Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University. She writes mainly about Shakespeare, but also dabbles in crime. Her book Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction, 1920-2020 will be published in March 2021.
Since the beginning of lockdown, I have been interested only in murder. To avoid the temptation of actually committing it, I have been reading about it instead. Officially this is because I have been completing a book called Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction 1920-2020 and needed to reread lots of crime fiction to check I hadn’t missed anything; really it is because I wanted to. This has meant lots of Agatha Christie (particularly archaeology-themed ones for a chapter called ‘The Deep Dead’ about digging up and disposing of bodies); all Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson books, which many Dunnett fans don’t rate but for which I have a guilty passion; vast quantities of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver books for a chapter on how the past is remembered through gossip; and the whole of the slim but delicious oeuvre of Sarah Caudwell, most elegant and amusing of murder writers. Finally since we are now in December I am just about to turn to my favourite subgenre of all, Christmas crime, in which burglars infiltrate country houses in Santa Claus costumes, people are killed by revolvers affixed to Christmas trees or find stolen jewels inside turkeys, and sudden snowfalls show up suspicious footprints. Yum.
Jeremy Jennings is Professor of Political Theory at King’s College London.
After six years of being Head of Department and then Head of School at KCL I am now on sabbatical leave. So, there is rarely a day when I do not dip into the Complete Works of Alexis de Tocqueville (about whom I am trying my best to write a book). I first read Tocqueville over 50 years ago but I still find him endlessly fascinating. He was seemingly incapable of writing a dull letter. I have also been re-visiting the writings of Henri de Saint-Simon. Marx and Engels did him an injustice when, with typical malice, they sought to rubbish him as a mere utopian but both Saint-Simon and his disciples illustrate that there is often a fine line between genius and madness.
Away from my own efforts to write something, the book that most has impressed me recently is Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States. His statement that the forced removal of Native Americans was “as if someone had depopulated most of Europe and shunted remnants to an allotment in Romania” is one that will never leave me. I also greatly enjoyed Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting, a lovely book that examines the lives of five women who lived in and around Mecklenburgh Square in the first decades of the twentieth century. The launch at the London Library was a fittingly joyous event. I was slightly disappointed by Martyn Rady’s The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power but the story of how, from modest beginnings in northern Switzerland, the Habsburg became and remained the dominant European dynasty for centuries is an extraordinary one. Forgery had something to do with it.
My evenings are now taken up with Paul Preston’s latest volume, A People Betrayed: A History of Corruption, Political Incompetence and Social Division in Modern Spain 1874–2018. Preston is undoubtedly the greatest historian of modern Spain. For sheer pleasure I am also reading Vita Sackville’s West’s The Edwardians. Every sentence is a joy.
Andrew Sillett is a lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at St Hilda's College Oxford. He is currently completing a book on the early imperial reception of Cicero.
A book-based appraisal of 2020 divides into unequal halves: what we were reading in the carefree days when we could have been doing anything else, and what we turned to when there seemed to be few other ways to fill our free time. The book that has really stayed with me is the one I finished reading just before lockdown came in - the third and final volume of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher. Like (I suspect) a lot of people my age, I grew up with a lot of opinions about Thatcher and precious little knowledge. I was captivated by her story, impressed by her strength of character, and enchanted by Moore's prose. The final chapter did not disappoint, and having read the story of her fall in such detail I can't imagine I'll think of Cicero's exile in the same way again.
Tom Mole is Professor of English and Book History at the University of Edinburgh. His 2019 book, The Secret Life of Books, was published in paperback earlier this year.
The year got off to a great start, as I read the novellas of Stefan Zweig. He’s a writer of wonderful polish and apparently effortless style; his A Chess Story, in particular, is just astonishing. The new book that will stay with me from this year was Kathleen Jamie’s brilliant collection of essays, Surfacing, a series of linked reflections on nature, archaeology and aging that managed to be thoroughly personal and yet attuned to public issues.
