symbol are especially recommended.The bibliography we’ve given here is necessarily selective, and entirely subjective. Most of the books listed below are in print and, and any which are out of print should be easy to track down. Titles marked with the symbol are especially recommended.
Bill Bryson Notes from a Small Island. Bryson’s best-selling and highly amusing account of an extended journey around Britain in the 1990s.
William Cobbett Rural Rides. First published in 1830, Cobbett’s account of his various fact-finding tours bemoaned the death of the old rural England and its customs, while decrying both the growth of cities and the iniquities suffered by the exploited urban poor.
David Craig On the Crofter’s Trail. Using anecdotes and interviews with descendants, Craig conveys the hardship and tragedy of the Highland Clearances without being mawkish.
Olivia Laing To the River. This acclaimed account of the author’s midsummer walk along Sussex’s River Ouse from source to sea is beautifully written and observed, interweaving nature writing, history and folklore.
Jan Morris The Matter of Wales. Prolific half-Welsh travel writer Jan Morris immerses herself in the country that she evidently loves. Highly partisan and fiercely nationalistic, the book combs over the origins of the Welsh character, and describes the people and places of Wales with precision and affection. Published in the mid-1980s.
J.B. Priestley English Journey. Quirky account of the Bradford-born author’s travels around England in the 1930s.
Simon Jenkins England’s Thousand Best Churches; England’s Thousand Best Houses. A lucid, witty pick of England’s churches and houses, divided by county and with a star rating. Sales were so good that Jenkins has had further stabs in the same format with England’s 100 Best Views (2014) and England’s Best Cathedrals (2016) and even Britain’s 100 Best Railway Stations (2017).
A. Wainwright A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (7 vols). These beautifully produced small-format volumes of handwritten notes and sketches (1952 to 1966) have led generations up the Lake District’s mountains and down through its dales. The originals have now been revised to take account of changing routes and landscapes.
Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert The London Encyclopaedia. More than a thousand pages of concisely presented and well-illustrated information on London past and present – the most fascinating single book on the capital.
John Campbell The Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher. Campbell has been mining the Thatcher seam for several years now and this abridged paperback version, published in 2012, hits many political nails right on the head. By the same author, and equally engaging, is his 1987 Aneurin Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism as well as his latest work, a biography of Roy Jenkins.
Tom Devine The Scottish Nation: A Modern History. Scotland’s pre-eminent historian cuts a well-researched and well-considered swathe through his home country’s recent history – from 1700 to 2007. Devine has also written a string of more specific titles – on the Lowland Clearances for one – as well as an exploration of Scotland’s current constitutional pickle, Independence or Union: Scotland’s Past and Scotland’s Present.
Christopher Hill The World Turned Upside-Down; God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. A pioneering Marxist historian, Hill (1912–2003) transformed the way the story of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth was related in a string of superbly researched, well-written texts – among which these are two of the best.
Eric Hobsbawm Industry and Empire. Ostensibly an economic history of Britain from 1750 to the late 1960s, charting Britain’s decline and fall as a world power, this book’s great skill lies in its detailed analysis of the effects on ordinary people. By the same author, Captain Swing focuses on the labourers’ uprisings of nineteenth-century England; Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 has at its heart an examination of the collapse of Communism; and his magnificent trilogy, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848, The Age of Capital 1848–1875, and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914; there is nothing better.
Philip Jenkins A History of Modern Wales 1536–1990. Splendidly thorough book, placing Welsh history in its British and European context. Unbiased and rational appraisal of events and the struggle to preserve Welsh consciousness.
Owen Jones Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. A trumpet blast from the political left – and a yell of moral/political outrage at the way the media treat the working class. You’ll do more howling if you follow up with Jones’s equally trenchant The Establishment: And how they get away with it.
David Kynaston Austerity Britain, 1945–51. Comprehensive vox pop that gives the real flavour of postwar England. Everything is here, from the skill of a Dennis Compton cricket innings through to the dangers of hewing coal down the pit, all in a land where there were “no supermarkets, no teabags, no Formica, no trainers … and just four Indian restaurants”. Also recommended is Kynaston’s follow-up volumes Family Britain, 1951–1957 and Modernity Britain, 1957–1959.
