Books of the year: Non-fiction

Published on Friday 4 December 2009 18:35

THERE can be no excuses this year for losing sight of the real meaning of Christmas, thanks to Diarmaid MacCulloch's A History of Christianity (Allen Lane, £35). A real stocking-stretcher at almost 1,200 pages, it's awe-inspiring in its scholarship, but accessible in style – indeed, a compulsive read. You'd hardly think MacCulloch could have left anything significant unsaid if it weren't for Charles Freeman's A New History of Early Christianity (Yale, £25).

This brilliantly evokes the intellectual excitement and spiritual ferment when a sect of enthusiasts was turning itself into a church. Erudite, elegant and insightful, Miri Rubin's Mother of God (Allen Lane, 25) follows the Virgin Mary's fortunes through 2,000 years of change.

Christianity will loom the larger in the Viking story from now on, thanks to Robert Ferguson's fascinating The Hammer and the Cross (Allen Lane, 30). Not, though, in the victim's guise we might expect. Dreadful as they were, Ferguson suggests, the Viking raids were the rearguard action of a people who felt their way of life was under threat. The Christ who brought not peace but the sword turned up again a few centuries later in Mexico. Edited by Colin McEwan and Leonardo Lpez Lujn, Moctezuma (British Museum, 25) gives a colourful – yet clear and even-handed account of an episode which has come down to us enveloped in lurid myth. Eugene Rogan's The Arabs (Allen Lane, 25) brings a bit of rigour to a much-romanticised story: it's just as compelling – and as tragic – told this way.

As historical tragedies go, 20th-century totalitarianism takes some beating. This year, for once, there has been no big biography of Hitler, Lenin or Stalin; Robert Service's Trotsky (Macmillan, 25) makes a welcome change. But it's been business as usual for the Second World War. Andrew Roberts's The Storm of War (Allen Lane, 25) is a terrific read. Notorious right-winger though he is, Roberts acknowledges the heroism of the Soviet sacrifice: the conflict's main theatre, he argues, was in the east. Ironically, though, he concludes that while "our" war may have been fought for freedom and democracy, its final beneficiary was Stalin's enslaving state. It's easy to caricature these two Second World Wars: that the western one was no game of cricket is appallingly evident in Antony Beevor's unforgettable D-Day (Viking, 25). Even so, a different quality of horror is on display in Michael Jones's account of Germany's defeat in Russia: The Retreat (John Murray, 20).

Earlier struggles haven't been forgotten. One highlight has been John Keegan's magisterial account of The American Civil War (Hutchinson, 25). For a more far-flung conflict, with a swashbuckling hero, there's John Lynch's biography of Argentina's liberator, San Martn (Yale, 25). But some of the most interesting war books of the year have come at their subject obliquely: Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller's story of the song, Lili Marlene (Norton, 17.99), is a wonderful example. The human side of the Second World War is poignantly revealed in Alan Allport's Demobbed (Yale, 20). The shadow cast by conflict over the ensuing peace has been something of a theme this year: Juliet Nicolson's The Great Silence: 1918–20 (John Murray, 20) describes a shell-shocked Britain, deep in mourning and yet forced to confront the post-war period.

The instinct to get up-close and personal with the past has not been confined to historians of war. Keith Thomas's The Ends of Life (OUP, 25) is an extraordinarily ambitious attempt to get right under the skin of men and women from the 16th to the 18th centuries, for a sense of how they experienced themselves. Less methodologically intrepid, but highly entertaining, Maureen Waller's The English Marriage (John Murray, 25) is by turns surprising, scandalous and heart-warming. Georgian England has done well this year, with Amanda Vickery's beautifully textured exploration of domestic life, Behind Closed Doors (Yale, 18.99). Fast-forward two centuries and David Kynaston's Family Britain (Bloomsbury, 25) does the same for the 1950s, bringing out the life and colour of an age we tend to see in monochrome.

For those who prefer to cut to the chase, the 18th-century sex industry is exposed in Dan Cruickshank's The Secret History of Georgian London (Random House, 25). Pretty much a sex industry in himself, Charles II pursued his political intrigues with much the same fervour: micro- and macro-politics meld together seamlessly in Jenny Uglow's biography, A Gambling Man (Faber, 25). And so, from Pepys's England, to bed (or not) with the Irish: as Patrick Kavanagh pointed out, the Great Hunger was never just nutritional.

Diarmaid Ferriter charts a troubled 20th-century history of sex and society in Occasions of Sin (Profile, 30). Har-dly history at all, but a fine first draft, Fintan O'Toole's Ship of Fools (Faber, 12.99) tells the story of the Celtic Tiger, the "economic miracle" that never really was. The booms and busts of 50 centuries are traced in The Great Cities in History (Thames & Hudson, 24.95). Edited by John Julius Norwich and illuminatingly written by a star-studded range of writers, this splendidly illustrated book sees the whole human story as one of rising and falling urban centres, from Uruk to the supercity of Shanghai. By contrast, Michael Fry's Edinburgh (Macmillan, 25) gives us a city for all seasons (even if most of them are cold and dreich): 1,500 years of barbarism, enlightenment and vibrant, often violent, life.