We asked our lecturers in the School of History for their recommendations on books, podcasts or films to get stuck into over the festive season, and here’s a great list of what they came up with:
Reader, Dr Philip Boobbyer shares his suggestions: “Vasily Grossman’s great novel, Stalingrad (London: Harvill Secker, 2019), looks at the battle of Stalingrad, which first appeared in a censored form in 1952, when Stalin was still alive. The first English-language edition only came out last year, and it is well worth a read. Like many Russian novels, it is forbiddingly long, but it is also surprisingly accessible, a brilliant example of how to explore a major national (in this case, world-changing) event through the experience of multiple characters.
I have always found literature an excellent way of entering imaginatively into a historical moment. Britain has many fine historical novelists, from Walter Scott to Hilary Mantel. There is also a rich tradition of Russian historical fiction — think of Lev Tolstoy and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Grossman’s novels fit into that, with Stalingrad and its famous sequel, Life and Fate, outstanding examples.
Grossman writes that the true meaning of an event cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to the ‘spirit of the time’. Stalingrad reflects that insight; we see in the novel the complex challenges facing Soviet citizens in 1942-43, both at the front and behind the lines. Like Grossman, we historians place a similar emphasis on context and culture — that is why, in seeking to reconstruct the past, we pay so much attention to primary sources.
Grossman is a writer with a feel for the variety of human experience. But he is also committed to the unity of truth — ‘truth’ is a recurring subject of interest in Russian culture. One of the characters in Stalingrad says: ‘If we start pretending there are two truths, we’re in trouble.’ There is a message here for our own world in 2021, where the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ in both strident and subtle forms is widespread, and falsehood can pass as respectable on the grounds that it is just anther narrative.”
Lecturer in Early Medieval History, Dr Edward Roberts, suggests, “The book, King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (Penguin, 2019), by Janet L. Nelson. As my first-year students have learned this term, Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was crowned Roman emperor on Christmas Day in the year 800 – the first to hold the title in Western Europe for more than 300 years. What better time of year to read up on this remarkable figure? Janet Nelson’s highly readable new biography explores Charlemagne’s extraordinary reign in exquisite detail, taking readers as close to the man as we can get, and showing clearly what made Charles the Great ‘great’.”
Dr Robert Gallagher, Lecturer in Early Medieval History suggests, “The Light Ages: A Medieval Journey of Discovery (Allen Lane, 2020) by Seb Falk. This very recently published book beautifully demonstrates just how much more sophisticated scientific exploration was in the Middle Ages than we might otherwise think. It’s also packed full of fascinating characters whose lives help bring medieval England to life. A highly readable book that’s a great introduction to a topic that we rarely hear about.”