In the last decade my historical interests have become much more global. An expert guide to the British Empire is Ronald Hyam:  Britain's Imperial Century or Britain's Declining Empire are books of style and wit. Anything by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper is worth the effort too. Vietnam has attracted any number of great scholars: my favourites books are Martin Windrow's epic Last Valley, about the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and Neil Sheehan's multi-layered A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. The vitality of historical writing in the US is astounding, whether one thinks of academic historians, like Walter A. McDougall on US foreign policy, or journalists on sabbatical such as our own Keith Kyle, the late author of the great history of the Suez crisis. 

I loved the angry passion of David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, no doubt derived from his years as a young reporter in Vietnam, while Randall B. Woods's compendious LBJ: Architect of American Ambition revealed what a great president Lyndon Johnson was. Americans also excel at the group portrait, if you don't mind reading copious amounts of (often irrelevant) background detail. In this genre, Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas's The Wise Men about, among others, Acheson, Harriman and Kennan, and Kai Bird on the Bundy brothers, are marvellous studies of senior US policymakers during the Cold War; on the other side I recommend another team effort, Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali's Khrushchev's Cold War.

What shall I read in my dotage? I used to dabble in ancient history, admiring Peter Brown's World of Late Antiquity especially. I shall have to get in A.H.M. Jones's Later Roman Empire and other sets just to give me the illusion of journey's end. But then I was never any good at economic history . . .