Non Fiction beach tome recommendations

[neckoil]

Last couple of long beach holidays I've really enjoyed reading historical non fiction - London by Peter Ackroyd and Bloody Foreigners by Robert Winder. Does anyone have any recommendations for similar for this summer please?

Churchill by Andrew Roberts
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Team Of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Tomes all and I would vouch for all 3

Yes, the Andrew Roberts book on Churchill is excellent. He also wrote a really good book on Napoleon (I'm a bit of a history buff).

You mention Peter Ackroyd OP. Have you read any of his other stuff? He wrote an amazing book on William Blake, and also a good one on Charlie Chaplin. Being a historian, his biographies are full of the sights and sounds of the time.

How about Bill Bryson? His Short History of Nearly Everything is my all-time favourite non-fiction book (along with Robert Graves' Goodbye to all That). But I think he's written some historical works as well.

I also loved Simon Heffer's book The Age of Decadence, which covers British history from 1880 to 1914. That period fascinates me. WW1 transformed this country. Not only was it a catastrophe from which we never fully recovered, it also sparked WW2. In reality, we were caught up in a European civil war that began in 1914, paused in 1918, started again 1939, and ended in 1945 with most of Europe shattered and bankrupt. Heffer's book is about the generation just before all that. It's so interesting to see where we were going, and what might have happened had there been no war. It was the time of Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. (I love Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, which is full of that sense of time running out – the feeling that things are about to crash.)

Messalina by Honor Cargill-Martin

My first thought was Richard Harris. Okay, doesn’t quite fulfil the brief has they’re fiction books, but they are historically accurate (I believe).

Alternatively, how about some biographies?

The Heffer sounds great @JaneyGee

Michelle Obamas autobiography is really readable if you've not already read it

Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser

• simultaneously a brilliant biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder and American history

The Restless Republic
Anna Keay

Mary S. Lovell's Bess of Hardwick is fabulous, absolutely fascinating.

@JaneyGee the Heffer one sounds ideal! 912 pages should fill beach time while kids are in the sea! Just need to make room in my hand luggage only travels for it 😁

The Plantagenets by Dan Jones if you like vivid narrative history

That sounds interesting. I might get that myself. If you want a really long autobiography then try the memoirs of Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798). It available as an e-book from gutenburg.org in an English translation from the 1890s. It's a fascinating insight into the 18th century but hard to follow at times.