Q&A w/ Alexander Mikaberidze
Alexander Mikaberidze joins us for a brief exchange. He authored The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Book of the Month: September 2021).
Who has influenced you?
I am quite voracious in terms of reading habits…I’ll tell you some of the most recent books I’ve read outside of my speciality, in terms of my research area. I just finished Neil Price’s [Children of Ash and Elm:] A History of the Vikings, which I found quite interesting — especially because he brought, not the traditional kind of narrative history o the Viking expansion, but a story that was very grounded in archaeological discoveries…I really enjoyed reading Mark Morris’ book, which is the history of the anglo-Saxons...Helmut Walser Smith’s Germany: A Nation in Its Time, which is a remarkable survey of German history over the last 500 years…I highly recommend Ritchie Robertson’s book [The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1690]…
Do you have a favorite novel?
That’s a hard one…I don’t have much time to read fiction! The last fiction I read was Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece on Thomas Cromwell [Wolf Hall Trilogy]...I loved that. That frankly is probably the only fiction I’ve read in a decade.
What are you working on today?
One of the key characters of War and Peace is Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov…The bad news is that there’s nothing written on him in English…But that’s also good news because that means that there’s lots of things to say, so I’m finishing a new biography of him that will offer a lot of fresh insights, a lot of new information, for the Western reader especially.
