Hi, my name's Simon Sebag Montefiore and I want to tell you about my new book
that's just out. This is it, Voices of History: Speeches That Changed The World.
It's an anthology of all the speeches you should know, you could know,
and speeches that you won't be familiar with but which will be fascinating to
you and hopefully will surprise you. It's got all the great speech makers of
history in here: Churchill, Lincoln, Elizabeth I, Martin Luther King.
But it also has some surprising ones. Muhammad Ali the boxer, Bob Dylan the
rock singer, Genghis Khan, Nero, even Cleopatra. They're all in here and I hope
you find it fascinating. And this book is in fact a sequel and a companion to this
one which is coming out in paperback at exactly the same time. Written in History:
Letters That Changed The World and that has also got amazing letters, really the
greatest letters from history by all sorts of crazy letter writers, men and
women, from every time of history, every continent, every culture, every gender,
every race. And between the two of them, the greatest speeches of all history, the
greatest letters of all history, I hope these are books that you can just enjoy
and they might also teach you something. Well I'm in my local Waterstones which
is Kensington High Street and I'm just back from the summer and I've been
reading books from Waterstones all summer and so I've got a whole pile of them
here that I've read and I want to recommend to you. And though I write
history books and my new books are history books I also write fiction and I
love reading both so I've got a sort of mixture of both to tell you about. So the
first one I'm going to tell you about is this one, Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergman.
which is a story about the Israeli
Secret Services, their assassination of terrorists and it's an absolutely
fascinating book that I recommend highly. But I also have been reading a lot of
fiction and here are some of these. American Marriage by Tayari Jones is I
think a masterpiece. It's about love, it's about the eternal triangle,
it's about life, it's about freedom, it's about sex. Couldn't be better, read
it now. This, Cersei by Madeline Miller, is the sequel to Song of Achilles.
It's set in the Trojan War. I also think it's utterly brilliant, read it now.
The third one is different, it's picaresque, it's about a liberated
slave in the American South and his extraordinary adventures. Washington
Black by Esi Edugyan. It's absolutely unputdownable.
l Iove this, I think this is probably my favourite of all of them. The next book I've
got to choose is William Boyd. I love his stuff, it's always elegant,
cool, crystalline, somehow sophisticated. This is typical: Love is Blind. It's about
a temptress in 1890s, early twentieth century Europe, St Petersburg, Paris,
Edinburgh. It's very elegant, it's very mischievous and as I said it's
very sophisticated. Try it, I think you'll love it - I did. And then of course we have
Sally Rooney. Now she has written Normal People and this is her second novel and
everything she writes I think is touched with gold, with genius. I think she's the
probably the greatest young British, she's Irish in fact, so, Irish writer
of her age group, she's a twenty-something, she's very young. Every
word of it is just, I think, perfect. And she writes always about love, about
class, with mischief, with wit. And the final book is Kate Atkinson,
Transcription. This is like a subtle but traditional spy thriller set in
World War II. It's got hidden depths and I really loved it. But
those are the fiction books but now I'm just gonna finish up right here with two
very different history books. Very different, from opposite ends of the
genre. First Diarmaid McCulloch, Thomas Cromwell.
If you loved Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
this is the true story of Thomas Cromwell by really the greatest British
historian of the 17th century - sorry of the 16th century, of the Tudors.
And it's unputdownable, it's brilliant, I loved it.
He's also written a superb history of Christianity which is
essential reading too. And the other one is another spy book, The Spy and the Traitor
by Ben Macintyre, it's my last choice. It's the true story of the Gordievsky defection
and it's a history book but it's as exciting as fiction, read it now, that's my selection.