Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History and translator of Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars

I have always found that memories of a book loved in the depths of summer have a peculiar, gilded quality. It is easy for me, then, to remember very precisely the summer read I most treasured as a child: Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson. I devoured it so many times that now, when I recall its portrayal of Moomin Valley, its mixture of the joyous and the unsettling seems blurred with recollections of my own happiest times in summer. Adult memories of travel in Greece are similarly interfused with memories of reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,  Roberto Calasso’s dazzling, poetic and utterly inimitable rendering of the Greek myths. As for the book I have most enjoyed reading this summer, Richard Beard’s The Universal Turing Machine is not really a book at all, but an online memoir that combines autobiography, science fiction and the inheritance of Tristram Shandy to create a most original masterpiece. It can be found (completely free of charge!) here.

Helen Thompson, author of Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

My best holiday reading experience in recent years was Moby Dick. I was travelling by train to Italy, and I thought that if I were ever going to read this book, it would be now. Somewhere on the train between Paris and Milan, I realised I was transfixed, and when I finished the novel on a beach on the Bay of Naples, it seemed as if reading it was the point of the holiday. It is the ultimate book about water and the cosmos, and I had arrived at the end of the journey the Pequod takes to Captain Ahab’s destruction on that sea that sits under the looming shadow of Vesuvius.

The beginning of Moby Dick is very evocative about the island of Nantucket as a whaling port, and I’ve come to see the book as a prophecy about what the global search for oil will bring. But there is also this near love letter to historical and literary England. Herman Melville compares the decks of the Pequod to ‘the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury cathedral where Becket bled’. Generally, there is this wonder at the waves and a biblical blackness to them, and reading the novel, you ride them wherever Melville has them take you.

Paul Lay, Senior Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

This year has been a mixture of old and new, fiction and non-fiction. Books on the British Civil Wars (or whatever we now call it) continue to flow steadily – with a menacing resonance for today’s divided society. Jonathan Healey’s The Blood in Winter is a riveting and darkly witty account of the conflict’s origins, while Minoo Dinshaw’s Friends in Youth is a moving account of the friendship of two leading Parliamentarians, Edward Hyde and Bulstrode Whitelocke, who ended up, like so many, on opposing sides.

For fiction, I remain obsessed by the works of Anita Brookner, a supreme stylist, economical, elegant and incisive. Her short novel – aren’t they all? – A Misalliance blew me away, as did the very different experience of Thackeray’s great historical novel, The History of Henry Esmond.

Dominic Sandbrook, historian and co-host of The Rest is History

My summer reading has been somewhat skewed by the fact that I have been recording episodes for a new book podcast, a spin-off from Rest is History, which is due to launch later this year. So I’ve been happily re-reading some of the classics, from Dracula and Wuthering Heights to The Hobbit   and The Handmaid’s Tale. One book I hadn’t read before, though, was Truman Capote’s true-crime chiller In Cold Blood – the book that, according to its author, created the genre of the non-fiction novel. My co-presenter Tabby had been telling me for months how brilliant it is, and she was quite right. The story of how two American drifters murdered a picture-perfect farming family in 1950s Kansas grips you from the very first page, with a sense of colour and texture to match any 19th-century novel. It’s a work of genius – there’s just no other word for it.

Johan Hakelius, political editor-in-chief of Fokus, Sweden’s leading current events weekly

Every other summer or so, I can’t stay away from Anthony Powell’s magnificent suite, A Dance to the Music of Time. It mirrors the randomness of cause and effect we experience, since we do not live in a neatly sanitised narrative. When I first read it, during a rainy summer 20 years ago, I was taken in by the suspense Powell manages to create from fairly ordinary circumstances. Other summers, I was gripped by his decoding of changing mores or his complex and convincing characters. I suppose this puts me firmly among Powell’s ‘socially and intellectually insecure’ fans, as the great and — by all sane men — revered Auberon Waugh put it in his legendary attack on Powell in the Sunday Telegraph. So be it.

The Swedish author Torgny Lindgren recounts in one of his books, Reminiscences, how his parents became concerned after Torgny had landed his first job as a reporter. ‘You should get an honest occupation and not be a burden to others,’ is his father’s verdict. When Torgny protests that he is getting paid, his father counters: ‘You are a burden to the readers.’ Anyone who makes a living out of writing must admit that Lindgren senior has a point. However, Torgny Lindgren is a light burden to carry. I suggest you start with Hash, a somewhat absurd, serious and hilarious tale of offal stew, nazi war-criminals in hiding and everyday life in a remote part of Sweden.

Alastair Benn, Deputy Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

I do not associate reading with summertime – although I must have read many books in this season of the year, none have left me with powerful, and enduring, associations. Summer is for physical freedom and ease, and sensuous abundance. Spend time in nature, not in a book – go to lands where the sun never sets. Climb mountains. Swim under golden skies. Use the rest of the year for reading.

