A summer of reading

Caitlin Allen, Commissioning Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

I gravitate towards novels set in my holiday destination. Though, ironically, the most memorable I’ve selected on this basis have treated their setting as almost incidental. Rachel Cusk’s Outline – which follows a woman teaching a creative writing course during a stifling summer in Athens – is one such instance. Plot is largely absent from this work of autofiction, which consists of a series of absorbing conversations between the narrator and those she meets. Plane passengers, students, fellow teachers and individuals encountered in cafes all proceed to share with her the most intimate details of their lives. And, as these stories accumulate, the unreliable nature of self-narration becomes apparent – be it through self-serving accounts of divorces, dotted with omissions, or tales of love affairs verging on the delusional. 

Our protagonist remains virtually silent during these monologue-heavy exchanges, revealing next to nothing about herself (and it is striking how little others think to ask). Yet we begin to understand her, through how she recounts her conversations to the reader. She is a perceptive – and amusing – observer of human behaviour, with a razor-sharp understanding of the fears, desires, regrets, insecurities and self-deceptions that shape our lives. But she is jaded, with a bleak view of human connection. What lingers from this book is a sense of how much of our inner world remains concealed from those closest to us. And yet, conversely, the strange ease with which we confide in complete strangers.

Bryan Appleyard, journalist and author

Stoner by John Williams is a novel about a man who was brought up as a farmer and becomes a university professor. He has a very bad marriage to an alienated, neurotic wife. He has an intense affair but returns to the bad marriage. College life is complex and troublesome. It is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. The greatness lies in the clarity and insight of the writing.

John Williams died in 1994. He wrote three novels, one of which – Augustus – won a National Book Award. Otherwise, he was curiously unnoticed. Stoner came out in 1965. The brilliance of the book arises from the steadiness of the author’s gaze. He writes of an ageing professor’s face, ‘…the erosive despair that had dissipated that hard self’. On his impossible wife: ‘…she wandered like a ghost into the privacy of herself, a place from which she never fully emerged’.

The outside world intrudes when the war with Japan begins. Many students went to fight and many died. Stoner wisely resists the call-up, restricting his war to conflict with his dreadful senior, Lomax. Yet this is not a depressing book. The beauty of the language and the precise evocation of character shine through. I have read it three times now over the years and I could easily read it again because it is as true as any novel I have ever read.

Alastair Benn, Deputy Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

When I think of ‘Summer’ and the novels I’ve read, my mind goes to Anna Wulf at the Mashopi Hotel, to the world of southern Africa she can never go back to, then to Adrian Leverkühn and his friends, young men hiking in the forest and talking of the future, of hope for Europe and Germany. I think of Laura Trevelyan and Voss breathing in silence together in a Sydney garden under the strange stars of a new continent. Next enters Don Quixote setting out once more to find his ‘princess’. But most richly and clearly of all, I imagine the tiles of Saint-Hilaire in Combray, warmed by the sun. Literature fires the inner perceptions most bound up with personal hopes and longing – and memories of the novel-reading life are never more drenched with nostalgia than in summer.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai, writer  

I used to love reading long narratives in the summer: massive 19th-century novels, dauntingly large historical books and multi-volume biographies. But my habits changed after I started a doctorate (which is when reading ceased to be a pleasure for a few years, until I defended my dissertation). These days I absorb far less text during the summer than I do throughout the rest of the year, mainly because I prefer to go outside when the weather is warm. Also, when the days are longer, I prefer to write more than I read, and when I do read, I re-read things that I didn’t read slowly or attentively enough the first time round. My preferred summer books are either in verse, or in another language (or both, if I think I have the time and/or mental energy).

Last summer I revisited Chaucer, and was embarrassed to find out how many good jokes I’d missed when I first went through The Canterbury Tales. This year I will return to as much Cicero as I can. At his best, he is such an artist with the Latin language that you forget you are reading a random letter to a dead Roman, or a re-hash of someone else’s philosophy, or a courtroom speech eloquently defending someone who was probably 100 per cent guilty. His Latin amply rewards the struggles that make students hate him: every so often he writes entire paragraphs that stamp themselves on your memory the second you read or hear them.

Richard Bratby, critic

In the summer that I left Oxford my exams finished early and I had four sunny weeks of complete freedom. It was intoxicating: each morning I’d throw open the window, put Der Rosenkavalier on the stereo and read, at blissful length. I read and read, but the book I remember most intensely is Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity. Zweig, at that time, was still a forgotten writer for Anglophones. The big revival was yet to come; I’d found a second-hand hardback, and didn’t know that experts considered him something of a hack. Zweig was my first Austrian novelist, and that summer he showed me another sunlit world on which time was running out – a vanished civilisation, still (in the early 1990s) just within living memory.

