TOP 10 HISTORY BOOKS (REVAMPED)

 

That’s right – I’m revamping my top ten history books, with no fewer than six new entries! Although one of those is a new wildcard tenth place entry for the best history book of 2025…

 

History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

History does not repeat but sometimes it rhymes.

History is just one damned thing after another.

 

Ah yes, history – and three of my favorite quotes about it.

The first is paraphrasing an actual quote by Karl Marx – often overlooked by people, even Marxists, as someone who could be quite the capable prose stylist when not bogged down in denser prose or theory.

The second is often attributed to Mark Twain – someone who is widely acknowledged as a capable prose stylist, except that he doesn’t seem to have actually said it.

The third quip is often quoted from historian Toynbee – correctly but somewhat misleadingly because firstly, it was adapted from a preceding popular saying about life, and secondly, he was using it to criticize historians who simply sought to chronicle history rather than analyze it. Toynbee definitely fell in the latter category – a historian whose central theme was identifying, well, the themes of history, its cycles and patterns, its plot and rhythm (or history rhyming if you will).

History has been a subject that has fascinated me since childhood, when I read it avidly – and still does as I read it now, hence my Top 10 History Books.

“History is an academic discipline which uses a narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effect. Historians debate the nature of history as an end in itself, and its usefulness in giving perspective on the problems of the present.”

I’m not here to seek to resolve any of these debates, if such a thing is even possible – I’m just here to read books on history and, you know, live in it. To adapt my own quote of living in a mythic world, I live in a historic world. We all do.

That said, what I will do is clarify my tastes in history books. I definitely lean more towards Toynbee’s concept of history as themes or patterns, preferring history books that are more analysis than chronicle.

I also tend to have a preference for military history – put bluntly, the history of wars and empires. Two of my top ten books are general histories of war and warfare – and I’d argue for my top spot as a third such entry, not so much military history of itself but a historical treatise of military strategy as a lens with which to view history in general and military history in particular.

To which I might add a fourth entry – which is also literally the fourth entry in my top ten – as my favorite military history of the Second World War, which I often dub my bible of that war. So that’s four of my top ten books as military history in one way or another.

Following on from the history of wars and empires, it might be cliched but foremost among my subjects of preference is the Roman Empire and indeed six of my top ten books have that as their subject – with five of those looking at the proverbial decline and fall of the empire, being my particular focus within that subject of preference. So that’s six of my top ten books as histories of the Roman Empire, with five of them being histories of its decline and fall in one way or another.

I also can’t invoke capable prose style in my introduction without noting my preference for a good or even literary prose style in my books of history – some historians or historical writers are definitely better than others.

So here are my top ten books of history. You know the rules – this is one of my deep dive top tens, counting down from tenth to first place and looking at individual entries in some depth or detail of themselves. Tenth place is my wildcard entry for the best entry from the previous year (2025).