Nine books to look out for in July

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

As with my previous posts of book recommendations, these are based on scouring the publishers’ catalogues for titles that I think look interesting. It’s inevitably a partial list, in both meanings of the word. There are undoubtedly many excellent books coming out in fields I have no interest in – which are many and various – and I will certainly have missed books even for fields which I was actively looking for. With the additional caveat that I haven’t read any of them yet, I offer this for your interest…

The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe
By Joad Raymond Wren; Allen Lane

Based on Wren’s decades of academic work on news and print culture in early modern Europe, The Great Exchange looks to be an epic account of the networks of information across the continent from the late fourteenth to the eighteenth century. While print inevitably plays a large part, it isn’t the whole story: the book is about the human need for news – commercial, political, personal – and how people in the late-medieval and early-modern world built complex systems to send and receive it.

“At its heart,” Wren writes in his introduction, “it remains an attempt to describe actual experiences of news: of wanting it, finding, interpreting and using it, and how these experiences combined to form a much larger, tenuous thing, a news network and a sense of European identity, the complex reality of something personal and material that is simultaneously at the outer reaches of humanity.” It sounds wonderful, I think.

To the Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel
By Andrew Martin; Profile

Martin is a terrific writer – witty, thoughtful and stylish – and his new book has much to recommend it. To the Sea by Train promises to be in part a social history of the British holiday for most of the twentieth century, which carries all sort of regional and class-based nuances and wrinkles, and in part an evocative and charming exploration of the golden age of train travel in the UK. Most if not all of Martin’s writing reads as a love letter to the train – I can’t think of anyone who does it better – and I’m very much looking forward to this addition to his oeuvre.

Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling
By Marina Warner; William Collins

Sanctuary should be a compelling exploration of an ancient human idea – the inviolable place of refuge – and its many iterations across myth and history. Warner proposes to uses a range of literary and other sources to examine how different aspects of the idea have understood and enshrined the concept of sanctuary, as well as how it intersects, not always comfortably, with contemporary shibboleths around national security, human rights and freedom of movement. Historically, the idea of sanctuary has always been allied to the sacred; Warner’s aim is to reimagine the concept for a secular world. This strikes me as a powerful idea and I am reviewing the book for Engelsberg Ideas.

The Heretic of Cacheu: Struggles over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port
Toby Green; Allen Lane

The Heretic of Cacheu is a microhistory of the late seventeenth century in Cacheu – like London a river port – which is located in today’s Guinea-Bissau. The heretic of the title is a woman called Crispina Peres – the wealthiest trader in the town – who was arrested by the Inquisition and brought to Lisbon for trial. Green uses the voluminous records of the Inquisition – including a similar legal process undergone by Luis Rodrigues, a scandal-plagued canon at the cathedral in Portuguese Cape Verde – to build a rich and nuanced portrait of life in Cacheu, at that point the major slave-trading port in the region. The kind of detailed, layered social histories revealed by the testimonies in the Inquisition archives are rare for any town or city in the period, and doubly so for Africa. Toby Green’s previous book, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, was highly praised – I haven’t had the chance to read it yet – and this promises to be similarly revelatory. It should stand alongside classics of microhistory like Montaillou and The Cheese and the Worms and transform our understanding of life in an African polity in the age of European colonial expansion.

The Graces: The Extraordinary Untold Lives of Women at the Restoration Court
By Breeze Barrington; Bloomsbury

The Graces is Barrington’s first book. It’s a study of the Restoration court of Charles II and James II through the lives of the women of the court, most notably Mary of Modena, the Italian noblewoman who married James – twenty-five years her senior – in 1673. The political background to Barrington’s story is tumultuous, encompassing the Glorious Revolution, the fall of James II, and the invasion of Britain and the assumption of the throne by William of Orange. But Barrington’s focus is the world of culture, patronage and influence that Maria shaped around her at court – a remarkable woman who surrounded herself with other remarkable women like Sarah Churchill and Anne Finch. It sounds very promising.