Andrew Rawnsley The End of the Party. Arguably Britain’s most acute political journalist, Rawnsley cross-examines and dissects New Labour under Blair and Brown to withering effect. Different target, same approach – In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition Government.
Simon Schama A History of Britain (3 vols). British history, from 3000 BC to 2000 AD, delivered at pace by the TV-famous historian and popularizer, Simon Schama. The prolific Schama can’t half bang it out – even in his seventies, he’s showing no signs of slowing down.
E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class. A seminal text – essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the fabric of English society. Traces the tribulations of England’s emergent working-class between 1780 and 1832.
Wynford Vaughan-Thomas Wales. Working chronologically from the pre-Celtic dawn to the aftermath of the 1979 devolution vote, this masterpiece is a warm and spirited history of Wales, offering perhaps the clearest explanation of the evolution of Welsh culture.
Owen Hatherley A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. No good news here from this angry rant of a book, which rails against – and describes in detail – the 1990s architectural desecration of a string of British cities in the name of speculation masquerading as modernization.
Duncan MacMillan Scottish Art 1460–2000 and Scottish Art in the Twentieth Century. The former is a lavish overview of Scottish painting with good sections on landscape, portraiture and the Glasgow Boys, while the latter covers its period (till 2000) in splendid detail.
Francis Pryor Home: A Time Traveller’s Tales from Britain’s Prehistory. The often arcane discoveries of working archeologists are given fascinating new exposure in Pryor’s lively archeological histories of Britain. This latest book concentrates on family life, but other Pryor titles include Britain in the Middle Ages; Britain BC and Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons.
Brian Sewell Naked Emperors: Criticisms of English Contemporary Art. Trenchant, idiosyncratic, reviews – often attacks – on contemporary art from this leading critic and arch debunker of pretension, who died in 2015. Few would want to plough through all 368 pages of the assembled reviews – but dip in and yelp with glee, or splutter with indignation.
Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Emma; Persuasion. All-time classics on manners, society and provincial life; laced with bathos and ever-so-subtle twists of plot.
James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson. England’s most famous man of letters and pioneer dictionary-maker displayed – warts and all – by his engagingly low-life Scottish biographer.
Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights. Set on the Yorkshire Moors, this is the ultimate English melodrama, complete with volcanic passions, craggy landscapes, ghostly presences and gloomy Yorkshire villagers/villages.
John Bunyan Pilgrim’s Progress. Simple, allegorical tale of hero Christian’s struggle to achieve salvation. Prepare to feel guilty.
Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Tripping out with the most famous literary drug-taker after Coleridge – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas it isn’t, but neither is this a simple cautionary tale.
Charles Dickens Bleak House; David Copperfield; Little Dorrit; Oliver Twist; Hard Times. Many of Dickens’ novels are set in London, including Bleak House, Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit, and these contain some of his most trenchant pieces of social analysis; Hard Times, however, is set in a Lancashire mill town, while David Copperfield draws on Dickens’ own unhappy experiences as a boy, with much of the action taking place in Kent and Norfolk.
George Eliot Scenes of Clerical Life; Middlemarch; Mill on the Floss. Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) wrote mostly about the county of her birth, Warwickshire, the setting for the three searing tales that comprise her fictional debut, Scenes of Clerical Life. Middlemarch is a gargantuan portrayal of English provincial life prior to the Reform Act of 1832, while the exquisite Mill on the Floss is based on her own childhood experiences.
Thomas Hardy Far from the Madding Crowd; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure. Hardy’s novels contain some famously evocative descriptions of his native Dorset, but originally it was Hardy’s defiance of conventional pieties that attracted most attention: Tess, in which the heroine has a baby out of wedlock and commits murder, shocked his contemporaries, while his bleakest novel, the Oxford-set Jude the Obscure, provoked such a violent response that Hardy gave up novel-writing altogether.
