Books like The Boys' Club — picked by fans

I was recently asked to record a podcast for Dan Snow’s History Hit on the Praetorian Cohorts (AKA Praetorian Guard). Being away from my home library, I downloaded a Kindle edition of Guy de la Bédoyère’s book to refresh my memory. 

This is a first-rate study of the Praetorian Cohorts, from their inception to their demise. De la Bédoyère is best known as a Roman historian on Channel 4 TV’s Time Team. He knows his sources and draws extensively on them to enliven his text; he tells stories about Guard prefects and the emperors’ growing reliance on them to attain, and then hold on to, power. 

The history, organisation, and role of the Praetorian Cohorts are essential to understanding the Roman Army. This is a fine book to start that study.

My next book is by far the least well-known of my authors, and it’s by far the least well-known book. It’s by my friend and colleague, Samuel Alexander, with whom I’ve co-written a couple of books now, including This Civilisation is Finished.

It’s a splendid read. For philosophers, it’s charming, because Sam is continually bringing in implicitly, and most explicitly, the great philosophers. He’s quoting or talking about Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and the rest. His characters sometimes offer lines of one of them to each other. And, in that sense, it’s very much a novel of ideas in the tradition of utopias and dystopias.

'Original, provocative, and witty, Australia is the most comprehensive single-volume history of Australia yet published.' This is the blurb on the back cover of the paperback but it echoes my own views of this marvellous book completely. It covers everything: from the plight of the convicts to the Europeans’ experiments with farming and land grabs; relationships with the Aboriginal people, and especially the virtues or otherwise of respective Governors and their often spiky relationships with the government back home. All of it written with authority and a wonderfully wry wit.

There’s a genre of music books, in which I plead guilty to form, that is almost scrapbook-like, that mixes and matches elements to make, at best, a seamless blend of words and images, the sort of book that is a work of art in its own right like you used to find buried down the back of the aisles at counter-culture bookstores. Wild About You is the concept writ large, perhaps not least because editors Iain McIntyre and Ian D. Marks went through a couple of other similar-styled books before getting it quite so right with this one. As a portrait of the post-Beatles beat boom in Australasia in the 60s, it is definitive, written with vibrancy and beautiful and evocative for its illustrations and design. I’m still waiting for this dynamic duo to move onto the 70s!

I’m a sucker for a good title, and this one had me hooked before I read a word. But the fun doesn’t stop there with this cosy spy thriller. Reading this book left me breathless.

The pace never lets up as the hapless Dawson travels to Australia where, confused, he is chased by a colourful collection of Germans, Russians, Brits, and Aussies, all intent on getting their hands on the eponymous teapot. 

I love books where the underdog finds their inner hero, and Dawson–with some help from the resourceful Lucy–is such a character. I galloped through this witty, clever book, eager to discover the secret of that teapot. I wasn’t disappointed.

I knew from the blurb this was going to be my kind of book. I really loved the post-apocalyptic Australian setting and the way the desert wasteland society is structured. The concept of dirt farmers is particularly genius.

As well as the excellent world building, there’s page-turning action, an epic zombie battle, and a clever setup for the next installment. This is the first in The Territory trilogy, which follows the increasingly important role of Squid and Lyn, two teenagers caught up in a battle against ghouls and who learn secrets about themselves and their society as they trek across the Outback.

My late colleague at UNSW Canberra, Jeff Grey, wrote this important book at the age of just 31. The product of a military family, Jeff blossomed from a specialist in Commonwealth operations in the Korean war into the author of a confident, opinionated (but impressively well researched) general history that went through three editions before Jeff’s untimely death in 2016. Jeff deserves credit for seeing that despite the resurgence in interest in Australia’s military history over the 1980s, no one had spotted the need for a comprehensive book that showed us how the bits went together. Thirty years on, no one has bettered it.

High, Wide, and Handsome is a non-fiction, pictorial history of Australian Showjumping from 1900-1950. These black and white photos depict the very different riding styles of showjumpers during these earlier years. Riding in long stirrups and even side-saddle, these fearless riders tackled enormous jumps on their courageous horses, up to nearly eight feet in height. Other photos show them jumping three or four abreast, the Section Fours, the riders sometimes going so far as to colour-co-ordinate their horses.

Australians love a road-trip – the longer, the better. This book, by one of Australia’s top driving holiday experts, is jam-packed with information and advice to make yours as easy as possible. Driving is definitely the best way to see our vast continent, and the route maps and distance lists are hugely useful. It’s a great resource on where to stay – everything from swank hotels to camping spots – and what to do. Want to know the best time of year to visit a certain place? That’s covered too.

This is a heartwarming contemporary story about a gay Aboriginal teen exploring his sexuality and falling in love for the first time, set against the vivid backdrop of a fictional, rural Indigenous community. It’s evocative and heady and compelling. It’s one of those stories that makes you want to reach into the book and hug all the characters and tell them everything is going to be okay. Such an important story from a brilliant new voice in Australian YA.