Best history books 2022: from Nazi Billionaires to Antony Beevor’s Russia

Although the 20th century and especially the Second World War remain an addiction for historians and their readers, some superb books about the rest of history appeared during 2022. We are so fixated on our being conquered in 1066 that we forget we were not alone in being prey to a super­power. Judith A Green’s The Normans (Yale, £25) untangles the mystery of how, as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages, and became richer and more populous, the Normans managed to seize territory right across the continent, from Byzantium to Sicily to England. “Were the Normans so successful because they came from a society uniquely well organised for war?” asks Green.

Another under-appreciated fact is that in late-15th- and 16th-century England there was always a powerful Dudley at court, even if that power was sometimes so consider­able that the monarch had to crush them. Joanne Paul, in The House of Dudley (Michael Joseph, £25), tells their story up to their most fateful mistake, which was backing Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days’ Queen, after which no Dudley was safe. “The verdicts of treason, with their devastating sentences, could be carried out at any point…”

The Siege of Loyalty House by Jessie Childs (Bodley Head, £25) makes Basing House, a Royalist stronghold in Hampshire, a microcosm for the Civil War’s horrors: 500 people of all classes were crammed into the castle and its earthworks during its siege, from 1643 to 1645. Cromwell eventually razed the place. Charles I was executed in 1649, and Anna Keay’s The Restless Republic (William Collins, £25) retells the 11 years that came next, through the experiences of persecuted aristocrats, religious extremists such as Diggers and Levellers, dissidents and those quietly working for the Restoration: and inevitably the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, “acutely uncomfortable with the paraphernalia of royalty that he had even then been expected to adopt”. Nonetheless, he made his Protectorate hereditary, which ­finished it off, anointing his inadequate son in what Keay calls an act of “colossal political recklessness”.

Vic Gatrell’s Conspiracy on Cato Street (Cambridge, £25) is a finely researched account of what the author claims was the greatest plot against the state since Guy Fawkes, a reaction to the repressive government of Lord Liverpool that sought to enforce order after the Napoleonic Wars by unprecedented restrictions of civil liberties. The plan to kill several ministers was exposed by “spies, turncoat witnesses, and informers”, and the ­plotters met a gruesome fate. (The plotters whose death sentences were commuted to transportation “did well in New South Wales”, ironically.) For those who have always wondered what, exactly, hanging, drawing and quartering entailed, Gatrell enlightens us.

The rights Liverpool had removed were restored in the 19th century, creating the liberal society. The historian George Dangerfield claimed it then died a “strange death” after the First World War, but Vernon Bogdanor disagrees, in The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain (Biteback, £35), which is as thorough a political history of Edwardian England as you could desire. One bitter conflict of that time was over Ireland. Ronan McGreevy’s Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP (Faber, £20) reveals the story behind the murder of one of Britain’s most illustrious soldiers because of his determined opposition to independence.

The upheavals in Ireland were dwarfed by the carnage unfolding elsewhere, as Antony Beevor’s ­Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 (W&N, £30) brings home. Extensive archival work by the author’s army of research assistants adds new dimensions to what we already knew of this well-trodden path: notably on the contribution of foreign forces (including the British) in 1919 in a failed attempt to stop the Bolsheviks in their tracks.

The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes (Bloomsbury, £25) looks 900 years earlier, to the national myths that Putin exploited in his invasion of Ukraine. “The country’s past will be reinvented by the Russian state as its needs change,” Figes observes.

In Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-speaking Peoples since 1500 (Allen Lane, £40), Peter H Wilson presents a meticulous record of the rise of Teu­tonic militarism, not merely in what became Germany, but in Austria and, indeed, Switzerland, too. It is as much a history of Europe since 1500 as it is of warfare. A fateful chapter in that story is given a revisionist spin in On a Knife Edge by Holger Aff­ler­bach (Cambridge, £25), which arg­ues that Germany’s defeat in 1918 was not inevitable. It could have gone either way on the battlefield, but internal turmoil was to blame for the defeat, leading to a peace not “based on justice but instead [...] too harsh”.

