Category Archives: History books

End fossil-fuel era to address colonial injustices, urges prominent historian

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West should address ‘colonisation of the present’ and not focus on past, argues David Van Reybrouck

Cities in the global north that curb their carbon emissions are doing more to address colonial injustices than those who focus their efforts on taking down statues and changing street names, one of Europe’s leading historians has said.

David Van Reybrouck, the Belgian author of a bestselling history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a new book on Indonesia’s independence from Dutch rule, has become one of the key drivers of a nascent and often fraught debate about Europe’s colonial legacies. Those who have lauded his work include the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan.

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Critics of Napoleon epic have fallen for emperor’s fibs, says film’s military expert

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The ex-para who advised Ridley Scott on the new movie’s battle scenes claims historians who attacked it have fallen for Bonaparte’s own hype

Critics of the “damaging” and “inaccurate” portrayal of Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott’s new cinematic epic Napoleon are just victims of the French emperor’s enduring propaganda, according to the military adviser behind the film’s vast battle scenes.

Paul Biddiss claims that “Old Boney”, as he was known to the Duke of Wellington’s British troops, was promoted largely because he elaborated on his own successes. Bonaparte’s fibs impressed all France and intimidated his enemies – until, that is, he met his Waterloo in 1815.

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Original letter from Columbus announcing ‘discovery’ of America goes on sale for first time

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The explorer is widely thought of as an exploiter today, and didn’t know east from west. But a version of his boastful missive is expected to fetch up to £1.2m at auction

In 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter that would change the landscape of the modern world. “I sailed to the Indies with the fleet that the illustrious King and Queen, our sovereigns, gave me, where I discovered a great many islands, inhabited by numberless people,” he wrote after his return to Europe to royal treasurer Luis de Santángel. “Of all, I have taken possession for their Highnesses.”

The events relayed in the letter were “the first report of a voyage that really did change the world”, says Columbus biographer Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

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Professor Hakim Adi shortlisted for prestigious Wolfson award

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The nomination for Adi, the first British person of African heritage to become a professor of history in the UK, is a vindication for the academic who was made redundant a week ago

Hakim Adi, the first British person of African heritage to become a professor of history in the UK, has been shortlisted for a prestigious history writing prize. This comes after Adi was made redundant by the University of Chichester when it cut a course he founded.

Adi has made the shortlist for the Wolfson history prize for his 2022 book, African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History. The winner of the prize, announced in November, will receive £50,000.

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Abuse has led Sathnam Sanghera to ‘more or less stop’ doing book events in UK

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Writer of Empireland, which examined Britain’s imperial past, says culture war-fuelled online trolling and heckling ‘gets to you’

The writer Sathnam Sanghera has said he barely ever does public events in the UK because of a fear of being attacked amid a culture war-fuelled backlash over his views on Britain’s imperial past, saying he feared a Florida-style push towards the banning of books.

Sanghera, a journalist and author whose bestselling book Empireland assessed how the UK’s colonial territories still infect contemporary politics and discourse, said he had begun to dread holding book events here.

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Elizabeth I heavily influenced by loss of mother Anne Boleyn at young age

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Evidence that both women experienced stress and anxiety, with Elizabeth traumatised by mother’s death and issue of marriage

Elizabeth I was heavily influenced by her mother Anne Boleyn, despite the fact that the latter died when the Tudor queen was less than three years old, according to the historian and author Tracy Borman.

As well as being influenced by feminist ideas that were ahead of their time, Borman said there was evidence they both experienced stress and anxiety.

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Lost letters reveal how ‘desperate’ Shackleton charmed Falklanders to save stranded crew

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Explorer hid his torment as he regaled officials in Port Stanley with jokes and stories

The marine archaeologist who headed the 2022 Antarctic expedition that discovered the wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance has found two previously unknown letters which describe the explorer in the Falklands while he was trying to save 22 of his men stranded on the “hellish rock” of Elephant Island.

Ahead of today’s anniversary of the wreck’s discovery, Mensun Bound told the Observer that the correspondence is remarkable because there is no witness account of him in Port Stanley during this crucial period in 1916 after their ship had become trapped in ice.

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Anne Boleyn’s reputation as ‘temptress’ to be recast in new exhibition

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Henry VIII’s second wife was a deeply religious woman who resisted his advances for years, according to fresh research

Anne Boleyn was found guilty of adultery, incest and conspiracy – all, almost certainly, false charges trumped up by Henry VIII – and then executed. For centuries, her reputation was that of a scheming seducer.

Now Anne is being recast as a deeply religious woman who, far from plotting to become Henry’s second wife, bade her time for six years as a lady-in-waiting to the king’s consort, Catherine of Aragon. She deliberately never consummated her relationship with Henry until their “unofficial” marriage in November 1532 – just two months before their formal wedding.

