Sudhir Hazareesingh's Reading List

"This is a wonderfully ambitious book. It’s meticulously researched, which is one of the criteria for the prize. It’s also very well written, which often isn’t the case when you’re dealing with subjects like this, which are quite technical and where some of the material is quite dry. Jamie Belich has done a phenomenal amount of research and written it out in a very engaging way—or as engaging as one can be when one is talking about the Black Death. No, he’s a Professor of Imperial and Global history—that’s the chair he holds here at the University of Oxford. But I think it’s in the nature of that kind of research that you have to have a good command of economic material and economic data. That is one of the other things that attracted our attention. Although it is very much centred on economic history, it’s also a book about the plague, and he discusses it at some considerable length. The book’s capacity to draw on different disciplines is something that we thought was very impressive. Then there’s the grand sweep. With history books , sometimes you say they’re ambitious when they cover fifty or a hundred years. This is a book that starts in 1346 and makes an argument about the impact on the globe that stretches right into and up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. This really is grand history, in the good old-fashioned sense of the term. Yes, and the reason why this is important in a wider sense is that one of the things that global history has tried to do, since its emergence, is to move away from the obsession with Europe and the idea that everything that has been important and significant in the world has been important and significant because it happened in Europe or has come from Europe. One of the striking things about this book is that, in talking about the Great Divergence, he acknowledges that part of Europe does end up pulling ahead. But it’s not just Europe. There’s also what he calls the Muslim South—the Middle East and North Africa—and they are part of this movement too. And it’s not for any institutional or cultural reason, but simply by the arbitrary fact that those were also the places where the plague struck very hard. To put it starkly, the argument of the book is that wherever the plague hit, these are the parts of the world that eventually benefited and prospered, and those places where the plague didn’t strike—India and China—ended up falling behind. He’s saying this is not about culture, this is not about institutions, this is not about religion—it’s the plague. He’s laid out the argument in as convincing a way as he can. If you push him—and there are places in the book where he acknowledges it—he accepts that the plague is not the only factor. What he’s really arguing, if one had to summarise it in a schematic way, is that while all these other variables mattered, the plague is the only thing that is common across the board, and therefore, the plague is the most significant factor. “You want a set of books that are going to broaden our intellectual and cultural horizons” The book is in four parts. I’m not a specialist in this period, but the bits that were illuminating for me were Parts Three and Four, where he’s talking about the Middle East and North Africa. Forgetting about the plague, just the way in which he demonstrates that these areas were also growing at that time, is very impressive and innovative. That’s where the major contribution of the book comes and Parts One and Two were just necessary to build that up. That’s also why it’s so long. What did they say about Schubert’s Ninth Symphony – ‘the heavenly length’? It does go on, but that’s what it takes to make and sustain this thesis."

"We liked it for the same reasons you did! It’s comprehensive, and that’s very important because a problem with history writing in general, but particularly with resistance, is that it tends to be written from a nation-centric point of view. Everybody wants to tell “their” story and how great they were or how terrible things were for them. That’s the framework through which most of these stories get told. Certainly, the Resistance memoir literature, which is vast, is almost all nation-centred. But this was a pan-European movement and what she does really well is to identify first of all the commonalities. In all of these countries, when you look at underground resistance movements, similar things happened. They had clandestine literature, they collected intelligence, later on they started engaging in sabotage and armed conflict. All of this is happening at different moments and in different ways, but it is happening across Europe. But looking at it across Europe gives you a sense that geography, too, matters. What happens in Eastern Europe is different from Western Europe. That’s the other big takeaway from the book. The Nazis, beyond a certain point in the East, simply regarded these territories as fodder. They wanted to enslave the local populations. It was an incredibly dumb strategy because one of its consequences was to render any kind of collaboration impossible. In Western Europe, the regime was different. They didn’t treat these countries in the same manner. They were brutal but not genocidal. That difference also has an impact on the kinds of resistance movements which emerged in different parts of Europe. It’s also the remarkable feat of reading all this material in so many different languages. The book is an extraordinary achievement in that respect. Speaking personally, I think it’s also a topical book because we’re talking about resistance at the moment. This is a book that helps us think about some of the obvious issues and also some of the awkward ones. We need to think carefully, because some of the organisations that in recent times we’ve called terrorists go on to become seen as freedom fighters. That was what was happening in Europe in the Second World War. The Nazis were calling all of these resistance organisations terrorists, and now we think of them differently. Yes, and here I can speak with a little bit more authority. A lot of it is about France, and because I’ve studied this period in detail, I know what a phenomenally complicated story it is. The French Resistance is three things: it’s Gaullism, it’s communism, and it’s the so-called internal resistance. The relationship among them is complex at any one time and over the six-year period, and at no point in the book does she put a foot wrong in writing about it. That she is able to get everything right in that way is very impressive and I am sure it’s the same for the other countries she is writing about."