Among the academic books I read in 2020, two stood out. The Connected Condition, by Yohei Igarashi, investigates how poets from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century nurtured the dream of unmediated communication, and faced its failures. Book Traces, by Andrew Stauffer, explores how nineteenth-century readers used and marked their books, and argues that, in an era of digitisation, we need to keep these books accessible to researchers if we want to understand what readers of the past have to tell us. I touched on some of the same concerns in my own book The Secret Life of Books, which came out in paperback this year, and is all about the things we do with books, and the things they do to us.
Marion Turner is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow in English at the University of Oxford. Her biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer: A European Life was shortlisted for the 2020 Wolfson History Prize.
I loved Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King – a novel set mainly in 1930s Ethiopia that is both a great story, packed with fascinating historical detail and a formally-experimental, carefully-crafted work of art. The other novel that I adored was Matthew Kneale’s Pilgrims. It tells the stories of a varied cast of characters travelling to Rome in the thirteenth century, and it brilliantly evokes the hybridity of medieval England, paying particular attention to colonial Welsh history, to the treatment of England’s Jewish population, and to the lives of medieval women. It is a triumph of the historical imagination, and it is also funny and vivid – a real page-turner. Finally, I’m currently immersed in Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard: A Life. She’s the undisputed queen of literary biography, and her extraordinary scholarship and sureness of touch are evident on every page.
Natalie Mears is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Early Modern British history at Durham University. She is currently working on a book on Elizabeth's posthumous image from 1603 to the present.
I’m usually like a bear with a sore head if I don’t have a book on the go, but I’ve been doing less pleasure reading over the past few months and listening to more podcasts. My days of reading heavyweight books are also long over so I tend to favour crime – especially Golden Age Crime – as I like the clear plot structure, trying to work out ‘whodunnit’ as well as a few twists and turns. Perhaps the investigatory aspect appeals to me as a historian! Consequently, I’m a pretty avid reader of the British Library Crime Classics and always look forward to the tenth of the month when a new one is released. ECR Lorac’s Checkmate to Murder – which I bought when I managed to get to the British Library to do some research for an article on the Gunpowder Plot that was published last month – was nicely atmospheric of WW2 London.
Unsurprisingly, I tuned in to Richard Osman’s session at the Durham Book Festival in October and then read his The Thursday Murder Club, which was really enjoyable; I’m looking forward to the next one. Earlier this year, I read Hannelore Cayre’s entertaining The Godmother, about a 53-year-old widowed mother of two decides to exploit her job as a translator for the French police to become a drugs baron.
I bought Nina Siegal’s The Anatomy Lesson when I was in The Netherlands last Christmas, which creates a story behind Rembrandt’s painting, ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp’. That novel got me in the mood for more Dutch stories, so one of my best friends, Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon, recommended Simone van der Vlugt’s Midnight Blue. Set in Delft the 1650s, it’s the story of a young woman who (spoiler alert) murders her husband, flees to Delft and becomes a painter trying to recreate the blue and white porcelain that was being imported from China i.e. what we know of now as Delftware. Murder and ceramics! It just needed some horses for it to be the perfect read!
John Roe is Professor of Renaissance literature at the University of York.
I have turned once more with relief, and delight, to my favourite novelist Anthony Powell, and his 12-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time. These novels chronicle English life throughout most of the twentieth century, but they do much more than that. They introduce a large cast of characters whose interactions with one another are beautifully conveyed in an inimitable style, which is comical, reflective, sometimes sombre, often dramatic, and always engaging. I also read, for the first time, and enjoyed Rose Macaulay’s quirky, oddly comical novel The Towers of Trebizond (1956), which is part travel writing, part theology, and finally a love story, with an unusual line in the portrayal of the narrator. A friend tipped me off to the short stories of Tessa Hadley, and I really recommend Funny Little Snake, published in the New Yorker (2017). She’s an admirer of Henry James, as you can see in her character relationships, but her style is original. Finally, a plug for my friend Michiel Heyns whose novel A Poor Season for Whales was published this year. It shows a slice of South African contemporary life and is both funny and moving. He isn’t published in Britain unfortunately, but you can get the novel on Kindle.
Sharon Marshall is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Exeter.