So for a few days I lived simultaneously in Norham Gardens, and a sleepy Habsburg garrison town before the Great War. The plot didn’t trouble me unduly. I’d found another Eden: the half-deserted cafés, the ochre-coloured schloss among the trees; the cavalrymen riding out in the morning mists. Many novels evoke summers in which time feels suspended, but Beware of Pity was my first in which fiction and reality seemed to align; to make each other light up. The lesson, I suppose, is that it isn’t always the greatest books that matter most. Rather, it’s the book that finds you at the right time, in the right place, made more poignant by the knowledge that it can never be read for the first time again.

Paul Cartledge, author of Pericles: Statesman, Demagogue, Eccentric

For the past several years I’ve been working to produce a sort-of, life-and-times biography of Pericles of Athens (c.495-429 BC). He lived in and to a considerable extent helped shape the Athens and Greece of the 450s to 420s BC, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call the Athens of that time, let alone all Greece, ‘Periclean’, as too many do. Writing on Pericles demands sensitive reading of many different kinds of source-material. On the written/literary front that means above all his contemporary Thucydides for the politics, and the much later Plutarch for the more intimate salacious bits. Translations abound for both: I’d especially recommend those of Robin Waterfield (Basic Books, brand-new) for Thucydides, and Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Classics) for Plutarch.

This year, 2026, is the year of the Odyssey – Christopher Nolan’s filmic version is set to be released at the height of summer. But it will be preceded by Erica Stevenson’s The Odyssey Effect: how Homer’s epic poem shaped the world  (Quarto). Forewarned is forearmed. For those wanting a distraction from the Greeks, I can unreservedly recommend Tom Holland’s new, mint-fresh translation of the Lives of the Caesars  by Suetonius (Penguin). Readers of Suetonius’ life of Rome’s first emperor Augustus who live in what are still called democracies should be very afraid.

David Chaffetz, author of Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

I am doing a lot of moving around, packing, unpacking, making new acquaintances and rediscovering things that had been missing for years, so my list is a combination of new and old. Madame, by Antoni Libera, first published in English in 2000, is an elegiac story of a high school student’s obsession with his elegant, icy French teacher. Panini’s Perfect Rule by Rishi Rajpopat is a recent release but describes how a maths student cracked a 2,000-year-old mystery in Sanskrit grammar. Moving from classical to popular, Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal, by Sandip Roy, retells triumphs and trials, on stage and off, of a fabled female impersonator. Straddling India and the West is Wendy Doniger’s analysis of myths about women, The Woman who pretended to be who She Was. Finally, George Foy’s novel The Winterpoor  examines the lives of the all-year-round community. Something to read when you are enjoying the beach in Cape Cod.

Thomas de Waal, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe

Three books from the shores of the Black Sea, ancient and modern.

Laura Spinney’s Proto  superbly tells the story of how advances in the testing of ancient DNA have transformed scholarly understanding about the roots of the Indo-European language. The consensus is that our linguistic ancestors were the Yamnaya people who lived in the steppes north of the Black Sea around 3000 BCE and then migrated outwards. Spinney guides us through a historical and lexical maze via extinct languages such as Gothic and Hittite to the present day. It’s painful that the birthplace of Indo-European also happens to be the most devastated zone of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Europolis  is an evocative novel, set in Sulina at the mouth of the Danube Delta, by a Romanian naval officer using the pen-name Jean Bart. Published in 1933, it is only now translated into English. A Greek resident returns home from North America with his black daughter to a once cosmopolitan port in economic decline. Chronic misunderstanding ensues and no one is spared the author’s sardonic all-seeing gaze.

The Lack of Light  is even better than Nino Haratischwili’s bestseller The Eighth Life. Only a Georgian living abroad and writing in German can be so unflinchingly honest about her homeland, which foreigners all too easily romanticize. If it were not so vivid and funny, the novel’s darker themes would be oppressive. It’s an utterly absorbing story of how four young women come of age just as the Soviet Union is collapsing and must navigate a new unstable, macho and violent world.

Jack Dickens, Literary Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

When I think of summer reading, my mind wanders back to the hills, fields and byways of Wessex, the home of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Thomas Hardy. It takes me to the cobbled streets and country pubs of medieval market towns, their dark stone walls washed with a passing summer rain, or brings me before the front of Wells Cathedral gleaming gloriously in the morning sun. I remember one beautiful summer’s day, soon after I finished my school exams, when my friend and I walked into the local market in Wells without a care in the world. There I stumbled across Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd  amid rows and rows of second-hand books. I snapped it up and read it all afternoon lying in the sunshine on the cathedral green, lost in Hardy’s world. In its pages, I found a charming agrarian idyll beset by the tragedy of human malice and misunderstandings. Hardy’s vivid description of the landscape of his native Wessex is enchanting, as is his depiction of a rural society that was then alive but in the process of vanishing.