"The history of books has now become, quite rightly, an important subject in its own right. Given the remit of the Wolfson Prize, books about books feature prominently in the line-up. The year that I was in contention, Richard Ovenden’s excellent work about the history of book burning was on the shortlist. Emma Smith’s book brings a lot of pleasure. It’s very enjoyable. There are lots of juicy, tasty, and heart-warming anecdotes. We liked the way in which the stories are woven together. You’re moving around from the 12th century to the present. It’s not in a random way because there is an overall movement and sense of direction, and the sixteen chapters have particular themes to them. You get a sense of the power of books. There’s power in a positive sense, but the Stephen King quotation is also about the potential for books to be, as Emma Smith says, sickening, disturbing and enraging. Books have that negative capacity, too. One of the chapters is about Mein Kampf . That chapter is topical because it’s all about freedom of expression, which is an important issue for us all at the moment. This is a book that, in a very mild way, takes you to those big, important questions. I like the unassuming way in which she does that—not in a thumping-the-table, ‘this is what I think, therefore this is what we must all think’ way but opening issues up as questions to address. In fact, she doesn’t give answers. That’s what I like about her. She identifies the important things that we need to think about. The other thing I liked was the notion of the physicality of books—what she calls “bookhood”—and the relationship that you develop with them. As we are having this conversation on Zoom, I see books behind you, you see books behind me here. We’re surrounded by them. We do all kinds of things with them: they’re like props. We live in a small flat in north Oxford which is completely overflowing and we don’t know what to do with them. We despair. That whole relationship with books is something she talks about in a very intelligent, subtle, and often touching way. For all of those reasons, we thought this book should be on the shortlist."

"In a narrow sense, this is a twin biography. It’s about two translators who are actors in this big drama of the encounter between the British and Chinese empires in the late 18th and early 19th century—from the 1790s through to the Opium Wars in the late 1830s. One of these two figures is George Staunton, who’s a child prodigy. He learns to speak Chinese when he’s very young and meets the emperor when he’s twelve years old. He must have been insufferable! He stays on in China and becomes an interpreter for the East India Company. Then we have this remarkable character, Li Zibiao, who’s part of the Catholic tradition in China. A lot of people will discover the existence of this because there’s a general assumption that China in that period is completely inward-looking, and largely closed to the world. The fact that Li Zibiao goes to Naples, becomes a Catholic priest, and learns Latin doesn’t help his career. But at this particular moment, and in this encounter, he plays a very important role. The slightly larger story Henrietta Harrison is telling is about the role of these two translators in mediating the encounter between these two powers that are trying to reach some kind of accommodation. It’s a wonderfully subtle book because when you look at the diplomatic history, the way in which this encounter is normally written about, it’s about clashes, about oppositions. It’s generally written in a binary way. What she’s trying to do is go beyond those oppositions and find, through these two people, the spaces where compromise and mutual understanding could be reached. Translation is one critical way in which this could happen. She has wonderful examples. How you translate the Chinese word yi makes a huge difference: whether you’re calling the British ‘foreigners’ or ‘barbarians.’ You could translate it with either word. If you use one, it has one set of consequences; and if you do the other, it has a different set of consequences. That whole part of the book where she dwells on the skills that these interpreters bring to bear is fascinating. In overall terms, the interpreters are not strong enough to be able to control the outcome, so, in the end, the two sides clash. But what the book implies—and she more or less says it—is that had they listened to their interpreters or taken them a bit more seriously, then the Opium Wars might not have happened in the way that they did. Also, one of the things that she digs out really impressively is the understanding that we now have of how badly this encounter went was created later on. It made me think of a more general point, which is that a lot of information we have about these landmark historical moments often come to us through understandings that we think are based on fact, but they aren’t at all. History is based on facts, but these facts are also social constructions. The Chinese nationalists in the early 20th century absolutely had an agenda—a perfectly understandable one, which was to pump up China and bash the West—and therefore, they ended up providing this account, which more or less erased the role of more consensual approaches. That’s how history gets written."