As someone who works on and teaches Roman poetry, it’s perhaps not surprising that my reading for pleasure also features a fair amount of poetry. I feel as though I’m a bit late to the party on this one as it was published in 2018, but I have loved reading Toshani Doshi’s Girls are Coming Out of the Woods and found myself turning back to it several times over the course of the year. It’s a really powerful and challenging collection that addresses everything from violence against women (the subject of the brilliantly anthemic title poem) to the Battle of Aleppo and the subsequent refugee crisis and the impact of the economic crisis in Greece. I’ve been teaching Roman Love Elegy this term and, although it feels somehow wrong to compare Doshi to the love elegists, her work embodies everything that I love about them and more. It’s a collection that feels simultaneously of its time and ahead of its time and is a brilliant amalgam of sincerity and irony. It’s witty and learned and lyrical, without ever sacrificing its boldness or defiance, and allows you to find joy and beauty in the despair, and that’s pretty special, I think.
Nathan Waddell is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. He recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Nineteen Eighty-Four (2020). His edition of Orwell's A Clergyman's Daughter will be published in the Oxford World's Classics series in January 2021.
This year I read Hermione Lee's new biography of the playwright Tom Stoppard. The book is a landmark study not only because it packs in an unprecedented amount of detail about Stoppard's life and work across a sixty-year timespan, but also because of its analytical clarity and directness. Stoppard's drama is playful, intellectually wide-ranging, at times cryptic, at others forthright--just like the man himself. Lee's biography makes these complexities, across the plays and the life, easy to understand, in a triumph of explanatory finesse.
Madeleine Davies is Associate Professor in English at the University of Reading
The first Covid lockdown found me scanning my bookshelves looking for a novel I hadn’t read before. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, which I had somehow always deferred, was the only candidate. Feeling gloomy as I began reading (Murdoch does not have the reputation of being relaxing), within one chapter I was hooked and heading for a 9-month Murdoch-reading-binge.
Murdoch’s worlds are not encouraging. In The Sea, The Sea, A Word Child and The Philosopher’s Pupil, her specialism is the creation of monstrous, obsessive men who are locked into extreme mind-sets and patterns of behaviour. The women around them are treated with vicious psychological cruelty. This is a bleak mental landscape but a compelling darkness and mordant wit propels the narratives forward. We enter disturbing psychological and philosophical territories involving sexuality, obsession, guilt, and regret as the stories build to intense climaxes where the tension finally explodes.
When I wasn’t reading her work (because occasionally I had to do other things), I found myself thinking about the novel and its action, and wondering how it would be resolved. All day long, the story stayed with me - I have become as obsessive as Murdoch’s characters, it seems.
Llewelyn Morgan is Tutorial Fellow in Classics at Brasenose College, Oxford. His Very Short Introduction to Ovid was published earlier this year.
I've already confessed to History Today that I'm very bad at reading books when they come out, and a bit of an expert at reading them fifteen years later. Or 2015 years later, of course, but if I said my book of the year was Ovid's Fasti you might get upset. I'm going to compromise and say that an excellent book of 2020 was Dan Jackson's The Northumbrians, strictly speaking published in 2019 but right on the cusp, and a copy didn't arrive with me until this year. It's a wonderful combination of historical insight and affection for his subject, a memorable piece of information on every page.
Toby Green is Senior Lecturer in Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College London. His book A Fistful of Shells was shortlisted by the 2020 Wolfson History Prize.
I have especially enjoyed two fantastic new books this year.
Vince Brown's Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War revolutionises the understanding of Atlantic history in bringing African narratives, experiences and techniques to 18th century Jamaica – it shows in granular detail and with exemplary historical imagination the centrality of Africa to the birth of New World societies.
Camilla Townsend's The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs is a landmark book which tells the history of the Mesoamerican experience of history and then of the Spanish conquest from the lens of the Aztecs. Townsend is a brilliant historian and linguist who uses rare Nahua texts to revolutionise our understanding of this foundational moment of modern history. The book deservedly won the Cundill History Prize.
Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton.
Amongst new works in my field, one book that stands out is Caroline Mezger's Forging Germans, which explores how the identities of Germans were unmade, made and remade in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 - a wide-ranging, stimulating read, and a thoroughly distinguished debut in the profession.
