Best history books published in 2024.

Except for one book below, I have not read any list of best history books, so I relied on the historians in Smithsonian Magazine and BBC History Magazine. 

Silk: A World History by Aarathi Prasad in Smithsonian, Nov 2024 

reviewed by Meilan Solly.

Prasad’s Silk provides an engaging, exhaustive overview of a single topic, in this case the titular natal fibre. Blending the University College London researcher’s background in science and humanities, Prasad’s book upends common conceptions about silk, moving beyond the well-trodden history of China and the Silk Road to explore lesser-known sources of the fibre, including molluscs and spiders. Along the way the scholar shines a light on historical figures eg Shaikh Zain ud-Din, an C18th Indian artist who painted illustrations of silk moths, and Ramón María Termeyer, Spanish priest who studied silk-producing animals especially spiders in mid-C18th South America

Prasad wrote in Silk’s preface: “Because there is not just one silk, there is not just one story of silk. Not one road, not one people who found it, nor one nation that made it. Not one country can lay claim to its source. In silk is science and history, mythologies and futures. What follow are stories from silk’s many metamorphoses: caterpillar to moth; cocoon to commodity; simple protein chains to threads with very extraordinary capability. Across history, across cultures and countries, silk reigned as the undeniable queen of fabrics, yet its origins and evolution remain a mystery. This is the story of how it left its mark on humanity.

Now my choices from BBC History Magazine, Dec 2024 

Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance 

by Ramie Targoff, Quercus. Reviewed by Leah Redmond Chang.

Except for scholars of C16th England, few know the names of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary and Anne Clifford. Targoff brought these women brilliantly to life in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Four Women Who Wrote the Renaissance, showing what it meant to be both a woman and writer in Shakespeare’s England. As Targoff said, this was also the England of a powerful queen, Elizabeth I. Was it a coincidence that these four flourished in that era? This is women’s history at its finest.

Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief by Ronald Hutton, Yale.  

Reviewed by Simon Sebag Montefiore. 

Hutton’s Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief is his follow-up to Vol 1 of a biography that radically changed and improved understanding of Cromwell as a cunning manipulator and wily political player. Cromwell was also the godly, incorruptible and outstanding general of his own mythology. This next book was just as excellent: beautifully written, deeply authoritative and very sharp, as powerful as a cavalry charge and as exciting for readers. Generalissimo Cromwell emerged as ruthless, slippery, disingenuous and self-righteous, but also steely in his efficiency and dazzling in his military brilliance & political composure.

Young Elizabeth: Princess. Prisoner. Queen by Nicola Tallis. Reviewed by Tracy Borman.

Tallis created a vivid portrayal with compelling new insights into the real woman behind the iconic Gloriana. The author’s meticulous research unearthed some unknown details from Princess Elizabeth’s early life eg her close acquaintance with the daughter of one of the men executed for adultery with her mother, Anne Boleyn. Superbly narrated, the story of the Virgin Queen’s turbulent path to the throne was surprising, revealing and utterly irresistible. This is Elizabeth I as you have never seen her before.

Young Elizabeth by Nicola Tallis, reviewed by Alice Loxton.

Tallis explored the younger years of Elizabeth I, not as the Virgin Queen or as Gloriana, but as a resilient teenager facing immense upheaval and unaware of the remarkable future to come. Through Tallis’ brilliant writing, see how Elizabeth was shaped by her mother’s execution, her four stepmothers, the predatory attentions of Sir Thomas Seymour & the Wyatt Rebellion 1554. It wasn't surprising Elizabeth became such a skilful propagandist and, seeing the potentially disastrous fallout, never married.  

 

 All His Spies: Secret World of Robert Cecil 

by Stephen Alford and reviewed by Onyeka Nubia.

This unfolded like a John le Carré spy spoof, but it wasn’t fiction. Elizabeth I, a heretic hated across Europe, was not expected to survive. It was the task of  Robert Cecil, Robert Walsingham and William Cecil to ensure that she did, using translators, play wrights, ambassadors and assassins. Alford explores the spy masters’ motives: some were driven by Machiavellian self-interest, others by pragmatic statehood, but Cecil had ice, not blood in his veins. 

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, 

Weidenfeld & Nicolson and reviewed by Helen Castor and read by me. 

This reissue was the fully updated edition of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s epic Jerusalem: The Biography and could not have been more timely, reaching as it now does into our own present day. Rarely has such an elegant and enthralling read been so urgently necessary. The Guardian wrote: "Jerusalem is the holy city yet was always a den of superstition, charlatanism and bigotry, the cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone." Jew, Christian and Muslim alike feel compelled to rewrite its history to sustain their own myths. The 3,000-year conflict provides a terrible story, which he tells surpassingly well. Montefiore's book, packed with fascinating and grisly detail, is a gripping account of war, betrayal, looting, rape, massacre, feuds, sadistic torture, fanaticism, persecution, corruption, hypocrisy and spirituality.