Bamber Gascoigne: My six best books
BAMBER, 74, is best known for being the quizmaster on University Challenge, which he presented for 25 years. For the past 10 years he has been devoting himself to writing HistoryWorld, an interactive history of the world on the internet at www.historyworld.net
Tristram Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
Penguin, £8.99
An amazing book, seeming like a modern experimental novel but written in the 18th century by an Anglican clergyman. You can dip in and out of it with constant pleasure .
The Invisible Woman
by Claire Tomalin
Penguin, £10.99
A magnificent piece of literary detective work, bringing to life in a moving way the woman who played a major part in Charles Dickens’s life: his mistress Nelly Ternan.
A Foreign Field
by Ben Macintyre
HarperCollins, £7.99
Another superb unearthing of a lost story – of courage, love and betrayal when some British soldiers, stranded behind the German trenches in the First World War, are hidden by French villagers under the noses of the enemy.
The Young Visiters
by Daisy Ashford
Chatto & Windus, £9.99
This high-society romance, written by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford in 1890, never fails to delight. My favourite moment? Ethel’s response when proposed to in a punt on the Thames: “Has it come to this?”
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
Penguin, £8.99
Not since Jonathan Swift has anyone written political satire with as surprising an angle and as deft a touch. The pigs Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) and the uncomplaining carthorse Boxer (the model worker) have a long literary life ahead of them.
The Wikipedia Revolution
by Andrew Lih
Aurum, £14.99
The website Wikipedia, written by the public (a most improbable experiment that has worked triumphantly) is the most significant development in works of reference since the first printed encyclopaedias. This is a fascinating account of its origins and spectacular growth and growing pains .