Nostalgia is not all that it has to offer, however. Far from the Madding Crowd  is also a reflection on the eternal themes of human frailty, envy, vanity, virtue, love and forgiveness. Despite the author’s (sometimes overbearing) tendency to melodrama and moralising, it is a highly perceptive and deeply moving tale. Put simply, it is a joy to read. And, unlike other Hardy novels, there is a happy ending of a sort.

Caroline Eden, author of Green Mountains

Every summer I go to Poland on holiday, it has become a habit, and when I’m there I like to take trains to different parts of the country. A companion for a recent journey to Poznań was a second-hand copy of Michael Moran’s A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland, first published in 2008. Providing insights on everything from the Vistula River to Chopin, the author also includes not only a bibliography at the back but a useful filmography, too, something perhaps more authors of non-fiction should do.

Staying with Poland, another book for summertime is Map: Collected and Last Poems  by Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), translated into English by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak. I first learned of Szymborska at an art gallery in Kraków – she also created fine collages – and became a fan. Her poems, a bit like life in general, are at times merry and at other times utterly devastating. I think Szymborska, a quiet genius, is the ultimate poet for anyone who says they don’t respond well to poetry.

Garima Garg, author of Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures

Growing up, summers were for mangoes, swimming, and discovering India through short stories. From Ruskin Bond’s tales about simpler joys of life in Indian hills to Satyajit Ray’s fictional sleuth Feluda and his exploits around the country, these stories were nothing short of an adventure. Then there were classics such as Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina, both of which introduced me to a world that was very different to mine. But, just like any great work of art, they also taught me how life always remains much the same as it has ever been – in their own ways, both novels explore the bewildering struggles and sweet joys of being human while navigating a maze of complicated societal norms, however particular to one’s own time.

More recently, however, I have enjoyed reading and re-reading David Abram’s The Spell Of The Sensuous, where he writes evocatively of the abundance of nature and how much we have lost in losing our relationship with it. Abram’s prose is both lyrical and thoughtful, which almost feels like dreaming at times. It has certainly helped me look at nature with a new set of eyes and redefine my relationship to it into something that I believe will endure for the rest of my life.

Christopher Harding, author of A Short History of Japan

A quarter-century ago, I was a student sitting in the British Library, handling with reverential awe a letter written by M.K. Gandhi. Nothing makes you feel close to a great historical figure quite like encountering their everyday flaws. One of his, apparently, was failing to estimate the space needed for an address on an envelope. The first line reached the edge unfinished, and continued on down at right-angles.

Gandhi name-checked as a major influence in a book I hadn’t heard of before: John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and Other Writings  (1860). I duly picked up a copy, and found myself carried along by a rousing vision – at once romantic and eminently real-world – of how apparently inexorable market forces might be tethered to a shared sense of dignity and value.

Twenty-five years on, I’ve just finished what feels like a twenty-first-century update. On the face of it, Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification  is about how tech platforms become so dominant that they can lock their customers into a steadily worsening service. But Doctorow shares Ruskin’s wild hope that people’s dignity and basic needs can be placed at the centre of economic life.

Ruskin relied on the conscience and character of each individual to effect change; Doctorow looks to national and international regulation to get the job done. Maybe the latter is what’s left after the disasters and disappointments of the twentieth century. But I remain a sucker for the promise of personal transformation, so it’s Ruskin and Gandhi all the way.

Katherine Harvey, author of The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living

As a teenager, I liked nothing more than a reading list to work my way through over the summer. I didn’t like all the books – the weekend when, for reasons that now escape me, I decided it would be a good idea to read both 1984 and Brave New World put me off dystopian fiction for life. And the year when I enjoyed The Age of Innocence  and followed it up with every Edith Wharton book I could lay my hands on was also a bit much. But the summer before my A Levels, which I spent reading sad Victorian novels in preparation for studying The Return of the Native, was an especially good one. Hardy became a particular favourite – I’m not much of a re-reader, but despite (or perhaps because of) his gloomy pessimism, he’s one of the few novelists I regularly return to. I also loved Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, the story of a ‘fallen woman’ and one of the few novels to make me cry. I daren’t go back to that one, in case I now find it overdone.

Henry Jeffreys, writer and wine critic

I recently read The Bonfire of the Vanities  (published in 1987) by Tom Wolfe for the first time. It’s been a long time since a novel grabbed me so forcefully. At times it’s so viscerally exciting that I almost couldn’t keep reading. It’s a massive novel in size, scope and cast of characters, but it doesn’t feel baggy or self-indulgent. Everything is there for a reason. Certain chapters, like ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, almost work as standalone short stories. It’s also incredibly funny. The drunken British journalist Peter Fallow is a particularly brilliant comic creation. There’s a hangover scene to rival Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. While it’s a satire on 1980s New York, so much of it, from the amoral race grifters to the cant-spouting politicians, is eerily reminiscent of modern Britain. What more can I say, it’s a masterpiece.

