Tom Holland Recommended Books

The Command of the Ocean describes with unprecedented authority and scholarship the rise of Britain to naval greatness, and the central place of the Navy and naval activity in the life of the nation and government. It describes not just battles, voyages and cruises but how the Navy was manned, how it was supplied with timber, hemp and iron, how its men (and sometimes women) were fed, and above all how it was financed and directed. It was during the century and a half covered by this book that the successful organizing of these last three - victualling, money and management - took the Navy to the heart of the British state. It is the great achievement of the book to show how completely integrated and mutually dependent Britain and the Navy then became.

In Shakespeare's Henry V the French lords quail at the thought of British soldiers, who eat like wolves and fight like devils after 'great meals of beef'. Two centuries later, eighteenth-century England rings to boisterous renderings of 'The Roast Beef of Old England' and loud cries of 'Beef and Liberty'. And even today, in the Telegraph in June 2002, a farmer blames the French defeat in the World Cup on their ban on British beef. Eating meat rich with blood recalls ancient beliefs that it endows power, life and passion. It is a manly food, fit for fighting men: in the Napoleonic wars the British navy gave its sailors a staggering 208 pounds of beef a year. But why are so many beefy images linked to British 'freedom'. In this sparkling, provocative book Ben Rogers follows a linked set of icons - roast beef and John Bull, bull dogs and butchers -showing how the bull came to define plain, stubborn, Protestant Englishness against corrupt, effeminate, Catholic Europe. His tale is rich in vivid historical detail; from the use of the roasting jack and the outcries against French fricassees to the famous 'Durham Ox' which toured Britain in 1802, and the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks (exclusively male), which still meets in London today. Lively, funny and illuminating, illustrated throughout with prints and drawings, including famous works by Hogarth and Gillray, Beef and Liberty is a feast to relish, an entirely original history, and a pioneering study in a new subject - food nationalism.

A publishing phenomenon in Europe, where it has sold 230,000 copies in hardback, Bart van Loo's epic history of the dukedom of Burgundy has the grip of a great historical novel and the fascination of a wonderful factual narrative.In 1525, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands.This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages.It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.Rightly compared to great narrative historians like Barbara Tuchman, Bart van Loo has written a popular and scholarly masterpiece.

This lively book reveals the clothing and fashion of the world depicted in Jane Austen’s beloved books, focusing on the long Regency between the years 1795 and 1825. During this period, accelerated change saw Britain’s turbulent entry into the modern age, and clothing reflected these transformations. Starting with the intimate perspective of clothing the self, Dress in the Age of Jane Austen moves outward through the social and cultural spheres of home, village, countryside, and cities, and into the wider national and global realms, exploring the varied ways people dressed to inhabit these environments. Jane Austen’s famously observant fictional writings, as well as her letters, provide the entry point for examining the Regency age’s rich complexity of fashion, dress, and textiles for men and women in their contemporary contexts. Lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings, historic garments, and fashion plates—including many previously unpublished images—this authoritative yet accessible book will help readers visualize the external selves of Austen’s immortal characters as clearly as she wrote of their internal ones. The result is an enhanced understanding of Austen’s work and time, and also of the history of one of Britain’s most distinctive fashion eras.

From the acclaimed author of Japan Story, this is the history of Japan, distilled into the stories of twenty remarkable individuals.The vivid and entertaining portraits in Chris Harding's enormously enjoyable new book take the reader from the earliest written accounts of Japan right through to the life of the current empress, Masako. We encounter shamans and warlords, poets and revolutionaries, scientists, artists and adventurers - each offering insights of their own into this extraordinary place.For anyone new to Japan, this book is the ideal introduction. For anyone already deeply involved with it, this is a book filled with surprises and pleasures.

From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels--poets, novelists, philosophers--who, through their epic quarrels, passionate love stories, heartbreaking grief, and radical ideas launched Romanticism onto the world stage, inspiring some of the greatest thinkers of the time.When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, How can I be free? It all began in a quiet university town in Germany in the 1790s, when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, their writing, and their lives. This brilliant circle included the famous poets Goethe, Schiller, and Novalis; the visionary philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; the contentious Schlegel brothers; and, in a wonderful cameo, Alexander von Humboldt. And at the heart of this group was the formidable Caroline Schlegel, who sparked their dazzling conversations about the self, nature, identity, and freedom. The French revolutionaries may have changed the political landscape of Europe, but the young Romantics incited a revolution of the mind that transformed our world forever. We are still empowered by their daring leap into the self, and by their radical notions of the creative potential of the individual, the highest aspirations of art and science, the unity of nature, and the true meaning of freedom. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfillment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our responsibilities toward our community and future generations. At the heart of this inspiring book is the extremely modern tension between the dangers of selfishness and the thrilling possibilities of free will.

A pangolin's tongue is longer than its body. It keeps it furled in a nifty pouch near the hip A swift flies 200,000 miles in its lifetime. That's far enough to get to the moon and back - then back to the moon.There's a fable that storks deliver babies. In fact, the Nazis used them to air-drop propaganda. Each of these animals is extraordinary. And each of them may soon disappear from the earth.A lavishly illustrated compendium of the staggering lives of some of the world's most endangered animals, Consider the Golden Mole is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck - to fall for the likes of the wondrous Pygmy Hippo, the seahorse, the narwhal and, as astonishing and endangered as them all, the human.

Why was Jesus, who said I judge no one, put to death for a political crime? Of course, this is a historical question--but it is not only historical. Jesus's life became a philosophical theme in the first centuries of our era, when pagan and Christian philosophers clashed over the meaning of his sayings and the significance of his death. Modern philosophers, too, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have tried to retrace the arc of Jesus's life and death.I Judge No One is a philosophical reading of the four memoirs, or gospels, that were fashioned by early Christ-believers and collected in the New Testament. It offers original ways of seeing a deeply enigmatic figure who calls himself the Son of Man.David Lloyd Dusenbury suggests that Jesus offered his contemporaries a scandalous double claim. First, that human judgements are pervasive and deceptive; and second, that even divine laws can only be fulfilled in the human experience of love. Though his life led inexorably to a grim political death, what Jesus's sayings revealed--and still reveal--is that our highest desires lie beyond the political.