Katherine Harvey, author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages

Since my summers never involve as many holidays as I’d like them to, I often supplement my travels by reading about other people’s. Last summer, after a wet week in Ireland, I enjoyed Mia Kankimäki’s The Women I Think About At Night, in which she follows in the footsteps of the female artists and explorers who inspire her, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Karen Blixen. Mixing travelogue, memoir and biography, it’s the sort of book that makes you want to travel, but also leads to further reading. Cal Flyn’s Thicker Than Water is an engaging account of her journey through Australia in search of her distant ancestor, Angus McMillan – a 19th-century settler who turns out to be a rather darker character than the family legends suggested. And Christiane Rutter’s 1938 memoir A Woman in the Polar Night, a vivid account of the year she and her husband spent living in a hut in the Arctic, is the perfect antidote to summer heat.

Jack Dickens, Commissioning Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

I recommend jetting off to the Caribbean in the late 1950s with Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It is a rare treasure: a Cold War spy story that explores serious themes about human nature while also being delightfully funny. In crafting the plot, Greene drew on his own insider experience, acquired while working for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service during the Second World War. He revels in mocking the public school mandarins in Whitehall and MI6, who are constantly duped by bogus reports from their man on the ground in Cuba, James Wormold, a British vacuum cleaner salesman who, in turn, is hopelessly out of his depth. With the incompetence of the British state currently in the headlines, Greene’s novel has a strangely contemporary resonance.

If the Caribbean doesn’t take your fancy, then I would suggest an adventure in Central Asia with Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game. Written with a novelist’s literary flair and imagination, an historian’s eye for detail, and a journalist’s nose for a good story, The Great Game charts the epic struggle between imperial Russia and the British Raj for mastery in Central Asia. Spanning the 19th century and beyond, Hopkirk’s account offers numerous windows into the workings of imperial conflict, diplomacy, and espionage. From St Petersburg and Samarkand to Simla and up into the High Himalayas, he brings his subject to life with a skill that few other non-fiction writers have been able to match.

Samuel Rubinstein, historian

There’s no better way to spend the summer than in the company of a classic novel. A few summers ago, I read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick  for the first time. The following summer, I read Laurence Sterne’s hilarious, inimitable The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. I had inherited some nice, old editions of the final four volumes (of nine) from my grandmother, picked up one of them, and couldn’t put it down; so I was moved to buy the whole set and start, as Tristram does, from the very beginning.

I did not choose to, but was required to, read George Eliot’s Middlemarch – it was the set text in my A-Level English Literature course. I’m so glad it was; had it not been, who knows if I ever would have been able to devote the requisite time to it. Since it is so often described as the finest work of English literature, it hardly needs any defending (some of my Middlemarch opinions do need some defending, however – such as my deep admiration for the much-maligned Reverend Casaubon). However, on my insistence, my girlfriend brought it with us this summer on our trip to Canada. As she worked her way through the first couple of volumes on our long flight to Calgary, I was struck by how often it made her laugh. Eliot has an eye for social conventions, for recognisable types, like no other. It is a very funny book.

Daisy Dunn, author of The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It

In my summer holidays as a teenager, I worked my way through the novels of Thomas Hardy and became, though a Londoner, a proud Wessex girl. I find myself returning to Hardy’s books at this time of year to experience the English countryside in a different way. I’ll revisit F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night for similarly nostalgic reasons, though it’s set on the French Riviera and evokes an atmosphere more haunting than holiday. Recent summers have been enriched by Rosamund Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and the new works of history and biography I have saved up throughout the year. I took William the Conqueror to Madrid one summer. He wasn’t the easiest of companions.

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

Looking for something substantial to read this summer? Look no further than Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History, a kaleidoscopic overview of some of the most important ideas that shaped strategic thinking from apes to corporate managers, with a whole panoply of great philosophers and social scientists squeezed in between. I’ve read it twice – there go two summers – but it’s so long and so incredibly rich, it could take another summer to really digest. Another summer favourite would be a fun, ideally Pulitzer-winning biography. Lots to go by here, but lovers of Italy will enjoy David Kerzer’s The Pope and Mussolini, a remarkable story of Pope Pius XI and his politically and morally complex relationship with the fascist state. The third book I would read over the summer would normally be a work of fiction.

When it comes to fiction, I am a big fan of the hundred years between 1850 and 1950, the best time for world literature. I could draw up a very long list of books here, but here’s one with a hair-raising ending: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a totalitarian horror story, now newly translated from Koestler’s original German manuscript. Who could wish for a better summer reading? Winter is coming!

Hannah Lucinda Smith, author of Erdogan Rising: The Battle for the Soul of Turkey

In summer, I like a nostalgic read, something easy to read that I can take to the beach and devour. In 2023, I loved Michael Cragg’s Reach for the Stars, a funny and sometimes bittersweet retrospective of the late 1990s pop scene, told through the agents, super fans, and members themselves of groups like Steps and 5ive. This year, I’ve chosen a pair of books that are more substantial and set in the 2000s. Sarah Ditum’s Toxic retells the stories of a cast of famous women of that era, from Amy Winehouse to Kim Kardashian, with a 2020s feminist lens. Meanwhile, as a perfect companion, James Bloodworth’s The Lost Boys tracks toxic masculinity from the pick-up artist scene of the noughties to Andrew Tate, Adolescence, and Trump. Both have had me thinking about them long after I closed the last pages.

Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War: How World War II is Shaping a New Nationalism

In the summer of 1989, I went to Taiwan. My university arranged placements for us in Taipei at the city’s Mandarin Training Centre. That was a particularly fraught summer: spring 1989 had seen the horrific killings of students and workers in Tiananmen Square, and the Chinese mainland was closed to foreigners.

The long novel I read that summer was The New Confessions by William Boyd, published in 1987.  I’ve always enjoyed Boyd’s novels, and this was the first, but not the last, of his books to explore one person’s memories over a lifetime, through the character of John James Todd. Todd fights in the First World War, becomes a movie director in Europe and the US, becomes a war correspondent, and ends up on a Mediterranean island.  As the title suggests, it loosely draws inspiration from Rousseau’s Confessions, one of the first modern autobiographies, which chronicles the highs and lows of a man’s life from youth to middle age.

Although neither Rousseau’s nor Todd’s life has much similarity to mine, I think that being a first-year undergraduate wasn’t a bad time to read that kind of novel about how early choices might shape the twists and turns of a life. Learning Chinese and about China was part of my early life. And it’s stayed with me for decades, even as the country itself has changed beyond recognition.

Saffron Swire, Associate Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

This summer, I’ve been chewing my way through the collected diaries of the acclaimed Australian novelist Helen Garner. How to End a Story is a beefy brick of a book — running to over 800 pages — but as it is untethered to any rigid chronology (separated only by years), you can dip in and out at leisure or disappear for hours to swim in her thoughts. Between her sharp, candid reflections on single motherhood (‘Being a mother is not something you finish; there is no tidy conclusion, no neat ending to the story’), her literary struggles (‘I’m not a natural writer – more a cross between a slow cook and a neurotic squirrel, gathering bits and pieces for years before I throw them all in the pot’), and the emotionally abusive relationships along the way (‘V is bad-tempered, self-satisfied, impatient – while I encourage his work, he never nourishes mine’), she also fills her pages with nods to writers old and new, from Cocteau, Germaine Greer to Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Self-deprecating she may be, but Garner is sharp as a tack, and her confessional pillow talk has made for great company on stifling summer nights.

I also recommend a trip to the crumbling grandeur of 19th-century Sicily during the Risorgimento. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard was my companion one sticky summer in Umbria many years ago, when I was both bed-bound and book-bound. I concur with E.M. Forster that The Leopard is a ‘great lonely book’, but it also reminds you of ‘how many ways there are of being alive’. A relatively short novel, rich in prose and sumptuous in setting, it offers the chance to slip into another world — one ruled by opulent Sicilian aristocrats like its charismatic protagonist, Prince Fabrizio Salina, who tries to navigate sweeping political change as Garibaldi’s forces advance. The tension between progress and tradition is handled dextrously by Lampedusa, encapsulated best in the book’s timeless dictum: ‘Everything must change so that everything can stay the same.’

Katja Hoyer, author of Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990

One summer, many years ago, I found myself in a café in Rhodes. ‘This is the life,’ I thought, settled down in my shady spot and began to read. When the waiter came, he gave me a look. ‘Nice holiday reading?’ he asked, pointing at the cover, which proclaimed the title in big, bold letters: ‘HITLER’. I’m not sure about ‘nice’, but it was good. Despite its 1,000 pages, Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler is a riveting page-turner. I can only encourage everyone with an interest in 20th-century history to brave the looks you’re going to get and take it to the beach. As a German historian, I’ve been drawn to German history throughout my summers. One all-time favourite of mine is Fatherland by Robert Harris – a gripping, fictional ‘what-if’ that has lost none of its tension. Set in an alternate‑history 1964, where Nazi Germany won the Second World War, it follows a Berlin detective as he investigates a high-ranking Nazi’s death. Well worth enduring the inevitable stares from your seat neighbour on the plane.

Mathew Lyons, critic

First, a new book I read on a brief holiday in June this year: Parallel Lives by Iain Pears. Pears is best known for his novels – Instance of the Fingerpost is a triumph of historical fiction – but Parallel Lives is the true story of the love affair between the Eton-educated art historian Francis Haskell and Larissa Salmina, keeper of Italian drawings at the Hermitage in St Petersburg, which resulted in their marriage in 1965. It’s an immensely entertaining read, and Pears does well not to let Larissa, an extraordinary character, take over entirely. But it’s also a perceptive study of two very different people and the transformative possibilities of love – as well as an exploration of a Cold War era that, in retrospect, also looks like the last gasp of a pan-European elite culture, which, in both good and bad ways, was largely indifferent to national politics.

Then, from another summer about 15 years ago, something else entirely: Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. I loathed it when I first encountered it at university, but the combination of two decades’ further maturity and a chair in the shade of a large apple tree one summer in a garden in Normandy changed my mind. I found myself completely seduced by the rhythm and music of Spenser’s lines – and by the imaginative force of his distinctively Elizabethan medievalism, with its self-consciously archaic language and multi-layered narratives that mingle Arthurian romance with allegory to magical effect.