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Eighty-year-old study of British slave trade is back in the bestsellers list

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Capitalism and Slavery, by the future first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago Eric Williams, argues that the abolition of slavery was motivated by economic, not moral, concerns

A book of unpalatable truths about Britain’s slave trade has become a UK bestseller, almost 80 years after author Eric Williams was told by a British publisher: “I would never publish such a book, for it would be contrary to the British tradition.”

Capitalism and Slavery was first published in the US in 1944. It was published in the UK by the independent publisher André Deutsch in 1964, with a number of reprints over the next 20 years.

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Red poets’ society: the secret history of the Stasi’s book club for spies

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For seven years, the East German security service’s poetry group met in Berlin to discuss literature. But there was more to it than just learning about iambic pentameter

At the height of the tense second phase of the cold war, a group of Stasi majors, propaganda officers and border guards convened at a heavily fortified compound in socialist east Berlin. From spring 1982 until winter 1989, they gathered once every four weeks, from 4pm until 6pm, at the House of Culture inside the premises of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment (the Stasi’s paramilitary wing), in Berlin’s Adlershof district. They met in a first-floor room adorned with portraits of East German leader Erich Honecker and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that was closed with a security seal overnight.

But the Stasi men did not gather to gameplan nuclear war scenarios, work up disinformation campaigns or fine-tune infiltration techniques. They set out to learn about iambic pentameter, cross-rhyming schemes and Petrarchan sonnets. The group, which internal memos referred to as the Working Circle of Writing Chekists (a reference to the fearsome Bolshevist secret police, the Cheka), produced two anthologies over this seven-year period. I got hold of a copy of one shortly before I moved to Berlin in 2016. The slim paperback, its title Wir Über Uns (“We about us”) falling down the front page in curling calligraphic letters, felt like something out of a Monty Python sketch, or a spin-off from the film The Lives of Others. How had a secret police synonymous with the suppression of free thought ended up writing poetry? Over the coming months I tried to track down former members of the circles, and contacted them to see if they could tell me more.

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The Betrayal of Anne Frank by Rosemary Sullivan review – who tipped off the Nazis?

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Despite controversy surrounding its findings, the work of a ‘cold case team’ powerfully illuminates what it was like to live under a genocidal regime

On 4 August 1944 Gestapo officer Karl Josef Silberbauer, together with three Dutch policemen, marched into a spice merchant’s on Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht and demanded: “Where are the Jews?” It was a piercing moment in 20th-century history, one that never becomes dulled by retelling. Within minutes Silberbauer and his accomplices had located a dummy bookshelf, behind which lay a secret suite of rooms where two families had been hiding for two years. Placed under arrest, these eight men and women were subsequently sent to concentration camps in the east from which only one, the business’s owner, Otto Frank, returned.

We know all this because one of Frank’s first postwar acts was to publish the journal that his 15-year-old daughter had kept during their immuration. The Diary of Anne Frank became a canonical text, one of the few accounts we have of living through Hitler’s Final Solution in real time. And it is Anne’s face – peaky, clever, ferociously alive – that has become the emblem of all the evil unleashed by antisemitism in Europe’s terrible mid-century. Yet despite the story being so familiar, there is one detail that remains a mystery. Who tipped off the authorities that there were people hiding at the back of Prinsengracht 263?

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US intelligence errors helped build myth of Nazi Alpine redoubt, says historian

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New book claims intercepted cables sent in second world war by Allen Dulles, later head of CIA, enabled disinformation campaign

A US spymaster inadvertently helped the Nazis develop one of the most effective disinformation campaigns of the second world war by spreading rumours about Hitler’s plans for a Where Eagles Dare-style Alpine redoubt, a historian with access to classified US military records has found.

The myth that the Nazis were amassing weapons and crack units of 100,000 fanatical soldiers in the spring of 1945 for a last stand in the Austro-Bavarian Alps was without any basis in fact but had a powerful hold on the imagination of American and British military leaders, who feared it could prolong the war for years.

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Anna & Dr Helmy by Ronen Steinke review – the Schindler of the surgery room

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This meticulous account of the Arab doctor who sheltered a Jewish girl in 1930s Berlin is a remarkable story of subterfuge and courage

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem honours 25,000 individuals who helped to save Jewish lives during the second world war. Among this roll call of the “Righteous among the Nations”, there is only one named Arab: Dr Mohamed Helmy. This remarkable book tells the story of Helmy’s life, in particular the years in which he helped a young Jewish girl, Anna Boros (later Gutman), evade the Nazis in the heart of Berlin from 1936 until the end of the war.

Ronen Steinke, a political commentator at German broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung, has painstakingly pieced together these events from the state archive in Berlin, and from Gestapo correspondence, and interviews with the surviving relatives of Helmy and Gutman in New York and Cairo. His story, deftly translated by Sharon Howe, wears this research lightly. Steinke’s history sheds a light on what he argues is a deliberately forgotten world, the old Arabic Berlin of the Weimar period, centred around the grand mosque in the Wilmersdorf district, which was “open, progressive and far from antisemitic” and which welcomed Jewish luminaries, including Albert Einstein and philosopher Martin Buber, to its cultural events. “It is a perception shared by many Muslims in western countries that the Holocaust was nothing to do with them, that Muslim migrants played no part in that history,” Steinke writes. “This book is evidence to the contrary.”

