The Telegraph 500 Must-Read Books war and history history of the Peloponnesian War / Thucydides (c400 bc)

The Telegraph 500 Must-Read Books

WAR AND HISTORY
History of the Peloponnesian War / Thucydides (c400 BC)

Generally agreed to be the first of its kind, Thucydides's history covers the war between Sparta and Athens, and though its accuracy remains moot - Thucydides was an Athenian general and so likely to be selective in his emphasis - it is an astonishing, rich and detailed drama to which historians return again and again.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire / Edward Gibbon (1776-1789)

"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortune of mankind," Gibbons wrote in this classic history tracing the Roman Empire from the 1st Century BC to the 15th AD. Vast, learned, opinionated, and witty, it is an absolute epic.

A Farewell to Arms / Ernest Hemingway (1929)

Set in the Italian theatre during the First World War, Hemingway's short, powerful, semiautobiographical novel is guaranteed to make any grown man cry, but it is also a penetrating study of camaraderie in the face of danger and is, as you'd expect, beautifully written in telling sentences.

1066 and All That / W C Sellar and R J Yeatman (1930)

Subtitled "A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates" 1066... is a tongue in cheek send-up of the way history used to be taught, and may yet be again.

All Quiet on the Western Front / Erich Maria Remarque (1929)

"This book is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure": so begins the remarkable semiautobiographical, humane and poignant novel about Remarque's experiences in the trenches and back in Germany after the war.

Legion of the Damned / Sven Hassel (1953)

Written in highly suspicious circumstances by a highly suspicious author (or perhaps his wife, or editor) this is the first in a series of novels that became cartoonish, yet for all that it packs immense power, describing the misadventures of a group of German soldiers on the Eastern Front.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples / Winston Churchill (1956-1958)

A magisterial, if patchy, four-part history of Britain from Anglo-Saxon times to 1914, it was begun in 1937 but subsequently much delayed. Subjective, erratic, with a romantic view of the world, it is full of character and incident, and is beautifully written.

Sword of Honour Trilogy / Evelyn Waugh (1952-1961)

Loosely autobiographical, this three-part meandering, tragic-comic farce paints a convincingly chaotic picture of the British muddling their way to winning the war. It is beautifully world weary and cynical, as the hapless hero is buffeted by the forces of class, waste, spite, cowardice and inefficiency.

A History of the Crusades / Steven Runciman (1951-1954)

A classic three-part history of the crusades written with such elegance and dash, one might think he was making it all up. Historians have since frowned on his technique, and recent research has revealed some factual flaws, yet Runciman remains required reading.

The Making of the Middle Ages / R W Southern (1953)

Written while the author thought he had only a short time left to live, this concise and unadorned primer has become a classic introduction to how Europeans lived in the early middle ages.

Catch-22 / Joseph Heller (1961)

The blackest and yet funniest book ever written on any subject. The "hero" is a bomber pilot flying sorties over Italy where thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him, but it is not them he's most frightened of: it's his own side who seem determined to do the job themselves.

The Guns of August / Barbara W Tuchman (1962)

Tuchman was awarded the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for this superb analysis of how and why the European powers went to war in 1914, and what could have been done to stop them. Tuchman enlivens the complex issue to make the book as compulsive as any thriller.

Slaughterhouse-5 / Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

A satire of more than just war, Slaughterhouse-5 mixes elements of science fiction with the novel's central event: the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut was there at the time, an American PoW, who survived the fire storm by sheltering in a slaughterhouse.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee / Dee Brown (1970)

Following the heartbreaking travails of the American Indians from their first contact with white settlers until the massacre at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's book covers what was in effect their ethnic cleansing by the American Government.

The Face of Battle / John Keegan (1976)

The late John Keegan dissects the ordinary soldier's experience in three key battles from English history: Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme and shows how, despite the technological changes, what is asked of a man in war remains fundamentally the same. An absolute classic of the genre.

Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324 / Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1978)

A ground-breaking micro-history of a small French village, researched from the records of a local inquisitor who went on to become Pope. Revelatory of the medieval mindset, as well as more general society.

A Bright Shining Lie / Neil Sheehan (1988)

The life and death of an American colonel who went to Vietnam in the 1960s, didn't like what he saw - cowardice and incompetence, rather than a wrong war - and so went on to tell the world's press about it. A fascinating study, not just of the war but of a man.

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland / Christopher R Browning (1992)

Browning uses records to show how an ordinary group of men became involved in the Final Solution and how just as easily humanity in general might be perverted to evil.

