The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus

"I love history and I find medical history in particular very gripping (especially the discovery of vaccines ), so I really enjoyed The Empress and the English Doctor: How Catherine the Great Defied a Deadly Virus . The author, Lucy Ward, is a journalist so it’s good bedtime reading, bringing home the story of the fight against the horrors of smallpox as well as focusing on Catherine the Great , who I’ve been wanting to know more about. Staying with Russia and popular history , Antony Beevor , the bestselling military historian, has a big book coming out on the Russian Revolution (and subsequent civil war) next week, already described by more than one reviewer as a “masterpiece.” If you’re interested in naval history , you may already have come across Victory at Sea , by Yale historian Paul Kennedy (author of the iconic The Rise and Fall of Great Powers ), which charts the rise of America as a superpower. Other books I liked the look of are A Village in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd (and Angelika Patel), a microhistory of how one small German mountain village—Oberstdorf in Bavaria—responded to the rise of Nazism. Already out in the US but out in the UK later this month is The Road to Dien Bien Phu — when Vietnamese forces defeated French colonisers in a pitched battle. Christopher Goscha, a professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, looks at how, from almost nothing in 1945, Ho Chi Minh managed to build up an army strong enough to send the French packing by 1954 (setting the stage for the Americans to be sent packing two decades later). Turning to the more distant past, there’s a good introduction to the Nile civilisation of more than three millennia ago, Tutankhamun’s Trumpet: The Story of Ancient Egypt in 100 Objects , by Cambridge Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson . The Persian Empire may be less written about in English but deserves as much attention. Persians: The Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones of Cardiff University is now out, his books always a good antidote to the Greek-centric view of ancient history where Persians only feature as the baddies. The Young Alexander by TV documentary producer Alex Rowson looks at the man who brought the Persian Achaemenid Empire to its end, Alexander III of Macedon (aka the Great). Rowson uses the archaeological finds at Vergina in Northern Greece—the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, Alexander’s father—as a springboard to weave a picture of Alexander beyond the one many of us have from reading Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven. Empires as a subject have been popular this spring, with different emperors across time and space featuring in I n the Shadow of the Gods: the Emperor in World History by Cambridge historian Dominic Lieven. In Empires of Eurasia , Jeffrey Mankoff looks at how the imperial past of Russia, Turkey, Iran and China affects their current geopolitical outlook. Though not out till the end of the month, what looks to be a refreshing take on world history is a look at all the people who didn’t settle down across the millennia: Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World by British travel writer Anthony Sattin. I was also excited to see a new book about Ferdinand Magellan, the disaster-ridden Portuguese explorer, by global historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. It’s called Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan , and is also a detailed look at the place and period he lived in."