Turtle Bunbury's Reading List

"Yes, it is the first of the Courtney sagas. Lots of school boys get hooked on Wilbur Smith, and there are of course grown men who love them too, so he seems to go across the board. I started reading him when I was about 14 or 15, and now the series runs to about 12 or 13 books. I thought it was brilliantly clever. It is like a soap opera where every book is the next chapter of the story. “I was amazed that there were people still alive who had lived through something which had happened so long ago.” He is the hero of the first few books. He was born in the 1860s and lived in South Africa, so his life is nicely timed to coincide with the Zulu risings and diamond hunting and all that. He is quite a respectable old man by the time the Boer War comes along. And he ends up becoming a patriarch to this massive family. I love the whole family dynasty, family saga concept. I think it brings it to life. There is this idea of character traits passed down from generation to generation. When there is a union and a baby is created, and that baby grows up, if the writer is clever he can make it a creation of both its parents."

"This book put a bit of a sheen on Wilbur [Smith] because it is so beautifully written. I just loved all the different aspects of it. There is such inventive language and concepts, and the whole magical realism thing really appeals to me. There is humour as well, and you don’t get that much humour in old Wilbur to be fair! In this book there are seven generations of a family with a very definite beginning and end. It begins with José Arcadio Buendía, who founds the town of Macondo in the Latin American jungle, and the book follows his family over the next 100 years. Each member of the family has pretty obscure things happening to them right up until the extraordinary and brilliant finale. Even though it is a fictional novel , it enabled me to look at family history from a much more stimulating perspective, with family traits cascading down through the generations."

"I have always been really interested in the 19th century and these books put a lot of it in context for me. They are brilliantly written and excellently researched. Flashman is a character whom George McDonald Fraser takes on from the moment he is expelled from Tom Brown’s School, creating 12 fictional memories. For me, they really brought history to life. It introduced me to history from all over the world. Flashman was knocking around the whole of the British Empire, as well as in North America and the jungles of Madagascar. It gave me a useful insight into global history . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes I am sure they do. They are both so humorous and I am quite keen to inject humour into my history writing. Well I think if you interview people you get a much more intricate insight into what was going on. In Ireland I have interviewed a lot of people who remember the War of Independence here, and you get many different perspectives that you won’t get in a normal history book. You get the tiny minutiae of why things actually happened. Exactly, so when you get to the everyday life you realise that somebody reacted this way or that. Also, the whole point is that we are all affected by what our parents and grandparents did. For example, if you had a grandparent in the war that will affect how your parents were brought up, and in turn how you are brought up."

"This is vital for me as a family historian in Ireland, because quite a lot of the families that I write about are landed gentry who ran Ireland from the time of William of Orange to the War of Independence. This series chronicles all these families’ births, marriages and deaths. It has a little bit of anecdote here and there. It will say what regiment they were in and where they were at school. Yes, it is very useful place to start – also if your family leased property from one of these families and you want to know more about the landlord. I like Crosbie of Viewmont, who invented a hot air balloon. The Robertsons of Huntingdon started their own religion with the Temple of Isis."

"I really like his writing. He has been a big influence on me. My mother sent me off to meet him when I was a kid, telling me, “He is a writer, you should go and talk to him.” He was brilliant. He said, “You know what, writing is wonderful. You’ll never have to do a hard day’s work again in your life – you can get away with it, you know!” He has written all sorts of things about Irish eccentrics and his adventures in Afghanistan , but this one is basically a social history. It looks at a lot of the amazing houses we have here, and tries to go into a little bit more depth about the families who lived in them. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I can safely say that if they don’t like history it is because they had a crap history teacher! I think nowadays people are making it a lot more visual. You can have a lot more fun with history. You have an enormous canvas of all these events and people and places and battles and juicy love stories. There is no way it should be boring."