Books like Conspiracy on Cato Street — picked by fans

I loved Making Waves because it changed the way I think about democratization.

I was particularly struck by the story of the Danish king in 1848, watching revolution spread from France through the German states and deciding that the safest response was to concede power and introduce representative democracy.

Weyland’s many examples from Europe and Latin America made me see much more clearly how political ideas, institutional blueprints, and fears of revolution travel across borders. I found the argument both persuasive and memorable.

More than most books on democracy, it convinced me that I cannot understand political change by looking at countries in isolation.

I loved this book for the sheer breadth of its perspective.

I found it exhilarating to see democratic ideas and practices placed in a history stretching back thousands of years and ranging across China, the Americas, Europe, and beyond. For me, it was a genuine eye-opener.

It reminded me how easy it is to treat the rise and fall of democratic institutions in Western Europe since the French Revolution as the central story, when in fact it is only one small part of a much larger global history.

I came away from the book thinking about democracy in a completely different way.

I admire this book partly because I disagree with its central hypothesis.

Congleton argues that democracy emerged through a sequence of consensual constitutional bargains between kings and their parliamentary opponents, with the threat of violence playing little role. I find that claim provocative rather than convincing, and that is precisely what makes the book so rewarding.

I especially like the way it combines a clear theoretical framework with detailed historical case studies that put real institutional flesh on the theoretical bones. The cases are illuminating, deeply researched, and written by an author with an exceptional command of constitutional history.

It is a book I keep returning to, even when I want to argue with it.

I love Captain Swing because it showed me just how much historical detective work can reveal about protest, riots, and revolutionary threat.

Not because of its strongly Marxist framing—which it certainly has—or because of its classical `Hobsbawmian’ style, but because Hobsbawm and Rudé undertook an extraordinary effort to locate and document thousands of disturbances across England during the Swing riots of 1830–31, Britain’s largest rural uprising. I am fascinated by the way they used this evidence to reconstruct what happened and why.

I still remember accidentally stumbling across the book on a dusty library shelf five stories underground and discovering the extraordinary wealth of information behind this engaging piece of historical research.

Poor George III: ridiculed in caricatures and the object of attempted assassinations!

This enormous book is a real page-turner. Its aim is to show that the changing meanings of words had a huge impact on the politics of the 1790s in Britain. The fourteenth-century statute of treason listed among its crimes that of ‘imagining the king’s death.’

In the reign of Edward III, that meant actually planning the death of the monarch, but by the 1790s, the word ‘imagine’ had taken on the modern definition of ‘envisaging’ or ‘fantasising.’ This much wider definition of ‘imagining’ had dire consequences for reformers who had no intention of arranging the death of the king but whose language might be loose enough to open them up to the charge of ‘imagining’ it. 

I was trained as a historian of the thirteenth century, and three of my books have been on thirteenth-century topics. One of the most influential figures in this period was Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who first befriended and then rebelled against King Henry III, reducing the king to a cipher and effectively ruling in his place. Montfort was also highly controversial, driven by a mix of high-minded altruism and personal ambition that divided people at the time and still has historians arguing to this day. Sophie Ambler tells his tale in an exciting fashion, emphasizing the violence and the drama, but this is also a book with real academic ballast. In particular, it brings out how different Montfort was by virtue of being raised in southern France during the Albigensian crusade, and why political violence in England increased in the wake of Montfort’s own bloody demise.

At a time when public figures invariably delegate speechwriting to anonymous wordsmiths, Churchill is a throwback to an earlier era when a speaker’s oratory was the original work of the speaker. In Churchill’s case, he knew what he composed would project his voice (and thinking) more compellingly than any “ghosted” text.

The noted American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow once observed that Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.” The speeches he dictated and then carefully revised were the principal reasons he was awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Brexit debate in Britain became bogged down in sentiment and myths.

All sorts of people brought up features of imagined history and former glories. Much of it was baloney, but it was not always possible to detect. This scholarly, evidence-based book guided me to a new understanding and appreciation of how my homeland developed over the 20th Century; it overturned some long-held assumptions.

I don’t believe anyone who wishes to understand those times can ignore this book.

The author’s unusual lens made this a captivating history. Murphy examines Victoria’s reign through the multiple attempts on the queen’s life. While the title isn’t entirely accurate (one would-be assassin used a walking stick rather than a gun), Murphy makes a persuasive case for the monarchy’s “rebirth.”

Defying death helped the queen survive some rough patches in her reign. Through eight attempts to kill her, the queen modeled “keep calm and carry on” in the best British tradition, and the public adored her pluck. After the final gunman failed to murder the queen, the aging Victoria said, “It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”

A. Sivanandan was a key intellectual of the Asian and African-Caribbean working-class movements in Britain during their insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected in this volume, written between 1982 and 1990, are about how those movements were disaggregated and undermined – laying the ground for today’s racist Britain. The son of a rural postal clerk from the hinterland of a minor colonial territory, Sivanandan fled Sri Lanka after the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958 and arrived in London as a refugee. The socialism the book advocates is poetic, loving, joyful, and centered upon the experiences of Third World peoples. Not a single sentence of Communities of Resistance is clunky or lacking in feeling.