Diarmaid MacCulloch's Top Book Recommendations

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Ecclesiastical History of the English People book cover

1

Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Bede, D. H. Farmer, Ronald Latham, Leo Sherley-Price

4.3

Starting with the invasion of Julius Caesar in the fifth century, Bede recorded the history of the English up to his own day in 731 A.D. A scholarly monk working in the north-east of England, Bede wrote the five books of his history in Latin. The Ecclesiastical History is his most famous work, and this edition provides the authoritative Colgrave translation, as well as a new translation of the Gre

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Bede is writing about 130 years after the English had first experienced Christianity. [source]

Cover unavailable

2

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume I

Edward Gibbon, David P. Womersley

4.2

Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is among the most magnificent and ambitious narratives in European literature. Its subject is the fate of one of the world's greatest civilizations over thirteen centuries - its rulers, wars, and society, and the events that led to its disastrous collapse. Here, in book one and two, Gibbon charts the vast exte

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch and Tom Holland.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

It’s a formidable task to read it, but it’s very readable, because although Gibbon was humourless about himself, he has a tremendous sense of humour about the rest of the world. [source]

It takes Tacitus as its model, who was famous for his waspish style, and a careful balancing and modulating of the sentences so that irony would be generated. This is what Gibbon does as well, and it means that not only is it an incredible work of scholarship but it is also compulsively entertaining. I really think that anyone who is prepared to give it a chance will find themselves smiling at the very least throughout it. [source]

The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland book cover

3

The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland

Margo Todd

4.1

The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century brought a radical shift from a profoundly sensual and ceremonial experience of religion to the dominance of the word through book and sermon. In Scotland, the revolution assumed proportions unequalled by any other national Calvinist Reformation, with Christmas and Easter formally abolished, Sabbaths turned to fasting days, and mandatory attendance of

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Margo presents this wonderfully rich, detailed picture of the lives that people led. [source]

The Church in Africa, 1450-1950 book cover

4

The Church in Africa, 1450-1950

Adrian Hastings

4.5

Covering five centuries--from the rise of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the 15th century and the early Portuguese missionaries right through to the Church and its key role in Africa today--this major new volume is the first complete history of the Christian Church in Africa. Written by a leading authority on Church history who has spent many years in Africa, it looks at all aspects of Christian

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The expertise that Hastings brought to what he did was quite exceptional, and this history is just entrancing. [source]

Cover unavailable

5

The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity

Christoph Baumer, Mar Dinkha

4.3

Christoph Baumer is one of the very few Westerners to have visited many of the most important Assyrian sites, and has written the only comprehensive history of the "Nestorian" (or Apostolic Assyrian) Church, which now fights for survival in its country of origin, Iraq. He traces its apostolic beginnings to the present day, and discusses the Church's theology, christology and uniquely vigorous spir

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

This is a wonderful book, and it brings me back to where I started – the Christianities we’ve completely forgotten. [source]

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire book cover

6

Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire

Nandini Das

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

In 1615, Thomas Roe arrived as an ambassador to the Mughal Emperor from the court of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, hung around for three years, and really didn’t achieve anything. He was constantly ill. He misunderstood customs. He bigged himself up in his own mind but, very revealingly, left no trace in the diaries of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, whom Roe presents as a bosom buddy and hugely impressed by him. Clearly, Jahangir wasn’t. Roe was a bedraggled person from a puzzlingly faraway country with which the emperor had very little dealings and not much interest. [source]

Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution book cover

7

Our NHS: A History of Britain's Best Loved Institution

Andrew Seaton

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

This is a very big book about an institution which inspires enormous loyalty and that title, Our NHS, is absolutely on the mark. The story is beautifully told. The author, Andrew Seaton, feels very much part of the story of the NHS, but shows the difficulties of saying whose NHS it is. There is what he describes as a sort of nationalism around the NHS. There’s a great pride engendered by the Labour Party—who created the NHS—in it being a uniquely British institution, and it is often contrasted with the dysfunctional state of US medicine. There are all sorts of ways in which the book reflects on its own preconceptions. ‘Our’ NHS: What about all the immigrants who have made it work since the 1950s? It could not have survived without them. [source]

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022 book cover

8

Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022

Frank Trentmann

4.4

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

It starts in Nazi Germany with the stories of individuals, illustrating the moral dilemmas of being part of a nation which is doing something utterly evil to some of its own people and to others too. Then there is the utter desolation, the devastation of 1945…Then the next decades, as Trentmann lays them out, are interesting. They are a story of what happens when you, or most of you, have utterly rejected the ideology in which you’ve lived. You’ve painfully reconstructed something which the victors imposed, but which is very different in its embrace of democracy and its obstinate wish to tell truth. [source]

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century book cover

9

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century

Joya Chatterji

4.4

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The book is about India in the 20th century, which means taking it from the late Victorian period, when it had become an empire under Queen Victoria, through to its present form, which consists of three large nations—India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—important on a worldwide scale. That is not an easy task, because the history is crowded with agendas and assumptions. There is the assumption of Britain being a good imperial power or a very bad imperial power. There is the assumption that in 1947 a tragedy happened, Partition. As I read it, I was testing my own assumptions against these inherited ones and found the book extraordinarily fresh. It is written by a citizen of modern-day India, but she has examined her own assumptions, her own experience, and created something which I found surprising and new. There is perhaps an optimistic message behind the book, that despite all the tragedy of the history of the sub-continent in the 20th century, these are three countries which have much more in common than many of their leaders admit. [source]

Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade book cover

10

Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Nicholas Radburn

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Once you’ve read this book, you can’t sustain complacent cliches about the Western part in the slave trade. The detail is extraordinary. What I found particularly interesting and different was the sense of the commercial dynamic driving it. The story starts with one monopoly company, the Royal African Company, chartered by the English monarchy. It’s based in London but is elbowed out of the way by provincial merchants in Bristol and Liverpool. They create a trade that’s far more profitable because it is much better organized, with absolute cynicism about the subject of the trade: human beings. They’re treated as commodities with advantages and disadvantages. There are the young, the elderly, the weak, the sick, and then there is the absolute prize: healthy young adult males. The essence of the trade is to acquire those assets, sort them out, and get them across the Atlantic with minimum loss, i.e. death. [source]

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage book cover

11

Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage

Jonny Steinberg

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch and Elizabeth Taylor.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Winnie and Nelson are heroic figures, but there’s a lot which is not at all heroic about them. It’s a ‘portrait of a marriage’, a very loaded phrase, because it’s warts and all. It’s warts which many historians had not talked or not known about, and previous biographers had left out (which just illustrates how biography is such a treacherous thing: it can be utterly misleading by omission). At the crudest level, we hear about the love affairs of both parties, the way in which they emotionally tried to cope against the crushing, evil machine that they were fighting. It’s both a history of South Africa with a freshness and a chilling detail that I hadn’t appreciated, but also makes one feel tremendously sorry for the two principal characters, in a Greek tragedy sort of way. Sometimes you’re just really cross with them. How could they end up doing such self-destructive things? In other words, the book brings the reader very close to two fascinating people who changed the world. [source]

Elizabeth Taylor

Steinberg writes a portrait of the Mandela marriage as a window to a country struggling to come to terms with itself. Both Nelson and Winnie Mandela were wounded souls, deeply scarred by apartheid, by the time they met at a bus stop in the Black township of Soweto. Social worker Winnie was just 20 years old, and Nelson was nearly two decades her senior, married, a father of small children, and was on trial for treason when they married 15 months later. During his nearly three decades of imprisonment, Winnie was allowed to visit only a few times, and she became more militant and prone to violence as Nelson became more conciliatory. Steinberg is empathic in his depictions of Winnie and Nelson Mandela, and it is painful to read about this deeply wounded couple, battling both the state and one each other. [source]

Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words book cover

12

Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words

Jeremy Mynott

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

It’s the sheer learning of it which is so engaging. What particularly impressed me was the accomplished translations of classical literature. They’re all Mynott’s translations and they’re so idiomatic, so elegant. [source]

Building Anglo-Saxon England book cover

13

Building Anglo-Saxon England

John Blair

4.6

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

It’s difficult to make Anglo-Saxon England come to life, but this book does because it’s got such an eye and an ear for what remains. Blair is straddling two worlds which don’t always talk to each other properly: history and archaeology. [source]

Oscar: A Life book cover

14

Oscar: A Life

Matthew Sturgis

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

It’s just a wonderful all-round picture of this extraordinary, complicated man. Oscar: A Life is very good at taking a cool look at Wilde and revealing just how self-destructive he was and how destructive he could be to those around him. [source]

Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice book cover

15

Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

Mary Fulbrook

4.4

A single word--"Auschwitz"--is sometimes used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet focusing on a single concentration camp, however horrific the scale of crimes committed there, leaves an incomplete story, truncates a complex history and obscures the continuing legacies of Nazi crimes.

Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the liv

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

What makes the book distinctive is the second half: the way that she pursues what happened to victims and perpetrators in the years after 1945. She tells different stories: the story of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the story of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic, and the way in which reactions to the Holocaust contrasted in these settings and the reasons for that—the political configurations after 1945 and the Cold War. [source]

Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson book cover

16

Trading in War: London's Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson

Margarette Lincoln

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

This is supremely clever local history, magnified as a prism to look at national and global history. [source]

Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution book cover

17

Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution

Geoffrey Plank

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

It’s the way in which he’s managed to integrate themes across the book with a constant progress through the centuries that is really clever. It’s compellingly written, it’s clearly written. And that’s not always the case with books covering such a wide area. [source]

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture book cover

18

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

Sudhir Hazareesingh

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

This book is not hagiography at all. It’s very easy to look for a great liberation hero. But this book shows a deeply flawed man who clearly didn’t make the lives of those who became free, all that much freer. He wanted hard work. There’s a certain ‘ Animal Farm -ness’ about the story. And yet, what an achievement it was for this little island to stand up to one of the great powers of 18th century Europe and create the first predominantly Black-run republic in the world. It’s extraordinary. [source]

Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge book cover

19

Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge

Richard Ovenden

4.5

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

Librarians can often be treated rather as second class citizens by historians because they’re the people who often seem to be stopping you getting the books while you’re drumming your fingers on the desk, waiting for them to arrive. But what Richard does is to take the experience of being a librarian, and the most senior sort of librarian you can get, and use that as part of the fabric of the book. [source]

Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe book cover

20

Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe

Judith Herrin

4.6

A riveting history of the city that led the West out of the ruins of the Roman EmpireAt the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics. For thre

Recommended by Diarmaid MacCulloch.

Diarmaid MacCulloch

In a sense, it’s quite an easy task writing a glittering book about Ravenna, because if you just go there, you see these relics of an astonishing culture. But Judith Herrin is absolutely the master of Byzantine Imperial history and late Roman Imperial history. She is someone who knows the whole context—it’s, of course, not just a book about a marshland town in Northern Italy. [source]