Twelve books to look out for in July and August

Upcoming history and non-fiction titles that have caught my eye

First Encounters: How England and Mughal India Shaped the World
By Lubaaba Al-Azami
John Murray; July

A lot of books about Britain and India concentrate on the Raj and Britain’s imperial zenith, so I’m delighted to see Al-Azami’s book looking at encounters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between English merchants and travelers and the wealth and power of Mughal India. (To my shame I still haven’t read Nandini Das’s Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire, published last year, which explored the career of the Jacobean diplomat Sir Thomas Roe, and which sounded magnificent.)

First Encounters focuses on the accounts of Thomas Stephens, a Catholic exile; the merchant Ralph Fitch; and an adventurer named John Mildenhall. Together they embody the first tentative steps of a rapprochement which still fundamentally shapes our world today. It’s easy to slip into faintly exoticising language when writing about these interactions – dazzling splendour and all that – not least because those are often the sorts of terms in which European travelers wrote of the East, having suddenly discovered that their idea of great splendour was a small and parochial thing, and struggling to articulate the otherworldly abundance, wealth and wonder of what they were experiencing. But these kind of first encounters are important not least because they are a way of re-introducing readers to powerful civilizations like that the Mughals without any of the baggage of succeeding centuries. I think this could be wonderful.

Clay: A Human History
By Jennifer Lucy Allan
White Rabbit; July

I enjoyed The Foghorn’s Lament, Allan’s last book, and this sounds like an excellent idea. As I understand it, Clay focuses on the history and archaeology of clay as a means of representing the human form. It is a medium we have been shaping and reshaping for millennia; our fingerprints are all over it. As such, clay is a material we have have always been in dialogue with about ourselves, mapping our bodies and articulating our understanding of consciousness and being. You can see that there is a lot to write about here, and the subject matter should allow Allan plenty of scope for nuance and depth.

The Art of Medieval Falconry
By Yannis Hadjinicolaou
Reaktion; July

Part of Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series, this is an exploration of falconry from an art history perspective. Birds of prey are, self-evidently, powerful creatures, but they are also powerful emblems too, and man’s adoption of them for the hunt seems to be a point at which wildness and domestication meet on complex and uneasy terms. I’ve always found the subject fascinating, and given that falconry was a key pastime of the rich and mighty across both western Christianity and Islam, there must be exceptionally rich visual sources here.

A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine
By Christopher Beckman
Hurst Publishers; July

Not going to lie. I absolutely love the deep, tangy taste of anchovies so this book very much has my name on it! Anchovies are a ubiquitous feature of Mediterranean cuisine and have been flavouring food in Europe since at least as far back as Roman garum. Like a lot of seemingly modest foods, they have a rich history and often been freighted with all kinds of social and other connotations. Fingers crossed, this could be really good.

Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland
By Jen Hadfield
Picador; July

A memoir from the exceptional poet Jen Hadfield, who has lived and worked in the Shetlands for nearly twenty years. The remotest part of the British archipelago, I think, and technically part of Scotland, the Shetlands have their own distinct landscape, culture and history, shaped by very different forces to the mainland, are are very much an archipelago of their own. (Shetlanders, I imagine, would wonder who was remote from whom.) I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather read about the islands, its people, and its ways of life.

As a side note, with a recent new book, Cairn, from Kathleen Jamie and a forthcoming new memoir from Gerry Cambridge, this is very much a bumper season for prose from Scottish poets – or, in Hadfield’s case – from poets based in Scotland.

The Troubadours
By Linda M. Paterson
Reaktion; July

Another book in Reaktion’s Medieval Lives series, this looks to offer fresh insight into the remarkable explosion of cultural energy that the troubadours of medieval south and western Europe represent. Paterson’s book promises to explore both the lives of these poet-musicians, who - like the players of early-modern England - moved among every strata of society, and the social, literary and musicological legacies of their work. Along the way, the book should examine the ideas about love and chivalry, faith and war which the troubadours articulated so powerfully, and which in some respects still resonate today.

Who Really Wrote the Bible: The Story of the Scribes
By William M. Schniedewind
Princeton University Press; August

Although there are individuals who are traditionally considered to have authored sections of the Bible – Moses the Pentateuch, David the Psalms, and so on – there really isn’t much beyond tradition to cling to. Schniedewind, however, proposes that the Bible was written by communities of scribes in the Near East handing down both techniques and knowledge from generation to generation, from master to apprentice. I don’t know how conclusive this is likely to be, but I think it should be a fascinating study of the world of textual preservation and textual transmission in the pre-Hellenistic world of Jerusalem and Judah – a world at once vanishingly distant from our own, but without which the world as we know it would not exist.

The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg
By Uwe Neumahr
Pushkin Press; August

I read through some of the Nuremberg transcripts a couple of years ago. If the crimes the courts sat in judgement on were unique in their horror, the courts themselves and the processes of international justice they sought to establish are in their own way no less remarkable. More broadly the weight on those called to bear witness to the Holocaust, and the tension between testimony and justice, remain powerfully resonant topics - not least because they push up against the limits of language to describe such experiences. (See Come to this Court and Cry by Linda Kinstler, for example.) Neumahr brings something different to the table by examining the responses of the writers and intellectuals who covered the trials – among them John Dos Passos, Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn – and who tried to articulate, for themselves and to the world, a response to the atrocities revealed day by day.

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World
by Andrea di Robilant
Atlantic Books; August

A biography of the 16th-century Venetian writer and diplomat Giovanni Ramusio, one of the great historians of exploration and travel. Ramusio collated and translated a large number of first-hand narratives in his three-volume Navigations and Travels. It has influenced both writers and explorers ever since. When this sort of thing is done well, it can be riveting, opening up for the reader the extraordinary moment of surprise and wonder that the West experienced as it spread out into the world and found the limits of its judgement and imagination desperately exposed. (Edward Wilson-Lee’s A History of Water, about Portugal’s Damião de Góis and Luis de Camões is exemplary in this regard.)

An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets
By Tim Brookes
Quercus, August

This is a brilliant idea, I think. There are innumerable books about habitat and species loss, but the convergence of technology and globalisation is destroying human cultures and intellectual ecosystems too. Brookes’s book is about what is lost - history, tradition, culture, wisdom, identity - when societies and peoples are compelled to abandon the systems they write with. It’s happening around the world all the time to indigenous and other peoples and it represents a loss of intellectual, societal and cultural diversity we should all be concerned about. This promises to be both a fascinating guide to these vanishing worlds and an argument for saving them from oblivion.

Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq
By Bartle Bull
Atlantic Books; August

An exploration of a country and a region with one of the longest, most complex and most storied histories of anywhere on the planet. Bull is a former Middle East journalist with on-the-ground experience to inform his research. I’m hoping his book will draw us away from the tyranny of presentism to unravel the deep connections between present and past and to show how the long reach of culture and history informs recent and current events in often surprising and illuminating ways.

Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief
By Ronald Hutton
Yale University Press; August

Ronald Hutton is one of Britain’s finest historians and this is the second volume of his acclaimed biography of Cromwell. It covers the tumultuous period from 1647 to the early 1650s and Cromwell’s ultimate seizure of power, which includes both the execution of Charles I and Cromwell’s brutal campaign in Ireland. If this is new to you, you should probably start with the first volume, The Making of Oliver Cromwell, published in 2021; either way, this is surely as compelling and detailed a study of one of British history’s most complex and controversial figures as we are likely to get.