Jeremy Jennings, author of Travels with Tocqueville beyond America

Now that I have joined the ranks of much-hated Baby Boomer retirees, the category of summer reading has lost much of its resonance. There are, however, two holiday books I vividly remember reading and recommend. The first is Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernisation of rural France. I read it years ago when I was renting a house near Cahors. Anyone about to spend time in the French countryside would enjoy its fascinating tale of how French country life was changed by the arrival of railways, roads, schools, and much else.

The second is Iris Origo’s War in the Val d’Orcia, read while I was staying in southern Tuscany. The contrast between Origo’s kindness and bravery and the barbarism of her unwanted ‘guests’ from the Wehrmacht is something hard to forget. The book I plan to read this summer is Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. Somehow, I managed to miss it in my novel-reading youth. My friend, Lord Blackwater, assures me that it is one of the greatest English novels.

Paul Lay, Senior Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

Throughout every season, Philip Hensher may have read – and digested – more novels than anyone alive, so his monumental study, A History of the Novel in Britain, is written with real authority. Hensher is especially good on relatively unfashionable writers such as Arnold Bennett (his Old Wives’ Tale is judged one of the 20 best novels in the language), offers remarkable, often contentious, deeply personal insights into the languid eroticism and peerless dialogue of Henry Green, and celebrates the Anglo-Irish novel, of which Elizabeth Bowen is the master, especially redolent of febrile summers. More familiar names are treated with similar rigour – Hensher adores Dickens – and there is now no better primer for this spectacularly diverse, humane genre.

Alexander Lee’s The First Ghetto: Venice and the Jews  is a deeply researched account of the creation of the world’s first ghetto, an insanitary cordon where Jews were subjected to humiliation and abuse, but also of one of hope, vitality and energy, where excellence – economic, cultural, theological – was valued highly, acting as a very tangible resistance to antisemitism. Though primarily a history, one cannot help but hear the resonance in this enduring tale of resilience in the face of contempt.

Berta Geissmar was the assistant to the great but morally compromised German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler before she was forced to leave Nazi Germany. Exiled in London, she became assistant to another great – though very different – maestro, the voluble Thomas Beecham. Her memoir, The Baton and the Jackboot, published in 1944, recounts the ever extending tentacles of the Nazi state, while contrasting the cultures of Britain and France – dominated by their capital cities and rural summer festivals – with those of Germany, where Dresden, Munich, Hamburg et al competed on equal terms culturally with Berlin, a contrast that endures.

Keith Lowe, author of Naples 1944: War, Liberation, and Chaos

For me, reading in winter and summer are two entirely different experiences. In the winter, I need something to wrap around myself like a blanket – a family saga, or a thick history of global events. But in the long hot days of summer, I want something that allows me to unfurl and daydream. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities  does exactly that. It reimagines Marco Polo’s journeys through the cities of Kublai Khan’s vast empire. Each city represents a new idea, and each is more magical than the last. It’s a slim novel, with very short chapters, but each one prompts you to stop, think and savour.

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book  is similar. It charts the relationship between a woman and her granddaughter as they spend each summer together on a Scandinavian island. Essentially, it’s a series of short stories, but somehow it manages to encompass the whole of human experience, from childhood wonder, through love and loss, to the eventual menace of death. It’s an astonishing book, dripping with sunshine.

Finally, there is Michael Frayn’s Skios, which is completely different. While the other two are books for the heart and soul, Skios is one for the mind. Set on a fictional Greek island in summer, it is a dizzying farce peopled with dozens of characters and at least half a dozen intertwined plots. How on earth Frayn manages to squeeze all these springs into such a small box is mind-boggling, but the final explosion at the end is utterly satisfying.

Mathew Lyons, writer and critic

Last summer I found myself re-reading The Deptford Trilogy  by Robertson Davies and basking again in his distinctive mix of acute observation, esoteric curiosity and warm, urbane, human comedy. My twenty-something self thought this the weakest of Davies’s three trilogies, but perhaps its interest in Jungian archetypes merely makes it the strangest. I enjoyed it more the second time around: it’s hard to think of writers today who match the generosity of his vision.

I am on the judging panel for the HWA Crown Prize for non-fiction, so the nominations for that will dominate this summer’s reading. But I doubt I will read a better new novel than Melissa Harrison’s luminous The Given World. It follows the life of a village deep in the folds of the English landscape over the course of one summer. It is a profound exploration of English rural identity that quite magically reimagines Kipling’s ‘Dymchurch Flit’ for a time of ecological crisis.

