My Favorite Historical Authors

I am a history addict. I fell in love with history while growing up. I loved to play around with the Britannica Junior and Collier’s encyclopedias in our house. When I wanted to escape from the stresses and disappointments of my young life, my drug of choice was reading about some historical person or about some country or its culture. Most of the books I buy now or check out from the library are historical nonfiction. In the last decade I have turned my attention more to trying to find books on Near Eastern history and cultures. I still pay attention to my first love, however, which is European history.

Three of my favorite authors of European history are Antonia Fraser, John Julius Norwich, and Henri Troyat.

Lady Antonia Fraser is a British author and the wife of the late Harold Pinter, who was a Noble Prize winning playwright. I especially love her first book that was written in the late 60s about Mary Queen of Scots. Her historical works have a literary complexity to them but are not boring. She often goes into the psyche of her subjects. Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film, Marie Antoinette, was based on Antonia Fraser’s book Marie Antoinette: The Journey.

Viscount John Julius Norwich began pursuing a career as an author after leaving the British Foreign Service. He also has a daughter with one of the former wives of American director John Huston.
I have an intense fascination for the Byzantine Empire because of Lord Norwich’s trilogy, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, Byzantium: The Apogee, and Byzantium: The Decline and Fall. Because of this energetic and occasionally humorous group of books, I now think that Rome in the East was more fascinating than the Rome of the West. The Byzantium trilogy is a quick read, almost like three fast paced, exciting novels. The lives of all the Byzantine Emperors are examined. John Julius Norwich admits that he does not write for academia but more for the general public. In this way he succeeds in actually making history come alive.

Of my three favorites, Henry Troyat is deceased. His background is also the most exotic in the group. He is listed as a French author, but he was actually born in Russia. The name he was given at birth by his Armenian parents was Levon Aslan Torossian. He was also of German, Russian, and Georgian lineage. Being a Turcophile (admirer of things Turkish) it is very surprising to me that his middle birth name was actually Turkish. Aslan, translated into English, is “lion.” This is especially surprising since the Turks and the Armenians have long been at each other’s throats and were particularly so just after 1911 when Troyat was born. But the complexities of the Near East… Henri Troyat’s family fled Russia to escape the Revolution. He became a prolific writer with a number of his histories dealing with Russian rulers and literary figures. I especially liked his biographies of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great. Like John Julius Norwich’s works that I have read, I can say that these two also are quick reads and are written with a dramatic flair like a novel.

If you are a history lover you should try out the works of these three writers. If you are not, try them out anyway. You might like them.

Links:
Official Website of John Julius Norwich

The Telegraph's Interview of John Julius Norwich

Official Website of Antonia Fraser