Let’s start at the very beginning: prehistory. Although are we actually starting there? Stefanos Geroulanos’s The Invention of Prehistory is less about life thousands of years ago, and more about how, over the past 300 years or so, modern societies have bent the distant past towards their own ends—from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideal of the “noble savage” to awful 21st-century arguments about “racial purity”. Like Ludovic Slimak’s The Naked Neanderthal, which was one of Prospect’s choices for the best books of last year, this is a work that makes you wonder how much we actually know—and how much we just project.
In its own way, Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire achieves similar ends. This is a work of deep scholarship, born of its author’s time in the Venetian state archive, which uses centuries-old manuscripts, letters, diaries and official documents to upend previous thinking about male-male sexual relations in early modern Europe. A niche enterprise, you may think. But our reviewer—a Princeton professor, no less—described Forbidden Desire as “one of the most compelling and accomplished pieces of social history I have read”. It is hard not to be swept up by Malcolm’s tsunamic intelligence.
Elsa Richardson’s Rumbles also tries to recontextualise the past—and, by extension, the present. Her subject is the gut, a “confederacy of organs” that is often looked down upon in favour of the highfalutin accomplishments of the brain. However, the gut has a rich cultural history that ought to wow—rather than repel—us. Did you know, for instance, the classical physician Galen believed that the human digestive system is what enabled us to have a culture in the first place?
Barnaby Rogerson’s The House Divided is ambitious in its subject matter, the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam and how that schism has affected the Middle East up to the present day. But it is appealingly straightforward in its exploration of that subject, avoiding diversions and pitfalls to make a compelling narrative of something that might have been dismally academic. It pairs well with Eugene Rogan’s The Damascus Events, which tells of a formative moment in the creation of modern Syria (and beyond), a massacre of thousands of Christians in the waning years of the Ottoman empire.
The tumultuous aftermath of the Second World War has provided two classic texts this year. The first is Gary J Bass’s Judgement at Tokyo, a detailed history of the trials that followed Japan’s defeat—which were not nearly as conclusive as Germany’s Nuremberg equivalents, but are striking precisely for that reason. The other is David Van Reybrouck’s Revolusi, a lyrical work about the revolution that brought independence to Indonesia—and inspired independence movements elsewhere, too.
As for historic biography, the masters of the form have returned. Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart concerns two men—the 14th-century king Richard II and his cousin who would be king instead, Henry Bolingbroke—yet it encompasses dozens of characters, hundreds of subplots and some of the most momentous years in English history. Lucy Hughes-Hallet’s The Scapegoat is both exhaustive and compulsive in its retelling of the life of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham and confidant (and much more) to King James I. Villiers ended up taking the fall—in the most terminal way—for his liege lord’s unpopularity.
Ramie Targoff’s Shakespeare’s Sisters deserves mention among these heavy-hitters. Group biographies can be as underwhelming as they are popular at the moment, but this one—of four female writers in the Elizabethan age—stands out for the cleverness of the connections it draws between its subjects.
Then there are the histories that are acts of living, quivering memory. Patrick Joyce’s Remembering Peasants is an elegy for a people who are almost gone—but not quite, since so many exist in our recent pasts and family albums. While Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood is a personal yet thrillingly perceptive ramble through the history of children’s literature. This really is our shared past: Neverland, Pooh Corner, Moominvalley, Hogwarts. It’s a joy to revisit these places.
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Books of the year 2024: Politics & Reportage
Books of the year 2024: Ideas
Books of the year 2024: Lives
