Dan jones

Wolves of Winter focuses on the brutality of the past

From our US edition

Dan Jones’s Wolves of Winter follows from his first novel, Essex Dogs, which tracked the vicissitudes of the titular Dogs, a group of English blokes rampaging around France during the reign of King Edward III. Jones is a historian by trade, and so the setting and context are meticulously researched. If you want to know how to load an early form of cannon, you’ll find out here. Peering into the past is a complicated business, especially far into the pre-modern era, although we do have lots of documentary evidence. It can be hard to remember that those knights and ladies were people just like us, with tempers, frailties and habits.

wolves

When the past becomes a page-turner: our pick of the best history books

'May you live in interesting times’. So the Chinese curse goes, and we undeniably live in interesting times, alas. But that doesn't mean the past has lost any of its allure; indeed, quite the opposite. Right now, it's just the tonic we need. If you found history dull at school, being merely an endless parade of facts and heavy-handed analysis, then you are the perfect potential reader for these superb examinations of past eras by some of Britain's best popular historians.  Here are half a dozen of our favourite page-turning history books, guaranteed to have you rapt and astonished at the revelations therein. Dan Jones – The Plantagenets (William Collins, £10.99) Perhaps the most popular new historian of our generation is the medieval writer Dan Jones.