Remembrance Day Special: Richard Holmes’ Christmas Wishlist

Between now and Christmas, we’ve asked some of our brilliant authors to provide lists of books they’d like as christmas gifts – either to give or receive. To kick of this series we have esteemed military historian Richard Holmes, with a special selection of Remembrance Day themed books.

We also asked Richard to provide a little background on why he chose the books he did.  Richard wrote:

Given my trade as a military historian and the time of year (there is a poppy in my buttonhole as I write) you should not be surprised that my list has a martial step.

Patrick Hennessey’s The Junior Officers’ Reading Club gives an insider’s view of the contemporary British army as it fights a relentless war against a resolute enemy, and Juliet Nicolson’s The Great Silence is a poignant exploration of the year the guns fell silent after the First World War.

I get irritated when we judge that terrible war primarily through its literature rather than by what non-versifying veterans wrote in their letters and diaries, but Jon Stallworthy’s Survivors’ Songs: From Maldon to the Somme hits so many targets that, when I next write about the First World War, I am bound to be influenced by it.

And for all my structures against it being far too literary a war, I read David Jones’s wonderful prose poem In Parenthesis perhaps once a year, and wish my edition was less scruffy.

Although this has been close to a record year for battlefield visits – a dozen, from Ypres to Salamanca and from Monte Cassino to Bosworth – my affection for ‘civilian’ Italy deepens, with Ravenna, Padua and Torcello visited, the latter on a majestic early autumn day with lunch at Locanda Cipriani.

I have just, all too belatedly, discovered John Julius Norwich’s two-volume history of the short-lived Norman kingdom of Sicily, The Normans in the South and The Kingdom in the Sun. Now I need some excuse for getting myself to the great cathedral at Cefalù – on the back of following George Patton from Palermo to Messina, perhaps?

History is riddled with the strangest of connections.  The Hautevilles, who ruled Norman Sicily, came from a village at the foot of the Cotentin peninsula –  and Patton hustled past it on his way to break out of Normandy in 1944.

A big thanks to Richard for this excellent, evocative list and for starting off the series in such great style. The series will continue all the way up till Christmas, so please come back to see what our other author’s will be hoping for, and do feel free to send in your Christmas wishlists too.