Longitude / Dava Sobel (1998)

Responsible for many copycat histories of previously overlooked trifles, Dava Sobel's diminutive masterpiece describes 18th-century British clock maker John Harrison's invention of a timepiece accurate enough to measure longitude at sea.

The Discovery of France / Graham Robb (2007)

A very different France to the one we think we know emerges from Graham Robb's unconventional history: one that is impossibly rural, remote, and insular, where no two villages speak the same dialect and peasants hibernate through the winter. The shock is how recently this was the case.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Histories / Tacitus (100-110 AD)

The Good Soldier Svejk / Jaroslav Hasek (1923)

The Naked and the Dead / Norman Mailer (1948)

Dispatches / Michael Herr (1977)

Birdsong / Sebastian Faulks (1993)

Captain Corelli's Mandolin / Louis de Bernieres (1994)

Regeneration Trilogy / Pat Barker (1991-1995)

Europe: A history / Norman Davies (1996)

Guns, Germs and Steel / Jared Diamond (1997)

The Siege / Helen Dunmore (2001)

A Short History of Nearly Everything / Bill Bryson (2003)

Hitler / Ian Kershaw (2008)

The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War / Antony Beevor (1982)

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire / David Cannadine (2001)

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution / Simon Schama (1989)

EUROPEAN AND RUSSIAN CLASSICS
The Trial / Franz Kafka (1925)

It starts with an arrest for no apparent reason, before ensaring the reader in a world of implicit guilt and looming punishment. Often read as a fable about the sinister state, it's just as terrifying for what it makes us think about ourselves.

If This Is a Man / Primo Levi (1947)

When Levi's shaming testimony of the death camps first appeared, it was so shocking that it was ignored. But its assertion of humanity in the face of the worst humans can do has made it all the more urgent.

Life: A User's Manual / Georges Perec (1978)

It seems as though Perec fits the whole of life and history into this beady-eyed tour of a condemned (imaginary) Paris apartment block. Objects spotted on shelves are the starting points for beguiling, quirky stories that can take the reader everywhere.

Don Quixote / Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615)

For all the scorn the novel hurls at its "hero" in the pasteboard helmet attacking strangers to defend the honour of a lightly moustached girl who thinks he's a twit, it's impossible not to love Quixote and his dreams of a nobler world.

The Confessions / Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)

Rousseau's project was to analyse himself, with all his faults, foibles and failures, from the ones that most haunt him (weeing in saucepans) to the ones he can get over (putting five children in orphanages). This assertion of the individual did a lot to change Europe.

Remembrance of Things Past / Marcel Proust (1913-1927)

In spite of those massive sentences, the slippery theme of memory and the eight digressive novels, Proust's probing, almost autobiographical masterpiece is full of gossip, snobbery, flirting, sex, jokes and the most illuminating similes this side of Homer.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Milan Kundera (1984)

The sophisticated, teasingly essay-like style is Kundera's best defence against the totalitarian crassness that engulfs his Prague and his characters, who juggle the serious with the seductively superficial - from Beethoven, through burying a dog, to the pros and cons of window cleaning.

Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy (1877)

Here is Russian high society observed with ruthless realism and a mastery of each character's inner life. Does Tolstoy make a sustained appearance in the character of Levin, the well-meaning suitor and father-do-be? The novel is all the better for it.

Zorba the Greek / Nikos Kazantzakis (1946)

An intellectual wants to experience the pulse of real Greek life: in the character of Zorba, the "man made of rubber" he finds it, along with a uniquely Greek mix of hospitality, piety and violence.

The Decameron / Giovanni Boccaccio (after 1350)

This network of a hundred stories, exchanged by aristocrats escaping the plague in Florence, is by turns ennobling and naughty, but always a celebration of the way a story can console its hearers, or at least divert them.

If On A Winter's Night a Traveller / Italo Calvino (1979)

The plot is - you buy a copy of If on a Winter's Night... So does someone who's just your type. But you're both missing bits. You become the detective in this splendidly funny tale, told through parodies of all those clever, tricksome European writers.

Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

We know who did it; the detective knows. But will we know why a student murdered his landlady? This is thrilling psychology, in which Dostoevsky's empathy with angry idealists, downtrodden women and tormented sensualists takes him deep into the urban Russian soul.

The Princess of Cleves / Madame de Lafayette (1678)

This tale of a noblewoman who must live for love, whatever the cost, has been called the first psychological novel. Later novelists, such as George Sand, still found plenty of material here they could use to create scandals in later ages.

