Tony Last’s fate in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, made to read the whole of Dickens to his captor. And I’m not even certain that the lot of the grandfather, condemned to listen to Gibbon’s clever historical paradoxes mangled by a lisping elementary schoolgirl, is much better than that of Sally herself.
The scene got me thinking, though. Is Gibbon still worth reading, for pleasure rather than study, and what other ‘classic’ history books would I recommend to those who don’t have to trawl through an academic reading list, but like to read about the past? I’ll set a couple of ground rules to narrow the field. First, the author must be dead – to avoid offending the living, and because, when deciding the classic status of literature, if an author is still with us, it is, as Zhou Enlai is supposed to have said in 1972 about the French Revolution, ‘too early to say’.
Rule two in this game is that the book must have originally been published in English. That still leaves the field ridiculously overpopulated; so I cannot emphasise enough that this is a personal selection. Let’s start with Gibbon. I have to admit that, like Sally (and her grandfather, who dropped dead), I have never managed to read Decline and Fall from cover to cover. But that is because it is long, not because it is difficult. It actually deals with the empire’s rise as well as its fall, and it does so with a wit that still sparkles today, as well as showing a ‘serious’ approach to history that professional historians have emulated ever since. One biographer of Gibbon counts 8,362 references to sources and authorities in the book.
Gibbon is a master of elegant prose:
‘Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.’ Or there are the flights of historical imagination, most famously in the passage where he conceives of the Arab conquests being continually extended: ‘The Arabian fleet might have sailed without naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.’
For a classic of medieval history, how about R W Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages? It was drafted during convalescence from a bout of TB, and its brilliant distillation of a world into relatively few pages gives the impression of an author with one eye over his shoulder. Actually, Sir Richard, as he became, lived another fifty years, but he had produced his masterpiece early.
But for the ordinary reader, its brilliant descriptions and insights – which depend on observation of characters such as the monk deputed to ‘travel the length and breadth of the lands of oc and oui’ to announce a count’s death – are what stand out.
We must have something on the Tudors. I have been meaning to read Agnes Strickland’s Lives of the Queens of England – and of Scotland – ever since I read that she wrote about Mary, Queen of Scots’ ladies-in-waiting strewing thistle seeds at the places of her captivity. I’m also intrigued by the fact that author Agnes was, in fact, Agnes and her shy sister Elizabeth – so reclusive that she didn’t want her name on the title page.
I adore the naughty, barely historical but completely irresistible Lytton Strachey on Elizabeth and Essex, full of confident pronouncements such as ‘the inconsistency of the Elizabethans exceeds the limits permitted to man’.
I like my classics opinionated; so would also want to include Cecil Woodham-smith’s The Reason Why, which answers Tennyson’s questions about the charge of the Light Brigade. The same goes for Lord Macaulay, whose stylishness makes up for the fact that his The History of England is so obviously marching confidently to the pinnacle of 19th-century parliamentary government.
Closer to the present, I’ve always got on better with Eric Hobsbawm than E P Thompson, even if the former, an unrepentant old Communist, never came up with anything as quotable as ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. That may also be because I like Hobsbawm as the author of smaller volumes, such as Bandits, on Robin Hood figures, rather than his more daunting works of world history.
If I have a favourite historical classic it is, embarrassingly, 1066 and All That, by schoolmaster W C Sellar and an adman (back to Madison Avenue, or the British equivalent), R J Yeatman, which contains ‘all the History you can remember’: from Caesar, in ‘the Olden Days’, to the ‘end of history’, after the First World War, ‘the cause of nowadays’. Why couldn’t grandfather have asked Sally to read that?