Sumantra Maitra, author of The Sources of Russian Aggression

I am working on a little side project about early British-influenced, transnational imperial liberalism, and the Young Bengal movement of social reformers, and have been reading some of the historic literature from that era, including The Neo-Romantic Movement in Contemporary Philosophy  (1922) by one of my more illustrious forefathers, Shishir Kumar Maitra. Another such book is Brahmoism, Or: History of Reformed Hinduism  (1923), a seminal monotheistic historical critique by scholar and Christian convert Ram Chandra Bose, who claimed that original Hinduism is no different than any other monotheistic religion. Also notable is the magnum opus, The History of Bengal  (1943-48), by the grand-historian Dr RC Majumdar. If Sir Jadunath Sarkar is India’s Edward Gibbon, Majumdar can surely be classified as Bengal’s own Theodor Mommsen, albeit a little less caustic in tone.

Among newer books on related subjects, I found Susan S. Bean’s Yankee India, and Rosinka Chaudhuri’s India’s First Radicals: Young Bengal and the British Empire, to be especially notable, neutral and lucid.

Max Mitchell, Podcast Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

Summer is a time for adventure and hitting the open road. In preparation for a recent trip to Grand Teton and Yellowstone, I devoured Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark. Published by Avid Reader Press, it is a meticulously researched edition with excellent illustrations and photographs. It is the first real treatment of the 1804 expedition since the flurry of coverage in the late 1990s and around the bicentennial. Fehrman devotes more time than other authors to the cast of characters, such as York, William Clark’s black slave, and Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman without whom the crew would certainly have perished in the Bitterroot Mountains. Emphasising Lewis and Clark’s enormous reliance on a motley crew for their survival not only makes for a better story, but it has the added benefit of being true. You can listen to Craig on the EI Podcast here.

Summer is also a time of plenty. Nature blooms and different flavours return to our tables — or at least they did before supermarkets made everything available everywhere all the time. Contrary to the current fashion of being ‘beach-body ready’, I often feel particularly gluttonous during the summer months and spend the season reading great writing about food by the likes of A. A. Gill or Jim Harrison. The latter, known for a trilogy of novellas published as Legends of the Fall  (1979), is in fine form in his 2004 essay, ‘A Really Big Lunch’. He only manages 37 courses and 13 wines.

Agnès Poirier, author of Left Bank, Arts, Passion and the rebirth of Paris (1940-1950) and Notre-Dame, The Soul of France

My summer readings carried the taste of sea salt, the feel of warm sun rays lighting up the pages as I turned them, the sound of my father’s baritone voice urging me to go to the beach for a swim, and then the silence of our Breton flat as I spent hours devouring books. I have so many vivid recollections of magical reading during my summers in Brittany. One summer I fell head over heels in love with Aragon’s Les voyageurs de l’impériale. It would certainly deserve a new English translation, just as Stefan Zweig was resurrected for an anglophone readership by Pushkin Press through the wonderful translations of Anthea Bell. Aragon, whose communist activities affected his image, was nonetheless a giant of French literature.

Les voyageurs de l’impériale is the story of Pierre Mercadier, a gifted historian who gradually abandons his family, his responsibilities, and ultimately his place in the world. Aragon follows him across decades of French society before the First World War, creating a portrait of self-deception that feels startlingly modern. Can freedom become an excuse for abandoning responsibility? With something of the social breadth of Balzac and the psychological introspection of Proust, Aragon pulls off a distinctive masterpiece of European literature, as ironic as it is compassionate, to increasingly devastating effect.

Cath Pound, arts journalist

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book  may seem like an obvious choice, but I have to include it as I love it so much. It focuses on a young girl named Sophia and her grandmother, who spend a summer on an island off the Gulf of Finland, both grieving the death of Sophia’s mother, though this is only mentioned in passing. While each individual chapter stands as an exquisitely crafted story in its own right, together they form a sublime whole that serves as a powerfully understated meditation on life, love and the wonder of the natural world.

Lynne Tillman is a favourite recent discovery. Her 1991 novel Motion Sickness  transported me back to that pre-euro, pre-smartphone era, when a trip around Europe involved multiple currencies, a wad of travellers’ cheques and plenty of change for calls home on a payphone. The novel’s unnamed narrator is a young American woman with seemingly endless funds who drifts around the continent, and beyond, reinventing herself with every new location and chance encounter. Why she has embarked on this trip, and whether there is an ultimate aim to it, remains a mystery. The narrator herself seems unsure, buying postcard after postcard but ripping them up before sending them, never able to find the right words to express her thoughts. Dreamlike, funny, melancholy and delightfully odd, it’s a reminder that there are intriguing experiences to be had if you turn your back on a rigid travel agenda and just go with the flow.

