David Hanna's 3 favorite reads in 2023

This book is an erudite deep-dive into a topic familiar to many, though superficially (as reading the book makes abundantly clear.) No one who reads it will ever see a Bastille Day celebration in quite the same way.

Schama emphasizes how the hideous violence often and justifiably associated with the later Reign of Terror under Maximilien Robespierre was there right from the beginning in 1788-89. He also convincingly demonstrates how much of the aristocracy and even members of the extended royal family enabled the revolutionaries by criticizing their own class, simply because it was fashionable to do so.

It’s chilling to learn how thin the veneer of the rule of law was/is and how this encouraged the worst of the revolutionaries to indulge their own worst instincts in the name of some distant ill-defined “utopia”.

There are some bright spots to redeem to a certain degree one’s faith in mankind. Charlotte Corday, Marat’s assassin, for one, is shown as the courageous and principled woman that she was. In certain respects, the most insidious villains in Schama’s book aren’t the historical actors themselves, but, rather, the generations of willfully blind historians on the French Left who have acted as apologists for the unspeakable violence against civilians, which at its apex may well be termed “genocide”, as in the Vendée.

For those of us who have chosen to make our career in history, Herodotus is the "father" of our chosen profession. His seminal work, The Persian War, is as much or more about Persia as it is about his fellow Greeks. To be sure, much of this book is slow-going as Herodotus has a lot of "X the son of Y the son of Z" and so on, as well as a bewildering amount of archaic place names, and names of peoples and tribes. However, this book is history at its very best, examining the motivations behind key decisions, and going out of its way to provide multiple perspectives on events.

Herodotus discusses sources and emphasizes where these sources are contradictory. But on the important matters, he doesn't equivocate. He gives full credit to the Athenians for being the one city-state that never wavered, and for playing the most important role in the ultimate defeat of Xerxes's invasion force. This, even though his own city-state had fought for the other side in the war.

Herodotus also has an eye for the telling anecdote, the timely digression that breaks up the narrative to provide context or merely to examine something of interest that is tangential.

I recommend the George Rawlinson translation if you can find it. 

On the one hand, this novella is very English, and very much of the time and milieu it is evoking (an all-boys boarding school circa 1870-1930), but there are aspects that are universal as regards teaching. For me, this is when it is at its best.

Any teacher reading this book will immediately recognize a bit of themselves in the early challenges to maintain classroom discipline, the frustrations of dealing with top-down reformers, those moments when the rules need to bend a little to create space for humanity and/or common sense, and those times when the outside world with its sometimes ominous rumblings creeps over the cloister wall or smashes right through it, and forces one to translate it all to one’s self and one’s students.

The book is also a love story. A lot of what makes this part of the story so moving is what is not said. Hilton shows restraint and respects the reader’s ability to practice empathy. In the end, however, it’s Hilton’s knowing observations about both the intense, and transitory, nature of teaching that struck a chord with me.