Of those things that I read to take me away from the 'day job', I have particularly enjoyed the new collection by Liverpool poet Greg Quiery, A Stray Dog, Following. It contains deliciously mischievous observations of everyday life that simultaneously carry a trenchant critique of historical and contemporary injustices - again, warmly recommended.
Paul Cartledge is Emeritus A. G. Levendis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His book, Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece was published earlier this year.
I read in two sorts of ways - books that I keep on what my American cousins call their nightstand, and read in dribs and drabs very very slowly; and books and articles that I read professionally and concentratedly, as a historian of the ancient Greek/Hellenic world.
Nightstand books this past year have included: Isabel Colegate’s The Orlando Trilogy (a novel sequence loosely based on the Theban Oedipus myth), War & Peace (at long last), The Oxford Companion to the Year ed. L. Holford Strevens (a legendary Oxford Classics near-contemporary) and B. Blackburn, and the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde.
Of the books I read professionally two, both published by O.U.P. in 2020, stand out: The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History by my Roman historian colleague and co-editor (of C.U.P.’s ‘Key Themes in Ancient History’ monograph series), Greg Woolf; and Cyclops: The Myth and Its Cultural History, by husband-and-wife academic team Mercedes Aguirre and Richard Buxton. Chalk and cheese, apples and pears, so far as their respective subject matters go — the one utterly grounded and material, the other spinning off into realms of utmost fantasy. But both equally deeply researched, powerfully written and endlessly stimulating.
John McRae is Professor of English at the University of Nottingham
Non-fiction: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker and Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee, the former a brilliant, life-changing look at one of the most important things we do in our lives, the latter very long, very detailed, and absolutely the last word on our greatest living playwright.
Fiction: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens — this is the one everyone is reading, a wonderfully evocative setting, and one of the great mystery stories. Girl, Women, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, last year’s Booker winner, was a very enjoyable read. I also loved Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, this year’s Booker winner. It was beautifully written, and it’s a joy to see a Scottish novel win again (although I wish he would spell ‘dowt’ correctly. It’s nothing to do with doubt, except in comedy sketches!)
John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. His edition George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will be published by Oxford World’s Classics in January.
I spent a lot of the summer reading and thinking about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, hardly the most uplifting choice in the covidy circumstances. I’d forgotten just how long the torture scenes were, but re-reading did at least confirm what a strange and Gothic book it is. Rosamund Bartlett’s fine translation of Chekhov stories, About Love and Other Stories (Oxford World’s Classics) sent me back to his work with new pleasure, and the melancholy of the Russian provinces was oddly familiar in the petty frustrations of social distancing. Surprise pleasure — and great escape — of the year was Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. An end-of-year treat was the publication of Paul Schlicke’s magisterial new edition of Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (OUP) which takes its readers back to the original versions of the twenty-one or twenty-two year old Boz, full of wit and laughter, and not nearly as raw as you’d expect.
Christopher Whitton is Reader in Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge.
I get to do a lot of browsing (and more) in the course of writing a round-up of work on Latin literature twice a year for Greece & Rome — a healthy way to make sure I don’t spend all my life drilling in exactly the same spot. One of the most enjoyable reads in my latest batch was Dominic Berry on Cicero’s Catilinarians, the first book in fact devoted to these speeches, their context and the reception. Another was Roy Gibson’s Man of High Empire: The Life of Pliny the Younger, a biography of Pliny which doubles as a literary study of his Letters, and trebles as a social history of the early Roman empire. And for a fresh angle on Augustan poetry, I’d recommend The God of Rome: Jupiter in Augustan Poetry by Julia Dyson Hejduk — a beautifully, honestly written attempt to make sense of Jupiter in all his guises in Propertius, Ovid, Virgil and others.
John Morrill is Emeritus Professor of British and Irish History at Cambridge and Life Fellow of Selwyn College. He is completing a major new biography of Oliver Cromwell to be published by Bloomsbury next year.
