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I had an odd reading journey recently. I was led by historical fiction into historical fact, and – although the history it recounted was dark and frightening – I found it oddly heartening, as a reminder that 2018 is not a terrible time to be alive.
It started with film. I was watching Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, which portrays the last hours of the dictator’s life and the scrabble for power afterward in bleakly hilarious fashion, and then Bridge of Spies, the Tom Hanks espionage vehicle, and I realised: I know embarrassingly little about the Cold War.
It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I lived through about a decade of it, for a start. But I mainly knew the big events, and mainly either as little more than names, or as set-pieces somewhat devoid of context: the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift. I didn’t have a good grasp of the sweep of it, how all the pieces fitted together.
Someone recommended to me The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, a much-respected historian of the period. It’s not a long book – fewer than 300 pages, not counting the references and index, which isn’t much when you’re cramming in the better part of a century of complex geopolitical history. But it covers that ground brilliantly. It doesn’t travel in strict chronological order, but breaks the narrative up into various themes that Gaddis considers relevant, such as “Command vs Spontaneity”, on the differences between the two ideologies that faced each other, or “Actors”, on the individual men and women (Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul II) who “widened the range” of historical possibilities and helped bring the conflict to an end. It’s a brilliant, quick overview of a vital part of history.
While it was fascinating, though, it only really went back to 1917, and, when in passing it described Lenin’s accession to power as a “coup d’etat” rather than a popular movement, it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the Russian Revolution either. So I looked on Amazon, which recommended Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. That was a very, very different book – 900 pages, and rather than skimming over decades in a few pages, it might, for example, spend a similar number of pages examining serfs’ farming techniques in a particular village a few miles outside Moscow in 1888. It was, it should be admitted, a fair old slog, and I kept getting bogged down and wandering off to re-read old Iain M Banks books. But I know an awful lot more about the Russian Revolution than I used to. If you’re in the market for a properly in-depth discussion, it’s worthwhile.
A similar journey happened to me with the English reformation. I started by reading Dissolution, book one of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series, about a 16th-century lawyer whom Thomas Cromwell asks to solve a murder. Then I read book two, and then books three to six. They’re gripping and evocative, if a little silly, and I was hooked. Having done that, on the recommendation of a friend I read An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, set in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which similarly revolves around politics and murder, but is a much cleverer and more moving work.
But, once again, I realised: I don’t know enough about the English reformation. In fact, I don’t know enough about British history in general. I’ve spent a lot of my life reading about science, but very little about history. So I embarked on Simon Schama’s splendid A History of Britain (volume 1), which takes us from Stone Age settlements to the last days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First (spoiler: she dies at the end).
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