"This one is taking a subject that we thought we knew a little bit about and giving it the full treatment. The classic work on this subject was written by Peter Fryer in the 1980s. It was called Staying Power , and it was a very good book. It was the first book that tried to tell the story of Black—Adi prefers to say African and Caribbean—people in Britain. Since then, a lot more material has emerged, and Adi brings all of this new material together and also gives this panoptic view of the—I’ll say Black, just for shorthand—presence in the British Isles. It’s 10,000 years from Cheddar Man to Black Lives Matter. It’s remarkable. You see Black people here in Roman times: the Black emperor, and the Black legionaries. You see African explorers alongside Francis Drake. You see Black people here in Tudor times. This is all pre-slavery. The Black presence before slavery is one of the many huge contributions of this book. Adi is a specialist of Pan-Africanism and he also has fascinating things to say about that story in the 20th century and the numerous contributions that Black people have made to British institutions like the NHS. It’s a book that is sweeping and comprehensive and, quite apart from anything else, destroys the myth, insofar as it needed to be destroyed, of white Britain—the idea that there was a point back in time when these islands were inhabited only by white people. You just can’t hold onto that view anymore, once you’ve read this book. Absolutely, and he has some really good and important things to say—even though it isn’t his subject—about race. You can’t write a book like this without talking about the history of racism in Britain. He shows two things. One is that racism—you’d be surprised if it wasn’t there—turns out to have been there from the time of slavery onwards. He connects it very much to the institution of slavery. He also shows, very effectively, that racism and beliefs in racial inequality were always part of the argument used by the powerful and those elites who depended on enslavement for their success. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Once you get into the 18th century, however, you also start to see people mobilising against slavery. He shows that this is something that is done not only by Black people. A lot of other social groups are part of these campaigns. When you look at the late 18th and early 19th century, all the social protests that led to abolition happen partly because slaves are in revolt in the colonies (that isn’t part of his story, although he mentions it) but crucially, because of ordinary men and women. Women in particular pushed really hard, particularly in the 1820s, to get Wilberforce to embrace the immediate abolition of slavery. Wilberforce believed in gradual abolition: he thought it was something that would happen spontaneously and in the fullness of time. It’s this campaign of Black and other working men and women that makes the abolitionists in Britain finally embrace immediate abolition. That’s an important part of the story and just one example of how Black people contribute to the promotion of greater equality in Britain."

"What’s original about this book is that it tells us the story of Victorian London from 1780 to about 1870, but not through the voices of the people that we normally know or are familiar with, like Charles Dickens . What Jensen is trying to do in this book—and I think he pulls it off really effectively—is to do it from street level. He tries to recapture the first-hand accounts of the beggars, the thieves, the musicians, the sex workers, the porters. There are all these occupations I didn’t even know about – road-crossing sweeper, for example; we encounter one of them, Margaret Cochrane, in the book. Unfortunately, because the material isn’t there to allow for a sustained engagement with them, you get only glimpses, but because he’s holding on to this one theme, you get a clear picture, over the aggregate of the book, of what life was like for people who were living in these precarious circumstances, like Mahomet Abraham, the blind sailor from Calcutta who begs on the streets with his dog. What is very impressive and touching is that this is a world full of poverty, violence and arbitrariness, but people do extraordinary things as well. That’s what’s so great about this book: you see all the sides. You see what a struggle it is just to eke out an existence. Sometimes, life in the Victorian era is sugar-coated. Until recently, people were talking about Victorian values as if it was a great thing to go back to that time. This dispels that myth, but it also isn’t a book that simply looks at poor people as victims. It shows that they are capable—under certain, very limited circumstances—of doing something wonderful with their lives, even if it’s just for a fleeting instance. You have to jump around. There are a lot of Old Bailey trial records because, for a lot of these people, the only moments when their voices end up being heard is when they break the law. That is problematic as well, because what they’re saying isn’t necessarily what they would say if they were being interviewed. But you have to take what you’ve got. I’m working on a book about the resistance of the slaves and there it’s the same problem. They didn’t write books. They were, for the most part, illiterate people. The few times when they appear in the records is when they carry out an insurrection, they get arrested, and then they’re interviewed before they go on trial. But what they say there doesn’t necessarily reflect what they would say in other circumstances. The book draws from a wide range of sources, including also personal diaries and newspaper articles; this gives the text a real sense of immediacy, which is reinforced by his use of the present tense—a very effective narrative technique. Oskar Jensen has done a really comprehensive trawl of all the available material and come up with an impressive and evocative set of stories."