Chasing Jessop: The Mystery of England Cricket’s Oldest Record
By Simon Wilde; Bloomsbury

As cricket fans may already know, whenever an English batsman is scoring freely and well and the prospect of a century hoves into view, one name starts being nervously mentioned. That name is Gilbert Jessop, and in 1902 he scored what is still the fastest century by an Englishman – a feat traditionally thought to have been achieved in 76 balls. According to Wilde, in this groundbreaking account of the spectacular innings, it may have been even quicker. It was, in any case, a time when to hit a six the ball had to go out of the ground, not just over the boundary. I appreciate this won’t be for everyone, but like most people who follow cricket I am a sucker for its history – not just the array of great writers who have been drawn to the sport, but the minutiae of its records and rituals, the slow-passing glories of its long-dead heroes. So this sounds very much a book for me, if for no-one else!

Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World
Justin Marozzi; Allen Lane

Slavery is as old institution – probably as old as civilisation itself – and evidence for it can be found on every continent, stretching back at least as far as the Shang dynasty in the sixteenth century BC. But contemporary Americo-centrism – and a hefty dose of presentism – distorts our understanding of the subject. As Marozzi demonstrates, the slave trade in the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East accounted for a similarly horrific toll on human beings – in the order of 12 to 15 million of them – as the transatlantic trade, and over a much longer period of time.

Many years ago I remember sitting in the British Library and weeping while I read a nineteenth-century account of the Saharan slave trade – I think in James Richardson’s Travels into the Great Desert of Sahara – and it has always confounded me that our understanding of the phenomenon of slavery has been so focused on the Middle Passage and its aftermaths. To comprehend it, we need to see it whole. Captives and Companions therefore sounds to be a hugely valuable contribution to the conversation, introducing much needed detail and complexity. Marozzi ranges from the earliest days of Islam – slavery in Africa long, long predates the birth of the Prophet Mohammed in the sixth century – through to the modern day and the stubborn persistence of slavery in some pockets of the Islamic world. As I say, this has all the hallmarks of an important book.

Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–47
By Michael Haag; Profile

Lawrence Durrell was one of my favourite writers when I was younger, and although it’s been a while since I read any of his novels – I gorged on The Alexandria Quartet and I’m wary of rereading now it in case I don’t like it as much – I still often turn to his poetry and travel writing. (His humorous short stories about diplomatic life – the Antrobus series – are delightful too.)

Haag had intended to write a full biography, but sadly died before he could complete the work. This account of his early life was pieced together posthumously by Haag’s editor. It will be interesting to see how those first three decades or so informed his later work. There is certainly plenty of colour to describe, from a childhood in the Raj and life in Corfu – memorably, if not particularly accurately, recounted in his brother Gerald’s My Family and Other Animals – and wartime diplomatic service in Alexandria. There are other full biographies of Durrell, which I haven’t read, but I think this should still offer plenty of insight into the development of what became a complicated life – and, perhaps more importantly – into the wellsprings of his work.

Winter Dreams: A Historical Guide to Old Age
Barbara H. Rosenwein; Reaktion

This is a great idea for a book: an exploration of how people and thought and felt about old age across two thousand years of recorded history. It’s a rich and profound subject, and Rosenwein – a historian of emotions – surely has a vast range of material to call upon across both literary and historical records and writings. How those thoughts and feelings have been understood has changed constantly over time, as individuals and societies alike have wrestled with when old age begins and what characterises that period of life – its infirmities but also its insights into the human condition. “Above all,” Rosenwein writes in her introduction, “we learn from history that old age - like all other stages of life - is an emotional enterprise, happy and sad, grateful and bitter, wise and foolish, intense and depleted, full of fear, anger and love.” I think this could be moving and profound – a thought surely entirely unrelated to being fifty-eight myself…