“There was a time not so very long ago when boys were taught to be men” writes author, archaeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver, and “part of the education of boys came from reading tales of brave and selfless deeds”. Not so any more. “It’s rubbish being a British man at the moment…nowadays the rest of the world sees British men as the performing seals of George W Bush’s Wild West Show. We’re the sick men of Europe too with our lazy fat guts and our binge-drinking.” He also opines that nothing grand or challenging that we do now is simply for the sake of it; nothing is important unless it is done live on air or filmed to be broadcast to the masses – perhaps a strange complaint from a man who makes his living from such media. But while being an archaeologist in Scottish winters, growing hero hair and appearing on TV in armour and wielding swords may be a little bit manly, Oliver is more interested in manliness on a much grander scale and how stories about such manliness could be an antidote to his despair for the youth of today.

Neil Oliver

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My husband knows I love big lavish picture books that you can dip in and out of at will and a couple of years ago he bought me a big chunky picture book called Egypt – 4000 Years of Art by Jaromir Malek. He got it from the Phaidon shop at Bicester Village outlet centre and swears he didn’t pay much for it. Perhaps he was hoping it would inspire me to book a trip to Egypt but so far it’s not worked its magic on me.

Jaromir Malek is the Keeper of the Archive at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, one of my favourite museums and a place where I always hunt down the mummies and have a good gawp at the Egyptian section.

Jaromir Malek

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What do you know about Mary Boleyn, sister of the better-known Anne? The chances are that whatever you think you know is incorrect or unsubstantiated. Recent fiction such as Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, along with various historical studies, have convinced us that it is certain that Mary gave birth to two children by Henry VIII, and that she was promiscuous and branded a whore – but these “facts” are far from proven.

Alison Weir’s latest work Mary Boleyn: ‘A Great and Infamous Whore’ is the first full length biography of the lesser known Boleyn sister. With little historical evidence to go on, Mary has been misunderstood and misrepresented for centuries, and Weir aims to attempt to set the record straight.

Alison Weir

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The Last White Rose: The Secret Wars Against The Tudors by Desmond Seward has a very interesting premise. It covers the reigns of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, and his son Henry VIII, and focuses on the various pretenders to their throne and the plots against them. While these pretenders (Perkin Warbeck, the Earl of Warwick and Reginald Pole being the most prominent) are often discussed in histories of the Tudors, the prospect of a detailed study of the Tudors from this angle was an intriguing one.

Henry VII came to the throne in 1485, following his victory over Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. He married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV, and their son became Henry VIII, famed for his six wives and his impressive girth later in life. As Henry VII’s claim to the throne was somewhat shaky, both had to deal with pretenders and plots to overthrow them.

Desmond Seward

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Warwickshire, August 1780.

Deep in the countryside near Rugby stands the Tudor manor house of Lawford Hall, occupied this summer by Sir Theodosius Boughton, his mother Anna Maria, his sister Theodosia, brother-in-law John Donellan, the Donellans’ two young children, and a handful of servants. It is early in the morning of 30th August and something is about to happen that will bring notoriety and scandal to the Boughton household.

Sir Theodosius, aged 20 and suffering from venereal disease he contracted at Eton some five years earlier, has just woken and is visited in his bedchamber by his mother. Anna Maria was keen for her son to take the medicine made up for him by the local apothecary Mr Powell in the hope that it might cure him; he, on the other hand, seems reluctant to take it as a dose he received from the same man the previous week made him ill.

Elizabeth Cooke

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“My name is Paul Rusesabagina. I am a hotel manager.” So begins An Ordinary Man: The True Story Behind Hotel Rwanda. This is the story of an ordinary man, a hotel manager, who saved 1268 lives during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Over the course of 100 days between April and July 1994, over 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered by the Interahamwe militia, because of their racial background. The Interahamwe were Hutus, and the build up to the genocide was filled with words of hate against the Tutsi “cockroaches” and the moderate Hutus who lived in peace with them. The UN soldiers in Rwanda had orders only to fire if fired upon, and so many stood by and watched the murder of children in front of them.

Paul Rusesabagina

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The Art of the Picts by George Henderson and Isabel Henderson is an in-depth look at the art of the Pictish peoples, who lived in Scotland in the 6th to 9th centuries. Both authors are renowned experts in the field, so we can be assured that we are in good hands.

First published in hardback form in 2004, The Art of the Picts is now being published in a more manageable paperback format. I have been reading the paperback edition, due for publication in August 2011, and given the weight of it I am glad I didn’t attempt the hardback.

George Henderson, Isabel Henderson

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Every month I read a book which I would be unlikely to choose myself. Why, you ask? For my reading group. We all take turns making suggestions, and while you can see patterns in what some of us suggest, occasionally there is a book which knocks me sideways out of surprise. Nothing to Envy is one of those books.

Written by journalist Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea is a collection of true stories about life in the country under the regimes of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, told by defectors who have left North Korea. Demick opens by discussing what we know of the country, which is really very little – it is in her introduction that she mentions the fact that North Korea is a “black hole” on satellite photos of Asia at night, a fact which I hadn’t realised and which captivated me.

Barbara Demick

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It can’t be easy writing a history book when you are the son of Stephen Ambrose. Ambrose senior was a writer of many popular books – including the Band of Brothers tome that was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s HBO series of the same name – on a grand scale. Slate referred to him in 2002 as, “a history factory, using his five kids as researchers and assistants to streamline the production process”. It was in this production line that Hugh Ambrose learned his trade as a writer of popular American history. It may seem that the only obstacle in junior’s way was the hard task of living up to his father, but personally I read this book just hoping that the plagiarism scandals that dogged the last part of Stephen’s life were not part of the apprenticeship that Hugh served.

Hugh Ambrose has claimed that he did not set out to write Band of Brothers 2 when he wrote The Pacific, although that is largely what it is (all the more so given the same production team made a series of the same name, using Ambrose as the historical consultant, and have named this the “official companion book” for the series).

Hugh Ambrose

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In 1095, Byzantium was an empire under threat. From his seat in Constantinople, Emperor Alexius saw his territories across the Bosphorus in Anatolia coming under intense pressure from the Seljuk Turks, a Muslim people originating in central Asia who were steadily overrunning provinces that has been in the empire since Roman times. The Seljuks were not intruders to be taken lightly, and had succeeded not just in taking control of many Byzantine towns, but had also met the cream of the imperial army in combat and cut it to shreds. Faced with potentially catastrophic losses of land and power, he issued a plea for help to the Christians of the West to supply soldiers to come to his aid.

Tim Severin

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When I came across Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire by Maya Jasanoff, I was attracted by the pretty cover and what sounded like an interesting subject matter. I didn’t really think any deeper about the choice of book than that. Despite my wide reading on history, particularly British, this was a subject I knew nothing about, and in a time period which has never really captured my interest – the eighteenth century. So this was a step into the unknown for me, and attempt to broaden my knowledge of world history.

Liberty’s Exiles is the story of those who had remained loyal to Britain and the crown during the American revolution of the 1770s.

Maya Jasanoff

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