The History Book Buffs

How do you make a history book read like a novel—and where should you draw the line?
This week on History Book Buffs, Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse discuss David Grann’s The Wager, an extraordinary story of shipwreck, survival and mutiny. Both loved the book, but what makes its storytelling so powerful?
When HMS Wager is wrecked off the coast of South America, naval discipline gives way to competing loyalties and a desperate struggle to survive. Grann turns the survivors’ conflicting accounts into gripping narrative history, complete with vivid characters, unbearable tension and startling reversals.
Antonia and Roger explore the craft behind the book: how historians build emotional investment, whether they can reconstruct their subjects’ thoughts, and why invented dialogue crosses a line for both of them. They also discuss Patrick O’Brian’s fictional treatment of the same expedition, the pleasures of footnotes, and what happens when real events refuse to deliver a satisfying ending.
Plus: recommendations for more exceptional narrative history—and Antonia’s own experience of being stranded on an island and eating limpets.
In this episode:
00:23 — Introducing The Wager: Roger’s £2.99 charity-shop discovery
02:16 — The expedition, the shipwreck and the competing survival stories
06:47 — Patrick O’Brian and The Unknown Shore
08:32 — How Grann makes history read like a novel
11:20 — Immersive storytelling and the limits of historical sources
16:26 — Invented dialogue, inferred emotions and where to draw the line
20:26 — Ships, confined worlds and characters under pressure
22:28 — Suspense when readers already know the ending
25:20 — Does a captain’s authority survive a shipwreck?
29:36 — Giles Milton, Ben Macintyre and the case for footnotes
Books and writers discussed:
The Wager — David Grann

The Unknown Shore and The Golden Ocean — Patrick O’Brian

Killers of the Flower Moon — David Grann

Stalin’s Apostles — Antonia Senior

The Siege — Ben Macintyre

Narrative historian Giles Milton

Who is your favourite historian who writes with the pace and power of a novelist? And where do you think the boundary between reconstruction and invention should lie? Let us know wherever you listen or watch.
Contains discussion of the plot and ending of The Wager.

Thomas Cochrane: The real-life Master and Commander | Peter Moore’s A Dangerous Game
Naval hero. Political radical. Convicted fraudster. Thomas Cochrane’s life makes the fiction he inspired look almost tame.
Antonia Senior and Roger Moorhouse discuss Peter Moore’s A Dangerous Game, a biography of one of Britain’s most extraordinary—and troublesome—naval commanders. From the audacious capture of a vastly superior Spanish warship to the stock-market scandal that destroyed his career, and his reinvention fighting for South American independence, this is history with all the adventure of a novel.
Along the way, Antonia makes an impassioned case for Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels, we explore Cochrane’s connections to Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower, and Roger ventures well beyond his usual historical waters.
Expect daring tactics, bitter rivalries, prize money, scandal—and an enthusiastic recommendation for a cracking history book.
CHAPTERS
00:00 A forgotten hero and a slightly hungover introduction
01:09 Peter Moore’s A Dangerous Game
04:37 Cochrane’s early life and entry into the navy
07:16 Jack Aubrey, Hornblower and the real-life inspiration
11:47 HMS Speedy versus El Gamo
14:04 What makes Moore’s biography so good?
15:49 Where to start with Patrick O’Brian
17:09 Radical politics and naval corruption
18:12 The Great Stock Exchange Fraud of 1814
20:39 A new life fighting for South American independence
21:35 Kate Cochrane: elopement and disinheritance
22:39 Our verdict
FEATURED BOOK
A Dangerous Game: Thomas Cochrane’s Life on the Edge by Peter Moore
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/440249/a-dangerous-game-by-moore-peter/9781784743208
ALSO DISCUSSED
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin novels, including Master and Commander, Post Captain, HMS Surprise and The Far Side of the World.
C. S. Forester’s Hornblower novels.
Enjoyed the episode? Follow History Book Buffs, leave us a rating or review, and tell us: are you team Aubrey or team Hornblower?

We’re back — and starting with a book that genuinely floored us.
In 1949, Polish resistance fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski was thrown into a Warsaw prison cell with Jürgen Stroop, the SS general responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. They lived together for 255 days.
The result was Conversations with an Executioner: Moczarski’s extraordinary attempt to understand the man beside him. Stroop talks about his childhood, his embrace of Nazism, his rise through the SS and the murder of tens of thousands of people — with a chilling absence of remorse.
We talk about how an apparently ordinary man becomes a committed Nazi; the seductive appeal of hierarchy, comradeship and obedience; Stroop’s horrifyingly matter-of-fact account of crushing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; and the big question hanging over the book: can we trust conversations reconstructed years after they happened?
For both of us, this is an astonishing book — intimate, disturbing and one of the most remarkable examinations of the Nazi mind we’ve read.
BOOKS
📚 Kazimierz Moczarski, Conversations with an Executioner: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi Who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto, translated by Sean Gasper Bye

And coming up on History Book Buffs:
📚 Terry Stiastny, Believable Lies: The Misfits Who Fought Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War — the extraordinary characters, dirty tricks, fake radio stations and black propaganda of Britain’s Political Warfare Executive.

📚 Miranda Malins, The House of Cromwell: Power, Family and the Making of Modern Britain — Thomas, Oliver and the extraordinary family that produced two of the most consequential commoners in British history.

Follow History Book Buffs on X, Instagram and TikTok — and send us the history books you think we should be reading next.

Forget the latest releases.
For this special summer edition, The History Book Buffs are joined by Ollie Webb-Carter from the History Book Club to recommend the history books they've returned to again and again—the classics that have earned a permanent place on their bookshelves.
From the Black Sea to Ancient Greece, from the English Civil War to Alexander the Great, from the American Revolution to Flashman, this episode is packed with books that combine outstanding scholarship with brilliant storytelling.
Whether you're reading on a beach, in the garden or on a long train journey, these are the history books we think every history lover should own.
📚 Black Sea – Neil Asherson
📚 Alexander the Great – Robin Lane Fox
📚 God's Fury, England's Fire – Michael Braddick
📚 The March of Folly – Barbara Tuchman
📚 Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War – Robert K. Massie
📚 Flashman and the Redskins – George MacDonald Fraser
📚 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
Books discussed

Hitler's most dangerous enemies weren't outside the Nazi Party—they were inside it.
In this episode, historian Roger Moorhouse takes us inside the dramatic events of 30 June–2 July 1934, when Hitler unleashed a wave of assassinations against his own comrades in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Except it wasn't just one night. It was a murderous long weekend that cemented his dictatorship and changed the course of history.
Why did Hitler betray Ernst Röhm, one of his oldest allies? How did the SA become a threat to the regime it helped create? And what role did the army, conservative elites and Himmler play in one of the most shocking political purges of the twentieth century?
We discuss:
Why Hitler turned on his closest supporters.
Ernst Röhm, the SA and the power struggle at the heart of the Nazi regime.
The dawn raid at Bad Wiessee and the purge's most notorious killings.
The murder of former Chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and the widening of the purge beyond the Nazi Party.
How the Nazis dressed up political murder as an act of state.
Why the purge marked the moment Hitler became untouchable.
How ordinary Germans reacted as the true nature of the regime became impossible to ignore.
Roger also reveals why he's writing the first major English-language history of the Night of the Long Knives in decades—and why this pivotal episode deserves far more attention than it has received.