I have spent Covid-lockdown-time seeing a new three-volume edition of all Oliver Cromwell’s recorded words through the press and getting on with a new biography based on this radical rethink of his words. I have spent far more time relaxing with ‘noir’ TV series than on reading books. The books I have most enjoyed are marginally historical but profoundly challenging. I am a great fan of the writings of Robert Macfarlane and his latest, Underland, explores what mankind has done by tunnelling into the earth. As ever, the writing is stunning and there are huge discoveries and some very grim historical episodes. For ‘straight’ history, I cannot recommend too highly a book that came out last year but which I have only just caught up with — and it is affordable. Ethan Shagan (who has already given us Popular Politics and the English Reformation and also The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England) now tackles The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment which is as good on the middle ages as on the early modern/Reformation period. I wish I had read it before I was giving a Zoom lecture to a sixth-form college and one of the students asked me ‘why was it so hard to be an atheist in the seventeenth century?’ And if you want to spend the £90 (£61 on Kindle) you would have spent in a restaurant on a book, I was more moved this year by Anna Barcz’s Environmental Cultures in Soviet East Europe: Literature, History and Memory (Bloomsbury), a real tract for the times.
Mark White is Professor of History at Queen Mary, University of London.
I spent my ‘free time’ during the Covid crisis reading and in some cases re-reading the works of John Le Carré, former intelligence officer and the master of the spy novel. I have enjoyed reading thirteen of his works this year. Famously he refuses to allow his books to be put forward for literary prizes. But although he has never won the Booker, it would be remiss to say he is not a major literary figure as he is a ‘genre’ writer. The great American author Philip Roth described Le Carré’s novel A Perfect Spy, inspired by his extraordinary fraudster father, as the greatest English novel since World War II. It’s a book that I would strongly recommend, as I would Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, one of the novels centred on his most famous creation, George Smiley. His works during the first three decades of his literary career were set in the context of the Cold War. His more recent, post-Cold War novels that I enjoyed include The Tailor of Panama and The Mission Song. So much more than just a gifted storyteller, Le Carré has much to say about the secret state, Britain’s post-imperial place in the world, and much more besides. He’s also very good on moral ambiguity, the things that people are prepared to do in the name of a greater cause. One other thing: he’s a superb stylist, and it has been an aesthetic pleasure to read his remarkably lucid, fluent prose. I once had a conversation with Le Carré a couple of years ago. My impression: very, very smart!
Liz Gloyn is Reader in Latin Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her most recent book, Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture, was published in October 2019.
I have just finished reading Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism, a vital and timely exploration of how feminist activism needs to concentrate on underlying social issues around food, housing, access to education, reproductive justice and more if it is to make itself relevant and fulfil its radical potential. I also very much enjoyed Jeannette Ng’s Under The Pendulum Sun, a fantasy novel in which a missionary is sent to the Kingdom of the Fae, and the symbolic language of Christianity becomes much more potent and dangerous than it ever has been in the mortal realm. Another highlight of the year was The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo, a novel in verse about a young Sudanese woman in Roman London who happens to fall in love with an emperor — I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read it, and it offers a vivid and captivating imagining of one possible life in antiquity.
Helen Smith is Professor of English Literature at the University of York.
I’ve enjoyed some very varied reading this year. On the one hand I’ve been immersing myself in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the gossipy, filthy Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by the Greek author Diogenes Laertius, both for a book I’m writing. On the other hand, I’ve been amazingly up-to-date, enjoying Curdella Forbes’ incredible novel of Jamaican history and the intertwined presents of Jamaica and the UK, A Tall of History of Sugar, alongside the gorgeous poetry pamphlet Odyssey Calling by York’s very own Writer in Residence (and leading contemporary poet and commentator), Vahni Capildeo. Oddly, these diverse books have lots in common: all four authors are fascinated by transformation and change, and by the limits of what it means to be human. And they all marry a rich vein of fantasy and invention with precise and telling detail: they’re luminous books, and well worth the read.
For next year, I’m especially looking forward to a prize-winning debut novel from another of my colleagues, Juliana Mensah. Juliana’s novel, Castles from Cobwebs, tells the tale of Imani, a foundling, who wrestles with her own sense of displacement until she receives a call from Accra in Ghana, sharing news of the death of her biological mother, and launching her into an extraordinary new story.
