Antony Beevor: My six best books
BRITISH historian Antony Beevor, 64, has written a string of best-selling books about key Second World War battles most famously Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945. His latest book D-Day: The Battle For Normandy (Penguin, £16.99) is out now in paperback
WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN WINTER: A MEMOIR IN BLINDNESS
by Candia McWilliam
Jonathan Cape, £18.99
The most brutally honest and beautifully written account I have read of somebody's own failings and suffering.
McWilliam, a brilliant novelist, was struck by a rare condition of the eyelids which effectively made her blind and forced her to re-examine her life.
FATHERS AND SONS
by Ivan Turgenev
Penguin, £6.99
A wise and entrancing portrait of generational clash amid looming political change. In it Turgenev invents the concept of nihilism and his novel was so influential that many came to believe that it was a real political creed.
BLOODLANDS
by Timothy Snyder
Bodley Head, £20
Snyder, professor of history at Yale, has taken the borderlands of Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States and Poland to study the almost incomprehensible slaughter carried out by both Stalin and Hitler. A magnificent tour de force.
FREEDOM
by Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate, £20
The best novel this year and the most enjoyable too.
Franzen manages to be funny, poignant and astonishingly observant in a comedy of modern manners which truly deserves that much-hyped title, the "great American novel".
TALLEYRAND
by Duff Cooper
Vintage, £9.99
In my view the most beautifully written biography of all time.
Seldom out of print it is the perfect short biography of a statesman and rake, written by a diplomat, gambler and womaniser who knew his subject better than anybody.
A TIME OF GIFTS
by Patrick Leigh Fermor
John Murray, £9.99
My favourite travel book. It is the account of Leigh Fermor's walk to Constantinople in the late Thirties. Learned and engaging it reveals a Europe about to vanish under the storms of Nazism and Stalinism.