How Germany lost the Second World War, too, is described in 1945: Victory in the West, by Peter Caddick-Adams (Hutchinson Heinemann, £30), a detailed account of the last 100 days of the Western Front, and how Allied troops met ferocious resistance from fanatical Nazis to whom death was preferable to surrender, leading to pointless slaughter. “We have lost the war,” a German woman wrote in her diary on VE Day. “But if we had won it, everything would have been more horrible still.” Some tried to prevent the conflict, including the deluded Anglo-German Fellowship, who were a little too friendly with the Nazis for comfort. Their bizarre story is told in brilliantly readable fashion by Charles Spicer in Coffee with Hitler: The British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis (Oneworld, £20).

Resistance, by Halik Kochanski (Allen Lane, £35), is an encyclopaedic history not simply of resistance movements across Nazi-occupied Europe, but also of the reasons why people chose to resist, and who, indeed, the enemy really was, in countries filled with collaborators. It deals with hideous reprisals – whole villages slaughtered in France and Poland – and facts such as these: “Out of Warsaw’s 24,724 buildings, 10,455 were completely destroyed.”

The outrageous story of how the fortunes of Germany’s industrial empires were bolstered by the depravity of the Third Reich is the subject of Nazi Billionaires by David de Jong (William Collins, £25). If stealing and looting Jewish assets, exploiting slave labour and producing the arms and lethal methods that Hitler used to destroy his opponents were not bad enough, de Jong argues that the political and economic needs of post-war Germany allowed many of the worst criminals to get away with it, including Ferdinand Porsche, the car magnate, and the industrialist Günther Quandt, whose family now control BMW.

Devil Dogs by Saul David (William Collins, £25) is the dramatic account of a company of US Mar­ines who fought all the way across the Pacific between 1942 and 1945. David’s research is as impeccable as his narrative command. How Britain’s Armed Forces coped in two world wars is the subject of Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain 1914-1945, by Robin Prior (Yale, £30), which ex­poses the constant tension, whether in conflict or in peace, between politicians and service chiefs. Prior believes Britain only conquered in 1945 thanks to the Amer­icans, despite the “anglophobe” contingent in their leadership.

Three magisterial books look at the post-war world. Command, by Lawrence Freedman (Allen Lane, £30), is an account by one of our leading military historians of how major post-1945 conflicts, from Korea to Ukraine, have been managed. Henry Kissinger’s Leadership (Allen Lane, £25) looks at the same period, but through six people he knew personally – de Gaulle, Aden­auer, Sadat, Lee Kwan Yew, Thatcher and, most controversially, Nixon – and argues why they were successful. Kissinger’s omniscience took a beating after his remarks that Ukraine should just give in to Russia. Nonetheless, it is always worth hearing from this astonishing eyewitness to history. Ian Kershaw, the acclaimed biographer of Hitler, covers much of the same ground in Personality and Power (Allen Lane, £30), his pen portraits of 20th-­century European leaders from Lenin and Hitler to Gorbachev, Thatcher and Kohl via Churchill and de Gaulle, asking: “How far can a single leader alter the course of history?” Unlike the strong personal advocacy of Kissinger, Kershaw leaves us to make up our own minds.

Other historians write not of leaders but of ordinary lives. Second City: Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain, by Richard Vinen (Allen Lane, £25), makes the case that Brum is, for all its amorphousness, England’s second city, and rightly pays tribute to Joe Chamberlain for transforming it through his progressive policies in the 1870s.

The “swinging” era of England’s first city, from the 1960s to Thatcher, is captured in John Davis’s Waterloo Sunrise (Princeton, £30), a beautifully written account of the arrival of trattorias, Carnaby Street, tower blocks and gentrification, as the capital was developed after the destruction of the war. Matthew Engel’s The Reign – Life in Elizabeth’s Britain, Part I: The Way it Was 1952-79 (Atlantic, £25) delivers equally sharp observations of Teddy Boys, hanged murderers, the British Empire, swinging London, National Service and Mrs Thatcher’s ascent to power, noting that “the City was euphoric” – the post-war consensus had ended. It is a powerful illumination of a lost world that is nevertheless part of living memory.

Richard Cohen’s compelling Making History (W&N, £25) reminds us that all historians must arrange the truth to give their ­version of the past, from Thucydides via Julius Caesar, Shakespeare and Gibbon to Winston Churchill – who famously said history would treat him well, because he would write it. And Cohen offers a salutary reminder of what happens if we “suppress free-thinking about history”, pointing to the Islamic “Counter-Enlightenment”, which by the end of the 20th century had swept up “a daunting proportion” of the world “in religious fanaticism, intellectual intolerance and dogmatic nationalism”.

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