AUSTERITY BRITAIN: 1945-51 by David Kynaston
Bloomsbury £25

In this appealing slice of social history, Kynaston doesn’t so much sprinkle his text with first-hand testimony as drench it. Mixing recollections from the famous (Fay Weldon, Joan Bakewell and Doris Lessing all chip in with memories) with extracts from Mass Observation reports (“Not knowing much about the facts of life before marriage, it came as rather a shock to my nervous system,” confessed one nameless Bradford housewife), his giant book summons up in vivid brushstrokes both the actuality of life in staple-starved postwar Britain and the state of the nation’s morals and attitudes. Sometimes the outsize, patchwork nature of the project can be overwhelming, but what ultimately makes this book such a triumph is the keenness of Kynaston’s democratic instincts, as he measures the designs and dictats of the postwar planners and governing class against the wishes of the people they were meant to serve. So often, the planners thought they knew best; so often, as in the blight visited upon Plymouth and Coventry, they were entirely wrong.

NEMESIS: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 by Max Hastings
HarperPress £25

Hastings’s success as a military historian is based on four cardinal virtues – solid scholarship, a supreme understanding of strategy, stirring evocations of battles and trenchant opinion. All are present and correct in this wide-ranging history, which does much to rectify previous Amero-centric views of the second world war in the Far East, laying heavy emphasis, for instance, on Japan’s war in China and putting matters such as the level of American and British losses – some 135,000 servicemen in total, compared, say, to 15-25m Chinese soldiers and civilians – into proper perspective. Unafraid to be controversial (he firmly believes that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary), Hastings proves himself once again to be the master of his material.

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THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE by Graham Robb
Picador £18.99

When in 1794 the Abbé Grégoire conducted a survey of patois in France, he found that barely 11% of the population claimed to be “pure” French speakers; nearly a century later, in 1880, the situation had barely improved, with just 20% declaring themselves comfortable speaking French. In this remarkable journey into the true history and nature of La France profonde, Robb uncovers a vast, barely recognisable country of extraordinary contrasts, endless divisions, fierce and occasionally murderous localism and mysterious secrets, where tribal allegiance to the pays overrode any notion of Frenchness, where isolated villages conducted the most arcane religious practises, and where memories of a whole caste of untouchables, the cagots, existed as recently as the 1960s.

LONDON IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: “A Human Awful Wonder of God” by Jerry White
Cape £20

Energy, élan and watertight scholarship go hand in hand in this fresh and enthusiastic account of late-Georgian and Victorian London. So much that we recognise about the modern city, from policemen and the Houses of Parliament to cabbies and council estates, first saw the light of day in the 19th century, when the capital changed out of all recognition from a city still rooted in the distant past to the world’s most modern metropolis. White’s survey does full justice to this teeming, restless century in London’s development.

SINGLED OUT: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson
Viking £20
“Problem of the Surplus Woman” ran one headline in 1921 when census figures revealed that the slaughter of the first world war had left Britain with 1.7m more women than men. In this often poignant and immensely sympathetic piece of social history, Nicholson explores the consequences on individual lives of this striking statistical imbalance. For many, in an era when marriage was generally conceived as “the crown and joy of woman’s life”, the resulting spinsterhood was a condition simply to be endured; for others, it proved a liberation, as they defied spiteful jibes about being “limpets” and “bread-snatchers” to forge pioneering careers for themselves.

THE WHISPERERS: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia by Orlando Figes
Allen Lane £25

Figes has already left a significant mark on the history of the Russian revolution, courtesy of his mesmerising 1996 book A People’s Tragedy. In The Whisperers, he now plunges headfirst into the Terror, focusing on the effects that Stalinism and its all-encompassing brutality had on private lives, particularly within the family. Figes and his researchers conducted hundreds of interviews for the book, and disinterred long-forgotten memories: from children forced to denounce their parents, husbands their wives. A remarkable feat of historical excavation, the result, though sometimes dense, is both ground-breaking and intensely moving.

THE COMPLETE POMPEII by Joanne Berry
Thames & Hudson £24.95

This book’s strengths are its accessibility and up-to-dateness. Hundreds of volumes have been written about Pompeii and Herculaneum, but few have offered such a thorough overview, and even fewer can boast such fresh information. Berry is not the most stylish of writers, but she deals thoughtfully with all aspects of the subject, from the eruption itself and the often messy archeological history to the individual finds. Beautifully illustrated, it is an ideal introduction to one of the world’s great classical sites.

BESTSELLERS

1 A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr
(Macmillan) 61,125

2 How We Built Britain by David Dimbleby
(Bloomsbury) 25,575

3 Bomber Boys by Patrick Bishop
(HarperPress) 19,720

4 Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd
(Chatto) 18,230

5 Austerity Britain by David Kynaston
(Bloomsbury) 17,825

All bestseller lists prepared by The Bookseller using data supplied by and copyright to Nielsen BookScan taken from the TCM 02/01/07-17/11/07

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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