Not so long ago narrative history was on the way out. Academic historians, ever more specialised, looked set for a solipsistic future writing only for colleagues ploughing the same narrow field. Yet the commercial and critical success of the likes of Antony Beevor, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Amanda Foreman (none of whom is a member of the academy), has demonstrated the continuing desire among the public for serious but accessible history. Here are five outstanding examples of the narrative historian’s art:
1) John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400-2000 (Penguin, 2008)
Asia is given equal footing with Europe in this timely, anti-whiggish account, which begins in 1399 as Tamerlane, the scourge of the Eurasian steppe, conquers Baghdad: 90,000 heads of his victims adorn the city’s towers. But it is not all violence. On the same trail of conquest Tamerlane is greeted on the outskirts of Damascus by the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun and they engage in erudition and mutual admiration. Darwin makes plain that empire-building is a task of ‘competition, collaboration and coexistence’ and is the norm rather than the exception in history.
2) Tom Holland, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (Abacus, 2004)
Swimming against current trends, Tom Holland is a novelist who became a historian. Rubicon, his first non-fiction work, is a study in discrimen, that moment between triumph and disaster, when Julius Caesar crossed the eponymous river, causing the fall of the Republic. It goes on to trace Augustus’ consolidation of absolute monarchy, as others, notably Cicero, lament a golden past. Holland has since written equally brilliant histories of the Persian Wars and the year 1000. Next month sees the release of his book on the origins of Islam.
3) Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700 (Penguin, 2004)
Following award-winning biographies of Thomas Cranmer and Edward VI, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, embraced his largest canvas yet. This is ‘big history’ of the first order, the story of a continent in almost continuous religious war. Yet MacCulloch also writes of the empowering nature of the Reformation, not only for Protestants, who embraced the dissemination of knowledge made possible by the printing revolution, but also the Catholic Church, born again in the Counter-Reformation.
4) Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: A History of World War II (HarperPress, 2011)
No episode in human history has been covered in greater depth than the Second World War, but Michael Burleigh, already the author of the finest single volume history of the Third Reich, gives the conflict a new dimension by making its appalling brutality — its evil — real where once it was abstract. No historian is better at making the small detail — the blood and brains on a Soviet or Nazi butcher’s apron — an essential insight to the whole story.
5) Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 Vols (Penguin Classics, 2005)
The epic masterpiece of the granddaddy of narrative history remains as rich and resonant as ever, and David Womersley’s edition is the one to buy. Gibbon’s confrontations with Christianity and his consideration of decline are especially timely and the prose is peerless: ‘Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations’. In the words of George Lytellton, ’what sentient being, however humble, could resist that?’
Paul Lay is Editor of History Today and the author of the ebook History Today and Tomorrow (Endeavour
Press)
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