A Hero of Our Time / Mikhail Lermontov (1839)

In a wry, detached tone, Lermontov explores that very wry detachedness that leads to duels and a consistent indifference to love and fate. The problem is, can the reader remain indifferent to the dashing Pechorin as he wrecks lives around the Caucasus?

Confessions of Felix Krull / Thomas Mann (1954)

Mann's last, funniest book takes on some of his biggest questions - are artists liars? Will decadence destroy Europe? This is the most heavenly, scandalous and saucy way of finding out the answers.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Fathers and Sons / Ivan Turgenev (1862)

Hunger / Knut Hamsun (1890)

Zeno's Conscience / Italo Svevo (1923)

Embers / Sandor Marai (1942)

The Coming of Age / Simone De Beauvoir (1970)

Death in Venice / Thomas Mann (1912)

The Leopard / Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)

Life and Fate / Vasily Grossman (1959)

Perfume / Patrick Suskind (1985)

Blindness / Jose Saramago (1995)

BRITISH CLASSICS
Tom Jones / Henry Fielding (1749)

Joyous and irrepressible, bawdy and fast, Fielding's picaresque adventure is short on moralising over sexual liaisons, and long on a rich depiction of 18th-century life. Ceaselessly engaging and everlastingly fresh.

Emma / Jane Austen (1815)

Of all Austen's heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most beguilingly flawed; and naturally, beneath the comedy of disastrous match-making and snobbery, the narrative has a keen intelligence and finely wrought moral sense that makes even a picnic on Box Hill seem universal.

Great Expectations / Charles Dickens (1860)

All that we associate with Dickens, from the large characters to the sense of social injustice, finds its most perfect expression here: Pip's journey from blacksmith's boy to nouveau gentility is an elegy of regret and nostalgia; and London and the windwhipped Thames estuary are unforgettably conjured.

What Maisie Knew / Henry James (1897)

Legal divorce came to England in 1857 and was still a rarity when 40 years later, James's novel told of a young girl being shuttled between two ghastly separating parents. Bleak, yet perfectly formed.

Middlemarch / George Eliot (1874)

Eliot brought her formidable acuity to the evocation of a very particular time - the political reforms of 1832 - but she also pioneered a real depth of psychological understanding in her unforgiving depictions of disintegrating love. Virginia Woolf described it as the only English novel "for grown-up people".

Tess of the d'Urbevilles / Thomas Hardy (1891)

There are times when Tess's rural Wessex has a medieval feel; but Hardy's tragedy of a wronged country girl is also on another level about the painful onrush of modernity and industrialisation - a foreshadowing of simple purity despoiled by capitalism.

Ulysses / James Joyce (1922)

Or: a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, as they criss-cross Dublin on June 4, 1904. Every word is pregnant with meaning, every character's thought conjured with precision, yet it is brilliantly, consistently, laugh-outloud funny.

Mrs Dalloway / Virginia Woolf (1925)

Well-connected Clarissa Dalloway is to give a party later that evening; not far away, Septimus Smith, a victim of shell shock, sits in Regent's Park, subject to hallucinations. Through their thoughts Woolf addresses Society and the delicacy of sanity.

Lady Chatterley's Lover / D H Lawrence (1928)

The sex scenes and language are now inadvertently hilarious, but none of us were to know this until 1960, when the ban on this novel was lifted. Still startling, there is also another level here to do with landscape, inheritance and war.

A Dance to the Music of Time / Anthony Powell (first volume, 1951, 12th volume 1975)

A fantastically ambitious and panoramic sequence detailing the lives and loves of various interlocking mostly upper middle-class characters across the 20th century, it continues to draw in fresh enthusiasts.

I, Claudius / Robert Graves (1934)

Graves hit a rich seam with this imagining of the lost autobiography of Emperor Claudius. Lethal palace intrigues, poisonings and sex, as well as satisfyingly complex relationships gives ancient Rome a vivid new colour and energy.

At Swim-Two-Birds / Flann O'Brien (1939)

A book within a book within a book, a satirical evocation of 1930s Ireland, in which the characters write about one another, and these various fictional figments gang up on the notional author.

The New Confessions / William Boyd (1987)

A sprawling picaresque aping the form of Rousseau's The Confessions, New Confessions follows John James Todd from Edinburgh through the First World War to Berlin, Hollywood and then into exile on an island in the Mediterranean. Surprising, engaging, often very funny, it is also ultimately rather moving.

A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess (1962)

Young Alex loves Beethoven and ultraviolence, but the state thinks it has found a way to scientifically purge him of evil. The real point of the book is the dazzling language - a blend of cockney, Russian and Romany.