Walter Scott Waverley. Swirl the tartan, blow the pipes, this is the first of the novels by Scott that did much to create a highly romanticized version of Scottish life and history. Others include Rob Roy, a rich and ripping yarn that transformed the diminutive brigand into a national hero.
Lawrence Sterne Tristram Shandy. Anarchic, picaresque eighteenth-century ramblings based on life in a small English village; full of bizarre textual devices – like an all-black page in mourning for one of the characters.
Robert Louis Stevenson Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Kidnapped; The Master of Ballantrae; Treasure Island; Weir of Hermiston. Superbly imagined and pacily written nineteenth-century tales of intrigue and derring-do.
Anthony Trollope Barchester Towers. Trollope was an astonishingly prolific novelist who also, in his capacity as a postal surveyor, found time to invent the letterbox. The “Barsetshire” novels, of which Barchester Towers is the best known, are set in and around a fictional version of Salisbury.
Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent. Spy story based on the 1906 anarchist bombing of Greenwich Observatory, exposing the hypocrisies of both the police and anarchists.
E.M. Forster Howards End. Bourgeois angst in Hertfordshire and Shropshire, by one of the country’s most intense modern novelists.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon A Scots Quair. A landmark trilogy, set in northeast Scotland during and after World War I, the events are seen through the eyes of Chris Guthrie, “torn between her love for the land and her desire to escape a peasant culture”. Strong, seminal work.
Robert Graves Goodbye to All That. Horrific and humorous memoirs of public school and World War I trenches, followed by postwar trauma (Graves had been badly wounded). Graves hit the literary big time in 1934 with an erudite Roman soap opera, I, Claudius.
D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers; Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s less-than-flattering take on working-class life in a Nottinghamshire pit village never went down well with the locals. His Sons and Lovers, a fraught, autobiographical novel, contains some of his finest writing, as does Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which pushes sex and class hard (and harder) together.
Laurie Lee Cider with Rosie. Beautifully written reminiscences of adolescent frolics in the rural Cotswolds of the 1920s.
Richard Llewellyn How Green Was My Valley; Up into the Singing Mountain; Down Where the Moon is Small; Green, Green My Valley Now. Vital tetralogy in eloquent and passionate prose, following the life of Huw Morgan from his youth in a South Wales mining valley through emigration to the Welsh community in Patagonia and back to 1970s Wales. The pick, How Green Was My Valley, captured a longing for a simple if tough life, and steered clear of cloying sentimentality.
Daphne du Maurier Rebecca. Long derided as a popular piece of fluff, this darkly romantic novel has come to be appreciated as a Gothic meditation on sexual inequality and obsession, focused around the brooding mansion of Manderley, on du Maurier’s beloved Cornish coast. See also the same author’s Frenchman’s Creek and Jamaica Inn.
George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London; The Road to Wigan Pier. Famous more than anything else for 1984, which was published in 1949, Orwell had warmed up in the 1930s with these angry denunciations of inequity, giving respectively a tramp’s-eye view of the world and an examination of the brutal effects of the Great Depression on industrial communities in Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Gritty account of factory life and sexual shenanigans in Nottingham in the late 1950s.
Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood; Collected Stories; Collected Poems: 1934–1953. Under Milk Wood is Thomas’s most popular piece, telling the story of a microcosmic Welsh seaside town over a 24-hour period. Collected Stories contains all of Thomas’s classic prose pieces, including the compulsive, crackling autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Thomas’s beautifully wrought and inventive poems carry a deep, pained concern with mortality and the nature of humanity.
Evelyn Waugh The Sword of Honour trilogy. A brilliant satire of the World War I officer class laced with some of Waugh’s funniest set pieces. The best-selling Brideshead Revisited is possibly his worst book, rank with snobbery, nostalgia and love of money.
