Books of the Year I

Jonathan Sumption

Barbara Emerson’s The First Cold War: Anglo-Russian Relations in the 19th Century (Hurst, £35) is an outstanding account of Britain’s relations with Russia at a time when ambassadors mattered and Britain was the only world power. No one has explained the Great Game in Central Asia or the intricacies of European dynastic politics so well.

Anne Somerset’s Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers (Collins, £30) overlaps with it, since one of the abiding themes of the queen’s relations with the eight men who occupied No. 10 in her long reign was her enthusiasm for going to war with Russia. Victoria was opinionated and outspoken, but easy to manipulate if you knew the codes. She took little trouble to conceal her likes (Melbourne, Disraeli) and dislikes (Palmerston, Gladstone), thus furnishing Somerset with some excellent copy.

Both of these books are based on serious documentary research (including, in Emerson’s case, in the Russian state archives during the brief period when they were readily accessible to western scholars).