"Well, Kessel was a writer and war correspondent who, when France was defeated in 1940, went over to London and joined the Gaullist Resistance, the Free French. Army of Shadows, written in 1943, is the book that made him famous and is still regarded as one of the greatest novels about the Resistance. The other thing for which he’ll always be remembered is the hymn of the Resistance, ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, that everybody in the Resistance used to sing – and, incidentally, was sung by a French military band this summer at the London memorial celebration of de Gaulle’s famous speech from a BBC studio in 1940. It was a wonderfully moving moment. Army of Shadows really takes you to the heart of what it is to be in the Resistance and one of the book’s greatest characteristics is that it celebrates the anonymous heroes, the ordinary man or woman who hides an allied airman, carries a suitcase from one town to another… It’s absolutely gripping too, very cinematic – in fact, it was made into a very successful film by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969. About halfway through the book it stops being a story about the different characters and becomes almost like jottings by the main character, the Resistance leader Philippe Gerbier, and you see everything through his eyes: the Germans and the Vichy police squeezing the Resistance more and more. You see his world gradually disintegrating; all the people he works with are being arrested, tortured and killed, and he tells it all. He himself is nearly captured countless times and the novel makes you feel what it’s like to lead this life, to have that kind of extraordinary pressure. He is a composite character, based on several people Kessel knew. When he was in London with the Free French he used to fly missions across to France, taking agents over and then picking them up, so he knew these people. In 1943 and 1944, the life expectancy of the agents flying over and being parachuted into France was very, very low. The probability was that they would be caught within 24 hours. But they kept going. Kessel vividly portrays their wonderful spirit – they believe they are going to win even if they themselves are not going to survive; they believe the Resistance is a sacred cause. The other thing that comes out is that political difference doesn’t matter – workers, peasants, young and old, Communists, landowners, people who love the Republic, monarchists, all put their differences aside in order to fight this battle. And so, even though this is a kind of adventure story written by a novelist, what you get out of it as well is the real Gaullist idea of what the Resistance philosophy is – that when your country is under occupation and you’re fighting to free it, everyone is in it together. There is also a universality about the Gerbier character: there were people exactly like him in 19th-century Poland, in occupied Europe during the Second World War, in modern liberation struggles such as in Ireland, South Africa, and Palestine."

"There are three volumes, and they’re very readable. There are portraits in there of all the great characters de Gaulle encountered – Churchill, Stalin , Roosevelt. He’s very generous. Despite the fact that he was at heart Anglophobic and thought the British would screw the French if they possibly could. He believed Churchill only helped France because it was in Britain’s interest to do so. When de Gaulle turned up in London and said, ‘I now speak for France’, it was almost an absurd situation – France had a legally appointed government headed by a distinguished old soldier, Marshal Pétain, and a lot of people in England and America thought de Gaulle was off his rocker, crazy, delusional. In the Memoirs de Gaulle has a sentence: ‘Faced with the political disaster, I had to become France.’ He sort of carries the country on his shoulder – and that’s what Churchill saw. Although de Gaulle was actually a little delusional – perhaps you have to be in such situations – he was driven by this greater sense that only a free sovereign France could restore the nation’s pride and sense of purpose … and that he was the man to do it. At the same time there was also a kind of modesty about him, humility even, and that comes out very clearly when you look at the way the French commemorate the Resistance after 1945. Even when de Gaulle is in power there’s no a huge fanfare – he never wants it to be about him but about all those anonymous heroes Kessel had written about."

"Well, it refers to an image by a celebrated cartoonist in the Figaro, Jacques Faizant, which just showed an enormous oak tree that had been felled – no caption, just this huge oak which was the symbolic representation of de Gaulle’s death. Malraux’s book is a very epic work and he was a very epic kind of writer as well, and he had a special place in de Gaulle’s heart. He’d been a Communist sympathiser and certainly not someone you’d expect to affiliate with de Gaulle. But it was the Resistance which brought them together and after 1945 Malraux remained a passionate Gaullist all his life. His vision of Gaullism is a romantic one – he sees de Gaulle as a kind of mythical figure who belongs to a long line of French heroes like Joan of Arc, Saint-Just and Napoleon. Fallen Oaks is based on the last conversation the two men had in 1969 at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises where de Gaulle had retired to. The key question Malraux is asking in this book is ‘What is it that makes France a great nation?’ And, according to Malraux, de Gaulle’s idea of greatness is not military force, grandiloquence or any kind of flashiness, but the idea that France stands for a set of republican values: freedom, equality, justice. He also ponders on why de Gaulle is such a great figure and it comes down to the fact that there’s an almost religious quality to him. He’s a bit like the leader of a religious cult – he’s separate, he’s solitary, but he has this ability to take ordinary events and transform them into mythical events. It’s not de Gaulle the politician that comes out of this book; it’s de Gaulle the creator of myths. Gaullism as a political force continued for another 30 years after his death but it became very conservative, very right-wing. Malraux’s book plays an important part in separating out the Gaullist myth from the political movement. The myth lives a separate life from the political movement, which is why de Gaulle’s myth is very much alive to-day, even though the Gaullist party is dead."