P.G. Wodehouse Thank You, Jeeves; A Damsel in Distress. For many, Wodehouse (1881–1975) is the quintessential English humorist and his deftly crafted tales – with their familiar cast of characters, primarily Bertie Wooster and Jeeves – have remained popular for decades.
Peter Ackroyd English Music. A typical Ackroyd novel, constructing parallels between interwar London and distant epochs to conjure a kaleidoscopic vision of English culture. His other novels, such as Chatterton, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee and, most recently the crime-ridden Limehouse Golem, are variations on his preoccupation with the English psyche’s darker depths.
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending; Levels of Life. One of the UK’s most versatile writers, Barnes seems to be able to turn his hand to just about anything. These two novels, perhaps his best, touch on themes of sex and inhibition, regret and false recollection, but most of all death and bereavement.
George Mackay Brown Beside the Ocean of Time. A child’s journey through the history of an Orkney island, and an adult’s effort to make sense of the place’s secrets.
William Golding The Spire. Atmospheric albeit complex novel centred on the building of a cathedral spire, taking place in a thinly disguised medieval Salisbury. Also, if you ever wondered what it was like to be at sea in an early nineteenth-century British ship, try the splendid Rites of Passage trilogy.
Alasdair Gray Lanark. Gray’s first novel was twenty-five years in the writing and remains his most influential, leading Anthony Burgess to hail him as “the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott”. This challenging, loosely autobiographical work – part science fiction, part bildungsroman – relates, in sometimes hallucinatory style, the journey of a man who hankers to create great art.
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger’s Child. Hollinghurst excels in pin-sharp and often very funny observations of British society. This particular work, from 2011, starts with a pre-World War I encounter in a country house, by turns bucolic, edgy and romantic. The focus of attention is a young poet who is killed in the war, and the narrative that follows develops into a satire on the uncertain art of biography.
P.D. James Original Sin. James wrote skilful tales of murder and mystery; of her umpteen novels featuring poet/Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh, this is one of the best. The novels An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin are also worth reading, featuring London private detective Cordelia Gray.
James Kelman The Busconductor Hines; How Late It Was, how late. The first is a wildly funny story of a young Glasgow bus conductor with an intensely boring job and a limitless imagination. How Late It Was is Kelman’s award-winning and controversial look at life from the perspective of a blind Glaswegian drunk. A disturbing study of personal and political violence, with language to match.
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall; Bring up The Bodies. Best-selling Mantel has made an enormous literary splash with her sharply observed, superbly crafted historical novels – and these are two of the best, set in the troubled days of Henry VIII and focused on his loyal enforcer, Thomas Cromwell.
Ian McEwan Atonement; On Chesil Beach. One of Britain’s finest contemporary novelists, McEwan’s dark and unsettling works are punctuated by the unforeseen and the accidental. Atonement is possibly his most masterful book, tracing the course of three lives from a sweltering country garden in 1935 to absolution in the new century, while On Chesil Beach is a tale of innocence and loss, misunderstanding and tenderness between two newlyweds in a hotel on the Dorset coast in the early 1960s.
Ian Rankin Knots and Crosses; The Falls. One of Britain’s most popular crime authors, Rankin introduced John Rebus in 1987 and since then the hard-drinking, anti-authoritarian, emotionally scarred detective has featured in almost twenty novels. He inhabits the mean streets of Edinburgh – streets the tourists rarely see – though visitors can rub shoulders with him in cherished locations like the Oxford Bar.
Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine From Doon With Death; Gallowglass; King Solomon’s Carpet; Grasshopper; The Birthday Present. Rendell wrote brilliantly and disturbingly of contemporary dysfunction in all its guises. Her long-standing Inspector Wexford series was set in the fictional West Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, but it’s when writing as Barbara Vine that Rendell excelled in creating memorable fictions and a sense of place, namely London.
Zadie Smith White Teeth. Smith explores mixed families, mixed races, mixed religions and mixed England in this zeitgeist-capturing debut novel, finished in her final year at Cambridge University. Among her other excellent work is the more experimental NW, which follows the lives of four people in northwest London (where Smith was born).