The BBC adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen, which began last Sunday, has led numerous books editors to pick their 10 best historical novels. I played this silly dinner party game last year (although I forget the inspiration). And, while admitting that it was nigh on impossible to pick 10, I came up with:
J.G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy
Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet
Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour
Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander
Robert Graves’s I Claudius
JM Coetzee’s Disgrace
Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Pat Barker’s Regeneration
Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard
There were some frankly lamentable omissions from my list. George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman series (of which the first is much the best of a good bunch), War and Peace, Les Miserables, Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great series, Catch 22, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (which was so good that it made me realise how much I’d underestimated Wolf Hall), Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of George Shearston, Rose Tremain’s Merivel novels and on, and on, and on.
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