The Girls of Slender Means / Muriel Spark (1963)

Set in drab 1945 London, Spark's genius for conveying the flavour of a time, combined with the collision between light-hearted youth and intimations of a heavier life to come, results in a story with an unusual sweet-sour after-taste.

The Sea, The Sea / Iris Murdoch (1978)

A theatre director takes a house on the coast where he meets his former love and disastrously begins wooing her afresh. Murdoch juggles philosophy with raw emotions and self-absorption and finds humour in both.

Riders / Jilly Cooper (1985)

One of the greatest of guilty pleasures, Cooper's febrile Rutshire Chronicles started here: show jumping is a backdrop to the extraordinary sexual dealings of the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black and the wealthy English county set. Pure glitzy class porn, yet still weirdly moving.

The Sea / John Banville (2005)

A masterful exploration of memory, and of loss, Banville's Booker-winning novel focuses on an art historian reaching back to the seaside years of his childhood, and of the people and experiences and loves that have subsequently shaped the meaning of his life.

White Teeth / Zadie Smith (2000)

The most startling quality of Smith's precocious debut - a northwest London multiracial multi-generational saga - is the blend of extreme energy and stop-you-in-your-tracks psychological observation. Immigration, the human genome, Kilburn, failed fathers, 1970s pubs and a Nazi too; the genius lies in Smith's flair for making it all seem so natural, as well as so funny.

Wolf Hall / Hilary Mantel (2009)

There is the temptation to think of this extraordinary work as populist, even crowd-pleasing. But Mantel's achievement runs deeper. In fictionalising Thomas Cromwell and the Henrician court, the deadly power struggles and the most tender relationships, Mantel has reinvigorated not just a genre but the English novel as a whole.

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Pilgrim's Progress / John Bunyan (1678)

Robinson Crusoe / Daniel Defoe (1719)

Clarissa / Samuel Richardson (1748)

Vanity Fair / William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

Bleak House / Charles Dickens (1852)

Cranford / Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)

Barchester Towers / Anthony Trollope (1857)

Howards End / EM Forster (1910)

Of Human Bondage / Somerset Maugham (1915)

The Forsyte Saga / John Galsworthy (1922)

Living / Henry Green (1929)

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys (1968)

Quartet in Autumn / Barbara Pym (1977)

Lanark: A Life in Four Books / Alasdair Gray (1981)

Money / Martin Amis (1984)

LATIN AMERICAN CLASSICS
The Time of the Hero / Mario Vargas Llosa (1963)

The debut novel of the experimental writer sometimes described as "the national conscience of Peru", this story of teenage boys at a military academy has shades of Lord of the Flies. The outraged academy authorities burned 1,000 copies on publication.

Rayuela / Julio Cortazar (1963)

Pablo Neruda said that those who do not read this great Argentinean author are suffering from "a serious invisible disease". This ludic, meandering and multipleended "counter-novel" - whose title translates as "Hopscotch" - is about lovers who refuse to make arrangements.

One Hundred Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)

Dreamily exploring Colombian myths and history through the magical, multigenerational story of the Buendia family. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, William Kennedy declared the novel should be required reading for the human race. Print out the family tree before you start or you'll get lost.

The Power and the Glory / Graham Greene (1940)

In Greene's masterpiece, a nameless Roman Catholic whiskey priest goes on the run in 1930s Mexico during the Red Shirts' persecution of the clergy. As he exchanges sacred rites for sanctuary, the vultures look down on him with "shabby indifference".

The Motorcycle Diaries / Ernesto Che Guevara (published 1993)

Leaving Argentina for a lark on a sputtering motorbike, the young Marxist revolutionary returns as a man with a mission. He becomes, in his daughter's words: "increasingly sensitive to the complex indigenous world of Latin America".

The Labyrinth of Solitude / Octavio Paz (1950)

"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition," writes the Mexican poet in this celebrated collection of essays. "Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude."

The House of the Spirits / Isabel Allende (1982)

Beginning life as a letter to her dying, 100-year-old grandfather, the Peruvian-born novelist's debut is a history of Chile told as a family saga through the female line. "At five," she has said, "I was already a feminist but nobody used the word in Chile yet."

The Alchemist / Paulo Coelho (1988)

Holding the Guinness World Record for the most translated book by a living author, this Brazilian-born author's allegorical novel follows a youthful Andalusian shepherd's journey to Egypt. When you want something badly enough, he is told, then you can make it happen.