Citizens — Simon Schama

Schama's history of the French Revolution is deliberately counter to the Marxist interpretation — he is interested in politics, ideas, and contingency rather than class conflict and structural inevitability. The result is the most vivid account of the Revolution in English, written with novelistic detail and a refusal to let the outcome determine the narrative. Robespierre is terrifying precisely because Schama shows him as someone who began with genuine conviction. The book is also a history of how the Revolution imagined itself — through spectacle, rhetoric, and the performance of virtue.

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize. 'The most brilliant, readable and provocative history of the French Revolution I have ever encountered.' — John Mortimer. 'A masterpiece of historical writing.' — The Times