"The reason I chose this book is that Debray is one of the most eminent left-wing intellectuals alive now in France. He comes from a very radical tradition: in the 1960s he trained with Fidel Castro, he went and fought with Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia… His left-wing credentials are absolutely impeccable, and yet in 1990, the centenary year of de Gaulle’s birth, he brings out this book in which he celebrates de Gaulle’s memory. This quite a big shock because up to this point his political background seemed to be opposed to all the things it seemed de Gaulle stood for. What Debray does in the book is to go over his own trajectory and all the people he worked for and he comes to the conclusion that the left in France had never really understood the nation, what it means to be part of a nation, and that the person who understands this best is de Gaulle. Debray is not talking about ‘nationalism’ but rather something the French call ‘fraternity’, which is an ideal which also involves justice and solidarity. It’s very striking not least because it’s so unexpected. But there are personal elements involved. When Debray was in Latin America in the 1960s he was caught in Bolivia and ended up spending four years in jail. And de Gaulle actually interceded with the Bolivian government and launched the process of getting him freed. Well, the reaction was mixed. I think many on the left, who saw de Gaulle as a kind of fascist dictator, were surprised that one of their own should sing the praises of such a man. But what was happening more widely on the French left was that in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a reappraisal of what the left stood for. Mitterrand had been in power by then for nearly a decade and a lot of things had gone wrong, and so Debray’s association with de Gaulle symbolises a search for something pure, something untainted. If one is being unkind you could say that Debray was always in search of a father figure – first of all it was Fidel, then Che, then he went to Chile and was with Allende, and then lastly Mitterrand. In his memoir, Praised Be Our Lords, he offers a reappraisal of each of these four figures and in the end it’s a negative view that predominates. So, if you think of it like that, Debray turns to de Gaulle in the end because all his father figures have disappointed him. And it’s a father figure that de Gaulle has become today for many French people, someone who represents the kind of old-fashioned virtues you would associate with a father – austere and tough but pure and incorruptible. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Having spent so much time working on his myth, I sometimes have to remind myself of some of the bad things about him. This is why having a biography on my list is so important because a biographer looks at the whole of the life, not just the good bits."

"A biographer can dig around and find interesting things about a person’s private life, and Fenby does this very well. For example, he shows how close de Gaulle was to his daughter who had Down’s Syndrome. She died in 1948, when she was only 20. But for her whole life de Gaulle was completely devoted to her. From the photographs and family memoirs you can tell there was a very special affinity between the two of them. When her father was with her she was much calmer and happier than when she was with anyone else. And, of course, he was totally distraught when she died. It’s a very thorough book and also very readable, especially when he’s describing dramatic moments in de Gaulle’s career, like in 1940, or 58 when he comes back to power, or 68 when he’s faced by this crisis on the streets of Paris. He tells it like a thriller, the pace changes and you feel transported into the moment. It’s very well written, and overall it’s the best available biography in English. Yes, and that’s what I mean when I say a biographer can look at the shortcomings of the man. Jonathan Fenby shows how de Gaulle completely misunderstood, misjudged 68 – he just didn’t see it coming. He had lost the plot. I think his biggest mistake is to have clung on to power for too long – he should have retired in 1965. But great men often think they are indispensable. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Part of de Gaulle thought the French were great, made for greatness, but there’s a whole other side to him that believed the French could also be mediocre, decadent. Of course, he’d seen both sides of France in his life… when he looks at Vichy and the French collaborating with the Germans, that’s not the better France. By the late 1960s you can see that he’s starting to feel the French have given up. There’s a glorious arrogance about him – he takes the fact that the French no longer support him as evidence that they’re no longer a great people. It’s almost like he thought: the French are not worthy of me. He resigned in 1969, after losing a referendum which he did not need to hold, so it was a kind of suicide. He died in November 1970."

"Well, it all started with Napoleon. I wrote a book called The Legend of Napoleon, which basically was about how the Emperor came to be celebrated as a national hero by the French people after his death. And it led me to see that his celebrity ended, in a way, in the 20th century when de Gaulle replaced Napoleon in the French hit parade of historical figures. And I wanted to explore this idea of how national myths are created. When de Gaulle died there were books of condolence opened all over France and often people would write whole paragraphs about what the General had meant to them, what values he represented. And many of them also said things like: ‘Goodbye Charles. You were greater than Napoleon.’"