My field is urban history, and the book I would recommend is undoubtedly Lewis Mumford's The City in History. To me, it is one of the greatest books ever written, not that many people have ever heard of it! However, at 700+ pages it is quite the journey – it took me a whole summer to get through on its own, let alone forming part of a reading list. However, if you were ever interested in exploring the history of urbanisation, this is the place to start.

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom is a sublime (if mostly political-military) account of the later years of the Taiping Civil War. Platt deftly navigates between the Taiping capital, the Qing loyalist general Zeng Guofan, and the Western presence on the coast, to produce a narrative that is, while not absolutely comprehensive, still relatively so, and utterly gripping as well. Despite the heaviness of the subject matter and the relatively high-level focus, Platt really manages to capture the human element in it all, and to put it bluntly I adore this book. It is what got me into wanting to actually do history.

I’m a Classicist, and I would 100% recommend Mary Beard’s ‘Confronting the Classics’, it’s a very entertaining read, but also super informative of some big topics and some of the good scholarly debates in classics these days. It’s an interesting and educated read, but you also don’t have to have a background in classics to enjoy it!

Considering the thorny issues of today... I focus on 18th century American history, I would probably recommend either Ira Berlin's "Many Thousands Gone" or Melvin Ely's "Israel on the Appomattox", both of them go into very good, nuanced detail about the history of African American slavery within the United States. Ira Berlin's work, was groundbreaking and defined the research into African American history for the late 20th century, basically undoing decades (if not centuries) of misconceptions and shedding a lot of the mentality that Southern apologists had over slavery. Too bad a lot of the book has not filtered into the general public...

Likewise, I have had the pleasure to study under Ely, and his book offers a strong rebuttal to another discourse that is common among the "Lost Cause", that it was impossible to have free-African Americans live in the Antebellum South, and that slavery was somehow "good" for their development.

Black Dog of Fate, by Peter Balakian is a heavy, personal family memoir mixed with historical breakdown of the Armenian genocide. It is a great read on a subject too many know too little about.

Caesar: Life of a Colossus, by Adrian Goldsworthy is my favorite biography of one of the compelling figures in all of history. You may think you know something of Caesar's life, most people do know some bits, but if you haven't studied the late republic it's hard to comprehend just how much happened in this man's lifetime. Another great read

The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past by Gail Hershatter (2014). Hershatter interviewed over 70 women from rural Shaanxi about their lives in China in the 1950s-1960s. She looks at how state Party policy affected these women's lives in local ways and how gender really impacted their daily lives. It's a very readable book and IMO, a very interesting one.

If you're interested in Titanic, the book I'd recommend to everyone no matter their level of knowledge is "Titanic: An Illustrated History" by Don Lynch and Ken Marschall.

Lynch and Marschall are two of the leading Titanic experts working in the field, with Marschall's artwork being absolutely stunning and a focal point of a well researched, and most importantly- easily accessible- book.

There are books I'd recommend for those interested in really diving deep and serious historical research. There are book I'd recommend for those who want to begin learning more about Titanic. This book is right in the middle and is respected and enjoyed by everyone.

There are a few tiny inaccuracies, it was published in the mid 90s, and we've learnt new things, but it's really gorgeous and captures what people find so fascinating about this event.