{"id":89496,"date":"2025-05-10T07:32:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-10T07:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/89496\/"},"modified":"2025-05-10T07:32:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-10T07:32:13","slug":"the-five-best-history-books-of-all-time-according-to-terry-deary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/89496\/","title":{"rendered":"The five best history books of all time, according to Terry Deary"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\t\t\t\tLooking for a nonfiction book which will change how you think about the past? Allow the Horrible Histories author to recommend his favourites\u00a0\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n


\n \"author
\n <\/a><\/p>\n

Senior Writer and Commissioning Editor<\/p>\n

Terry Deary<\/a> has made history unforgettable. As the writer of the Horrible Histories series, he transformed dry dates and dusty facts into gruesome, hilarious, and wildly entertaining stories for children. Then, in last year\u2019s A History of Britain in Ten Enemies, he transformed our past into a gruesome, hilarious, and wildly entertaining book for adults.<\/p>\n

With over 350 titles to his name and more than 38 million books sold worldwide, Deary has become one of the most influential figures in historical storytelling<\/a>. But which history books have most inspired the man who made history fun? Here, he reveals his top five favourites\u2026<\/p>\n

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe by Charles Nicholl\"\" <\/p>\n

\u201cMy own tastes in reading are largely murder mysteries. Then a friend recommended The Reckoning and I discovered that true historical mysteries can be just as engaging as the fiction I love. <\/p>\n

\u201cNichol\u2019s solution to Kit Marlowe\u2019s famously mysterious death in 1593 probably wouldn\u2019t convince today\u2019s Crown Prosecution Service,<\/a> but it shines a light on aspects of the Elizabethan world (or under-world) that I never suspected existed. His original research into primary sources is so impressive it revealed to me how the best of the best historians\u2019 minds work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vintage, \u00a314.99<\/p>\n

Stalingrad by Antony Beevor\"\" <\/p>\n

\u201cIn my History of Britain in Ten Enemies, I reflect on the way the average Briton\u2019s view of the present is distorted by Anglo-centric teaching of history. It\u2019s difficult to find international peace<\/a> while each country believes it is the white knight of history, slaying the other nations that are the fire-breathing aggressors.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs such, Russia was an enigma to me until I read Stalingrad. Any nation living through that 1940s hell is going to have scars it carries with it \u2013 and affects its psyche \u2013 for generations. For Britain it was the horror of the Blitz that my parents experienced \u2013 but I discovered Stalingrad and the Russian experience of defying and surviving an invasion was worse. Beevor\u2019s book gives me some understanding of why Russia is the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penguin, \u00a312.99<\/p>\n

Summer of Blood: The Peasants\u2019 Revolt of 1381 by Dan Jones\"\" <\/p>\n

\u201cMy history education through the early sixties taught me that our knowledge of the past is all about monarchs <\/a>and wars, dates and great events. I was misinformed. Those leaders and their lives are a tiny percentage of the story of human existence. The majority of people are like me: peasants. They have their lives and struggles, triumphs and disasters, too \u2013 they simply aren\u2019t so well recorded in the annals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Peasants\u2019 Revolt opened my eyes to the realities of the past and how the forgotten \u2018little\u2019 people of the past have their breaking points, too. Dan Jones also demonstrated the dangers of simplifying the past to fit onto a page of a school history text. Yes, the Poll Tax did play a part in sparking the revolt. But it was also about people and real personalities in the underclasses. And it asks the vital question, what would make me snap and revolt?\u201d<\/p>\n

HarperCollins, \u00a312.99<\/p>\n

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman\"\" <\/p>\n

\u201cAs an established children\u2019s fiction author by the early 90s, I was commissioned to write non-fiction. My job was to present facts to children in a \u2018child-friendly voice\u2019. So much non-fiction<\/a> for children had been written by \u2018experts\u2019 and \u2018academics\u2019 and was inaccessible to reluctant readers. I needed to start reading non-fiction myself and came across A Distant Mirror.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving suffered impenetrable prose in school texts, I was thrilled to find there are historians like Tuchman who can engage, entertain and enlighten without making reading about the 14th century a chore. Academic historians writing in formal prose have their place, but there is now a wealth of accessible history writing to bring the general reader pleasure as well as edification and stimulating ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penguin, \u00a314.99<\/p>\n

Somme by Lyn Macdonald\"\" <\/p>\n

\u201cAlexander Pope said, \u2018The proper study of mankind is man\u2019 (with apologies to women, but we know what he means). Folk memories of the World War One <\/a>battle at the Somme have become about statistics, but Macdonald\u2019s book reminded me that a thousand dead is not a tragedy \u2013 it is a thousand tragedies. And for every Allied family that was left grieving a dead man, there was a family in the Central Powers suffering the same way.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory through eyewitnesses that Macdonald interviewed before they died reminded me that history is not about statistics, it is about human experience. It is about me and you \u2013 why we behave the way we do. It is about self-knowledge. It is why we need history books.\u201d<\/p>\n

Penguin, \u00a312.99<\/p>\n

A History of Britain in Ten Enemies is out now in paperback (Penguin, \u00a310.99). Deary\u2019s debut novel Actually, I\u2019m a Murderer is published 12th June (Constable, \u00a318.99)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking for a nonfiction book which will change how you think about the past? Allow the Horrible Histories…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[4036,3444,17977,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-89496","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-book-interviews","9":"tag-books","10":"tag-books-feature","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114482377245006040","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}