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Books that explain the world: Guardian writers share their best nonfiction reads of the year

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From a Jacobean traveller’s travails in Sindh to the tangled roots of Nigeria, our pick of new nonfiction books that shine a light on Asia, Africa and South America

• Share your top recommendations for books on the developing world in the comments below

You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021
By Alaa Abd El-Fattah

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Readers reply: which monarchs would have lived longer if modern medicine had been available?

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The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Which British monarchs would have survived their illness or wounding if today’s medical knowledge had existed then? (Bonus question: which monarchs would we have had but for illnesses that are now easily preventable?) Jane Shaw

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

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Historian Timothy Snyder: ‘It turns out that people really like democracy’

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The author of On Tyranny on the lack of historical literacy, how local news has been replaced by Facebook, and why novels matter to him

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books about the 20th-century history of central Europe, including Bloodlands, which examined the devastating consequence of Hitler and Stalin’s simultaneous reign of terror over civilian populations, and won the 2013 Hannah Arendt prize for political thought. In 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, Snyder wrote a short book, On Tyranny, which provided 20 brief lessons – “Defend Institutions”, “Remember Professional Ethics”, “Read Books” – from the 20th century that might help readers protect democracy against dictatorship. It topped the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in 2017. A new edition of the book, with illustrations by the German-American Nora Krug, whose graphic memoir Belonging confronted Germany’s Nazi past, has just been published.

What prompted you to want to make this graphic version of On Tyranny?
It came out originally in this extremely simple, accessible form. I always had the idea that it could take a different form, but that only became concrete once I read Nora Krug’s Belonging. I cold-called her and said: “Could you please do this?” Part of it was also to renew it. I changed the text a little bit, removed some of the stuff that was specific to 2016 and added some lines that recall what happened in 2020.

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Can history teach us anything about the future of war – and peace?

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A decade on from psychologist Steven Pinker’s declaration that violence is declining, historians show no sign of agreeing a truce

Ten years ago, the psychologist Steven Pinker published The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argued that violence in almost all its forms – including war – was declining. The book was ecstatically received in many quarters, but then came the backlash, which shows no signs of abating. In September, 17 historians published a riposte to Pinker, suitably entitled The Darker Angels of Our Nature, in which they attacked his “fake history” to “debunk the myth of non-violent modernity”. Some may see this as a storm in an intellectual teacup, but the central question – can we learn anything about the future of warfare from the ancient past? – remains an important one.

Pinker thought we could and he supported his claim of a long decline with data stretching thousands of years back into prehistory. But among his critics are those who say that warfare between modern nation states, which are only a few hundred years old, has nothing in common with conflict before that time, and therefore it’s too soon to say if the supposed “long peace” we’ve been enjoying since the end of the second world war is a blip or a sustained trend.

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‘Joyously subversive sex goddesses’: the artists who gave witches a spellbinding makeover

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Thousands of women were slain after being accused of witchcraft. Don’t they deserve more than the evil cackling hag stereotype? A powerful new book blows away the satanic baby-eating myths

We all know what a witch looks like. A gnarled old face full of warts with teeth missing and bright green skin. Then there’s the long black coat, the tall black hat and let’s not forget the sizable crooked nose, sniffing the fumes rising from a bubbling cauldron in a room festooned with cobwebs.

But that’s not what witches look like at all, or at least not according a hefty new art book being published in time for Halloween. In this compendium of witchy women, from Renaissance paintings to modern Wicca, the caricature of the evil hag is turned upside down. Witchcraft, the latest volume in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica, finds evidence from artists as diverse as Auguste Rodin and Kiki Smith for its revisionist view that witches are typically young, glamorous practitioners of highly sexualised magick. The cover painting, by Victorian artist JW Waterhouse, depicts the ancient enchantress Circe in pale, red-lipped pre-Raphaelite ecstasy – and the fun just keeps coming. The witches here are powerful feminist sex goddesses whose rites and incantations are joyously subversive.

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On my radar: Sam Fender’s cultural highlights

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The Tyneside rocker on his favourite bath time podcast, a second world war memoir and where to get the best breakfast kippers

Sam Fender was born in 1994 and raised in North Shields. He began writing songs aged 14, building on an affinity with Bruce Springsteen, and started acting a few years later, appearing in the ITV series Vera. After releasing his first single, Play God, independently in 2017, Fender featured in the BBC’s Sound of 2018 poll. He won the critics’ choice award at the 2019 Brits and his debut album, Hypersonic Missiles, entered the UK charts at No 1. His second album, Seventeen Going Under, is out this week on Polydor.

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