Marc Polymeropoulos, former Senior Intelligence Service Operations Officer, CIA

My annual summers growing up on the Greek island of Mykonos were a time for escapist reading. I would spend hours at our whitewashed house near Psarou beach, reading book after book.  And James Michener, whose work lined the bookshelves of my Greek grandmother (‘Yia Yia’), never failed to deliver. In fact, Caravans: A Novel of Afghanistan  remains my favourite work of fiction of all time, a novel that had a seminal effect on my life. Published in the 1960s, it is a ride through post-Second World War Afghanistan, told through the eyes of a young US Department of State foreign service officer and a woman he is tasked with rescuing. For those of us in government who have spent considerable time in Afghanistan, it is especially revealing. Unlike the war-torn country ruled by the Taliban that dominates current news, it is a fascinating look into what once was an exotic locale, where hippies flocked and travel was relatively safe, but long-held tribal customs reigned supreme.

I first read this book in high school (and several times after), and it began my path into the CIA as I fell in love with this Lawrence of Arabia-type story. I wanted to go and do exactly what Michener’s fictional young American diplomat did: serve in mystical lands. And I accomplished that through a career at the CIA, where I served in multiple countries across the Middle East and South Asia. Years later, as a CIA base chief in eastern Afghanistan, I specifically thought of Caravans during a Key Leader Engagement with tribal elders, marvelling at my own journey.

David Priess, author of The President’s Book of Secrets

‘Summer reading’ seems such an odd concept. As long as I can remember, enjoying books has been a perennial activity – tied to a particular season no more and no less than breathing, eating, or sleeping. Looking back over almost a decade, however, a trend within my book selections stands out: classic science fiction tends to wax in the summer, and wane come autumn. Longer days, my obsessive reading log indicates, have driven me in recent years back to works including Frankenstein  by Mary Shelley, From the Earth to the Moon  by Jules Verne, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, and the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I can’t explain why more modern science fiction, like the many books of Neal Stephenson, instead consumes my winters … did that start with Snow Crash?

Sergey Radchenko, author of To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power

I run a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where we read biographies of prominent individuals – thirteen biographies each semester. From the thirteen I assigned last year, the one I enjoyed the most is the new Scott Anderson biography of the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, which examines the Iranian Revolution as a case study in the catastrophic failure of American foreign policy.

In this page-turner of a book – which I highly recommend as your summer reading – Anderson argues that President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, helped pave the way for revolution by giving the Shah unchecked support and vast military aid. Flush with oil wealth, the increasingly autocratic and yet bizarrely indecisive Shah presided over corruption, inequality, and repression, while popular discontent steadily grew.

In Anderson’s telling, very few American diplomats correctly foresaw the collapse of the Shah’s regime in 1978-79, and those who did saw their warnings largely dismissed in Washington. He is sharply critical of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose anti-Communist focus, Anderson claims, blinded him to the danger of an Islamic revolution and led Washington to exaggerate the risk of a Soviet-aligned Iran.

The subtitle of the American edition of Anderson’s book – ‘A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation’ – aptly sums up the argument, and reminds readers that whatever else they might think of most recent US (mis)adventures in Iran, there is plenty of historical precedent for bad policy.

Samuel Rubinstein, historian

A couple of summers ago, I bought a nice nineteenth-century edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire  in eight volumes, and slowly worked my way through them all. They made a tremendous impression on me; some of the finest lines still sometimes waft into my head unprovoked. Gibbon is as wise as he is funny: his historical arguments are, I daresay, sometimes even very persuasive. His Memoirs are also wonderful. Since 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the first volume of the Decline and Fall, this summer might be as good a time as any to dive back in.

Gareth Russell, author of Queen James

There have been so many books tied to summer. I think perhaps the happiest earlier memories were with Agatha Christie and my grandmother. I’m not sure how appropriate they were, but I soldiered on happily with them in a house they took every summer on the north coast of Northern Ireland. Granny would read aloud pages and I would be given an easier paragraph.

Now, every summer I re-read The Leopard  by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa. I first encountered its tale of a Sicilian noble family living through the Risorgimento about ten years ago, when I was on book tour in America. There was a lot of travel, which is perfect for reading. The Leopard is a summer book. It captures perfectly the oppressive, humming heat of the Sicilian summer. It is an extraordinary novel, in the way it weaves together Catholicism, the pleasures of good food or a cold bath, the foibles of the aristocracy, and the agony of the almost in the paths we take in life. Every time I re-read The Leopard, I find something new and am reminded of how beautiful it is.

