Let us celebrate a great year for history books. It’s become a slight tradition that I always  produce a list of the best books of the year. And also for thrillers. And tv dramas. First the history books.  My favourites of the year are: Augustus the Strong by Tim Blanning the riotous debauched  life of the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony who had the misfortune to be crushed between the voracious ambitions of the ruthless giant,  Tsar Peter I of Moscow and the manic, capricious, cruel Charles XII, a titanic conflict that resulted in the end of Poland and Sweden as great powers and the Petrine creation of a new power called Russia with himself as its first emperor.  Yet Augustus’s flamboyant and wild life resembles the novels and movies of Barry Lyndon and Tom Jones. He didn’t really have 354 illegitimate children nor did he (probably)  sleep with his own daughter by mistake but this superb history book catches the artistic brilliance and entrepreneurial gifts of Augustus along with his disastrous reign in Poland and the great success of his reign in Saxony.  A delight!  A feast! Cromwell the Commander in Chief by Ronald Hutton – the second part of a masterwork that recasts Cromwell as military genius and wily, inscrutable, weaselly, subtle,slippery, lying and extremely ambitious politician. Here we follow him as he defeats Scots and Irish and Brits, never losing a battle.  It is unputdownable and outstanding. We cant wait for the third part of this trilogy – Cromwell the Monarch:  We wish Professor Hutton a happy Xmas but urge him to work hard on the next volume… The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor. This is just superb – one of our greatest historians and literary stylists  - because history is a weird mix of science, ethics, literature, humanities  and the best historians are all great writers too – retells the great and cruel duel between Richard II,  one of the worst and most cruel of our rulers, and Henry IV,   that ends with the murder of the former and the crowning of the latter - the start of a turbulent reign filled with rebellions and betrayals and tension with his son.    Castor does it beautifully in a real virtuoso demonstration of how to write a great history book.    I recommend that you finish it and then immediately start Dan Jones’ s gripping Henry V that reveals one of our most able rulers as exactly what you would expect: a brutally ruthless, highly religious but talented man of his time. Eastern Front by Nick Lloyd.   Like Cromwell this is the second of a masterwork trilogy a history of the WW1 by the great Professor Lloyd: Western Front is already out and is the best history of the ww1 so far. Now with this one, he gives us the gigantic and catastrophic panorama of a war of which many know little – that between Russia and Germany/Austria alongside Austria vs Italy. The scale of death and tragedy the span of the fronts are astounding.   All is told neatly,  elegantly, with flawless scholarship and acute character portraits.  Again, Professor Lloyd enjoy your xmas but we crave volume three: the Ottoman war…. All His Spies: the Secret World of Robert Cecil by Stephen Alford is another work of beautiful writing in a literary sense but also superb scholarship and  brilliant characterisation worthy of the greatest novelists -a humane portrait of statesmanship, espionage and personality at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I, showing the thuggish Mafia style rule of absolute personal rulers.   Alford is a maestro of humanism but also the dirty business of politics, spying and courtiership. Now i am going to read his Burghley and his Watchers. Izabela the Valiant by Adam Zamoyski  is  a pure joy and delight. Zamoyski always writes beautifully and always has an empathetic feel for past times particularly the 18thC, the nobility in eastern Europe and his native Poland.  All his books are outstanding but I think this is his best since Last King of Poland: it’s the life of an extraordinary and lovable and admirable woman, Princess Izabela Czartoryska,  collector, politician, grandee and prolific passionate  lover. To Run the World:  the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for World Power by Sergey Radchenko is a virtuoso history of the Cold War filled with new material from the archives of the Politburo,  with a sense of humour (Brezhnev’s comments come to mind) but it is also special because the cold war was so often covered in a strictly centralized focus on the superpowers Moscow and DC and no one else. This is properly international starring Cubans, Vietnamese, Libyans, Angolans.  It is the best history of the Cold War yet. Damascus Events by Eugene Rogan, the most distinguished & most balanced of Middle East scholars: this is the story of the Druze-Christian war in the Ottoman Levant in 1860 that led to the massacre of 20,000 Christians in Damascus and the intervention of French and Western troops.   In many ways as Rogan shows it was an event that helped formed the Middle East today and it is grippingly told. Those are the formal history books but then I must recommend some history that is so recent it merges with journalism and here I recommend two books that expand our knowledge of the region where it seems people know the least and yet feel the most: the Middle East. We are Your Soldiers by Alex Rowell is a biographical study of Gamal Abdul Nasser,  Egyptian dictator and Arab nationalist hero who has been weirdly neglected by modern historians. But Rowell chronicles the other side of his oversized charisma – the tyrant whose secret police terrorized Egypt, whose purges expelled so many of the ethnic minorities, Greeks,  Jews, Italians, Turks who had made Egypt so cosmopolitan, and whose wars and assassinations and ambitions spread havoc in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq. (I think the book is mistitled – in the ppk, it should be called Nasser and the Arab world or something like that)  Essential reading to understand the Middle East. While we are on the Middle East, Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East 1979-2003 is as exciting and thrilling as a thriller, as lurid as any history of tyranny and is as essential to know how the Middle East works as any book you can possibly read.  Superb and upputdownable.  It is certainly a chronicle of America’s clumsy mishandling of Iraq and misunderstanding of Saddam Hussein over 30 years of his dictatorship.  But it is also a chronicle of the tragic misrule of the Arab world by merciless dictators like Saddam – and of course the Assads. The Assads and Saddam came from the same Baathist Party and ruled their multi ethnic multi secular republics invented by the Imperial powers in much the same murderous way.  This book is not only a must-read but is totally compelling.  Enjoy.