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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December 2007 – Benazir Bhutto had returned to Pakistan for the third time and was planning to stand for election. She was aware that it was dangerous and her emails for sometime had been discussing the possibility of her assassination and in the event of it occurring who to point fingers at. The Pakistani Government had been asked for extra heavy security to prevent any attempts at her election gatherings and Benazir had also asked whether she could bring her own bullet-proof vehicle from Dubai. The request had been refused. 24 hours before her death, her husband was calling her from Dubai and begging her to let him take her place, but she was determined to continue.

Amir Mir, Pakistan

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In 2005 the world watched in horror as Hurricane Katrina attacked the city of New Orleans, bursting the levees and leaving the city neck-deep in water. The environmental devastation was beyond imagination but what shocked observers even more was the rapid breakdown of ‘normal’ human behaviour. The city descended into chaos and disorder; stores were looted, gangs roamed the streets and inhabitants – most of them poor and black – were herded into the Superbowl where rape, violence and despair were the order of the day. What the television reports didn’t tell us was about the violence and psychological abuse of innocent inhabitants, arrested without charge, denied even the basic rights of a phone call or the opportunity to let anyone know where they were – all in the name of ‘Homeland Security’.

Dave Eggers

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The King’s Speech by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi is about Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue, the man who helped King George VI overcome his stammer. It accompanies the recently released film of the same name, but it is not a novelisation, nor is it the book the film was based on.

Mark Logue is a grandson of Lionel Logue, and in his introduction he describes his quest to learn more about his grandfather, and also his reasons for wanting to tell his story. While the film covers only a decade or so, from 1926 to the start of the Second World War in 1939, Mark Logue wanted to provide a fuller picture of his grandfather’s life, from his life in Australia right through all the years he worked with and became friends with the King.

Mark Logue, Peter Conradi

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The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain by Allan Massie chronicles the Stuart (or Stewart) monarchs who ruled in Scotland for 300 years, and a further century in the United Kingdom following the Union of the Crowns. The most famous of these monarchs and their descendants are Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI & I, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, but The Royal Stuarts takes us right back to the beginning, tracing their origins from the salt marshes of Brittany to their rise in the nobility of Scotland, leading to their ascendancy to the throne. The daughter of Robert the Bruce, Marjorie Bruce married Walter, High Steward of Scotland. Their son became the first Stewart monarch, King Robert II in 1371.

Allan Massie

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Pompeii is name which is instantly evocative, of disaster, volcanic eruption, destruction, terror and death. In her book Pompeii: Life of a Roman Town, Mary Beard looks at how the town was in its life, before it was devastated by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. First published in 2008, Pompeii: Life of a Roman Town has recently been reissued to coincide with Beard’s upcoming BBC programme of the same name.

Mary Beard is a well-known classicist, with a Chair of Classics at Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Newnham College, and she is classics editor of the TLS.

Mary Beard

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How the Girl Guides Won the War by Janie Hampton was a book I expected to be enjoyable but rather twee, full of sing songs around campfires and tales of irritatingly cheerful Girl Guides doing good deeds. How wrong I was.

These things are all present in the book, but there is much more to it. My expectation was similar to that of the author before she started writing; in her introduction Hampton notes that she not expected to write the book she did, which is full of praise for the Guide movement.

Founded in 1909 after girls took an interest in the recently formed Scouting movement, Girl Guides was something which was open to girls from all backgrounds around the world.

Janie Hampton

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Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy by David Starkey is a book which attracted my interest as it was a different-than-usual premise. Normally, history books focus on one period of time, or one person/dynasty, or even in some cases one event. Here was a book which said it would teach me the history of England, but would do so by telling me the history of the monarchy. As I have a keen interest in royal history in particular, I was eager to see if David Starkey would deliver.

David Starkey is, as many will know, a prominent TV historian. However, despite my interests in history, I’ve never seen one of his programmes – I prefer to read about medieval monarchs than be shown random pictures of them which someone talks.

David Starkey

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Late for Tea at the Deer Palace by Tamara Chalabi charts the history of the authors Iraqi family through the twentieth and early twenty first centuries. She starts with her great-grandfather, then her grandparents and their children, her father and his siblings. As a prominent family and opponents of the regime which overthrew the royal family, the Chalabis, a Shi’a Muslim family, were forced into exile in the late 1950s, moving to London and then Lebanon. Only once Saddam Hussein was removed from power could they return to their beloved Iraq.

Iraq, Tamara Chalabi

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