Max Skjönsberg, author of The Spirit of the British Constitution: Parliamentary Reform from the Civil War to the Great Reform Act

In a year with many notable anniversaries, one that stands out is that of the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who died 250 years ago, in 1776. The best introduction to his thought is James Harris’s Hume: An Intellectual Biography, which is a must read for anyone interested in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions. But there is no substitute for reading the master himself. Hume is perhaps at his most accessible through his wide-ranging, entertaining, deceptively simple yet profound essays. This summer, Penguin is bringing out a new beautifully designed two-volume edition of Hume’s Complete Essays, masterfully edited and introduced by the leading literary scholar David Womersley.

Finally, in a summer when we celebrate revolution and enlightenment, Richard Whatmore’s readable (and sobering) The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis  is also highly recommended, as is Richard Bourke’s masterpiece, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke.

Hannah Lucinda Smith, author of Hinterlands: Journeys Through Europe’s Unfinished Frontiers

Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling  deserves every bit of praise that has been heaped on it. His meticulous retelling of the death of a London teenager in 2019 goes down each of the story’s rabbit holes to take in the physical and social transformation of the UK’s capital city since the turn of the millennium, shedding light on its dark criminal underbelly and the dubious foreign money that has flooded into its property sector. The result is a gripping true-crime story that somehow escaped the headlines when it happened and offers a window into the city’s corruption.

My second summer read is Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself, a portrait of the Erdoğan era in Turkey told through the lens of one Istanbul neighbourhood. Hansen’s eye for characters and detail brings a rich literary quality to her writing, and her deep knowledge of the country, where she lived for a decade, gives her a perspective that few outsiders can match. As Turkey’s descent into autocracy quickens, this is a timely and vital reminder of the impact on the people living through it.

Charlotte Stroud, writer

I first read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek  ten summers ago, the same year I moved to the countryside. Books have a habit of finding you at the right time. As the fields turned from brown to green and the winter silence gave way to the clicking and trilling of birds, I read Dillard’s meditation on the mystery of life. All around me were the ‘extravagant gestures’ that she calls ‘the very stuff of creation’– white peonies drooping with the weight of their own exuberance, goldfinches swaying on the heads of purple thistles. I’ve gone back to this extraordinary book every summer since, not because Dillard has the answers but because she asks all the right questions.

When I open my copy of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, its seawater-crinkled pages make a delightful crunching sound and grains of Guernsey sand escape from the spine: a fitting condition for a book set on the New England coast. Published in 1896, Jewett’s novella is about a writer who retreats to a seaside town for the summer to finish her book. Very little work gets done, however, in this place where the sea breeze brings the scent of thyme and mint right to her desk, where eccentric hermits living in their whitewashed houses provide endless distractions. Willa Cather wrote that The Country of the Pointed Firs wasn’t a story but ‘life itself’. For me, this may be the defining quality of a perfect summer read.

Saffron Swire, Digital Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

Summers for me have always been wrapped up with the West Country, with memories scattered between Devon and Cornwall, from picnics of boiled eggs and cold sausages beside rivers and estuaries, afternoons in the shade of crab apple trees to long walks along high-banked lanes ribboned with cow parsley and primroses. When I want to recover something of that landscape, I often find myself returning to Alice Oswald’s Dart. Drawing on conversations with people who live and work along the River Dart, Oswald pens a long poem that follows the river from source to sea. The voices of poachers, ferrymen, swimmers, sewage workers and canoeists are caught along the way like fishing tackle snagged in the current, becoming part of the river’s flowing chorus.

I have also been enjoying Michael Bird’s St Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time. Having also spent summers there since childhood, I often find myself pining for the elemental landscape and St Ives’ luminous, buttery light – a light that has drawn generations of artists to Cornwall’s far western edge. Bird charts the emergence of international modernism in St Ives as a unique episode in the story of modern art in Britain, tracing how this small fishing port grew into one of its most important artistic centres. Through figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon, he explores how this remote stretch of coastline became a crucible for artistic experimentation, as they translated its sea, sky and light into their respective abstractions. It is as much a biography of the landscape as it is of the artists who lived and worked there, leaving an ineffaceable mark on both the town and the story of twentieth-century modern British art.

Phil Tinline, author of Ghosts of the Iron Mountain

In the pandemic summer of 2020, I was stuck at home like everyone else – and writing my first book, The Death of Consensus. And that meant immersing myself in that other crisis summer of 1940. I read my way through the books fired off by young men desperate to save the country from invasion. Like New Ways of War, hammered out in weeks by Spanish civil war veteran and Mirror columnist Tom Wintringham, as a guide to digging an anti-tank trench in your village, and making a sponge bag into a grenade. And If Hitler Comes, a short sharp novel by two BBC journalists which sketched out how the City might fold all too easily to Nazi rule.

But most of all, I was reading Guilty Men. This was born on the roof of the Evening Standard’s building just off Fleet Street on the final day of May, as the news reached London from Dunkirk. Three journalists – among them Michael Foot – resolved to force Chamberlain from power by setting out how his politics were easing Britain towards catastrophe. They wrote it in four days. It came out on 5^th July 1940, and changed our politics for decades.

Eighty years later, with Britain under attack once more, that image stuck. Those young men up on the roof beneath a beautiful blue sky, waiting for the bombers, deciding to denounce the guilty men who had left us so exposed. It seemed the perfect picture of a London summer.

Derek Turner, author of Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire

My summer holidays are usually spent scrambling around old cities, interspersed with swimming in the North Sea, so I read less in those months than at any other time of year. But one summer several decades ago, I felt a whole new world swimming into my ken, as I opened Boswell’s Life of Johnson  for the first time.

I had always seen the late-18th-century English as fascinating but slightly freezing, with its chilly ‘objectivity’ and fine but often formulaic architecture, and Dr Johnson as its rather formidable defining intellectual. But here, under Boswell’s brilliant guiding hand, the ‘Great Cham’ came scintillatingly alive as even more than cultural arbiter – as waggish humourist, lover of conviviality, chivalrous romancer, sturdy reasoner, non-priggish idealist, firm friend, slightly henpecked husband, cat-lover, and in every way a warmly relatable human being, sharing the same doubts and fears as us. Even the baking sun of that year seemed outshone by the candlelit clever clubs of the London of the ‘Age of Johnson’, as I holidayed in my heart from my holiday.

Now, 235 years after it first appeared, it is still the liveliest life ever written, and an indispensable aid to understanding a pivotal period.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink

Throughout the year, I read lots of works I need to read: for classes, for research, for a China-focused book prize. Summer means more time for non-required reading. It’s when I read new works of fiction by my favourite novelists, as well as non-fiction books unrelated to my research, that have a special appeal. They need to be stylishly written and contain humorous parts, poetic passages, and moving vignettes. Recent summertime non-fiction books that I’ve found deeply satisfying include Evan Osnos’s The Haves and Have Yachts  (funny), Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait  (lyrical), and Matthew Longo’s The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain  (poignant).

As summer nears, I ask myself a simple question: ‘Has Alane Mason sent me any books lately?’ A dozen years ago, Alane, an editor friend at Norton, emailed me about an ‘amazing’ book she was working on. She wanted to send me an advance copy. She was sure I’d love it. She was right. Elizabeth Pisani’s Indonesia, Etc.  was a wonderfully enjoyable read. Since then, I’ve loved having Alane lead me to gems like Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth  and Demuth and Longo’s books. Thomas Mullaney’s marvellous How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information, Alane’s latest, would have been just right for this summer – except for one thing. I got my hands on an advance copy months ago and couldn’t resist reading it right away.

Alexandra Wilson, author of Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British

As summer approaches, and with it the hazy prospect of a holiday yet to be booked, I am drawn to cultural histories of travel, such as Richard Mullen and James Munson’s witty The Smell of the Continent: The British Discover Europe, which explores Victorian travellers’ experiences of train timetables, currency exchanges, hotels, unfamiliar cuisine and poor sanitation. At the top of my current to-read list is Robert Holland’s The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination, an aesthetic grand tour in the company of everyone from Lord Byron to the Bloomsbury Group.

When actually travelling, I am particular about packing at least one book that connects to my destination, or at least does not jar with it. (Reading a novel set in Moscow when in Paris, for instance, simply wouldn’t do.) Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited  is a book for all seasons and stages of life, to which I return time and again, but it spoke to me most powerfully on my first visit to Venice, shortly before going to university, when I imagined myself experiencing the city through the same eyes as Charles Ryder, the novel’s protagonist.

Of course, holidays are also occasions for relaxation, even guilty pleasures, so I always take a dependably amusing novel, such as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and a biography of someone quirky or faintly absurd, most recently Tina Gaudoin’s Three Times a Countess: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Raine Spencer.

Muriel Zagha, critic

In French the long summer holidays are called grandes vacances. It is a season of personal vacancy and, in terms of reading, of openness to chance, providence and paths of desire. Especially when staying in somebody else’s house, a circumstance that further frees the mind, I have often ignored the improving books packed in my suitcase and become captivated instead by what I found on the bookshelves before me. Once, it was Michel Butor’s hypnotic 1957 La Modification  that hooks from the start by addressing the reader as ‘you’. On another occasion, it was Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, which I picked up, expecting a Savile Row mystery, only to find myself drawn into the haunting ancient world of the Fens and its traditions of bellringing. Another time, it was Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!  and its harsh evocations of Swedish migrants to the iron country of Nebraska trying to break the soil’s resistance to crops. There is joy in being ambushed by books.