2007 Winner
As the former Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, Rajiv Chandrasekaran escorts the reader into the Green Zone - a bubble of surreal Americana. Its a walled-off enclave of towering plants, posh villas, and sparkling swimming pools that remains the headquarters for the American occupation of Iraq. Cut off from wartime realities, the monumental task of reconstructing a devastated nation competes with the more sybaritic distractions of life in this Little-America on the Tigris. Chandrasekaran describes the bars stocked with cold beer, a disco where women dance in hot pants, a cinema that screens shoot-’em-up films, the all-you-could-eat buffet piled high with pork, a shopping mall that sells porn, a car park filled with shiny new SUVs, and a dry-cleaning service. Most Iraqis are barred from entering the Emerald City for fear they would blow it up. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and internal documents, Chandrasekaran brings to light a remarkable array of insights into the nature of the American occupation.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/imperial-life-in-the-emerald-city-by-rajiv-chandrasekaran

2007 Shortlist
It was a murder that shook a nation. In November 2004, an angry young Muslim, Mohammed Bouyeri, shot and killed the provocative Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh. The killer had objected to a film that van Gogh had made with the Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali – an outspoken critic of Islamic fundamentalism. Chillingly, after Bouyeri shot van Gogh, he calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete, as if performing a ritual sacrifice. The murder horrified quiet, tolerant, prosperous Holland and sent shock waves around the world. Shortly after the murder, the writer and academic Ian Buruma returned to his homeland to try to make sense of Van Gogh’s death and to see whether any larger meanings should - and shouldn't - be drawn from this terrible episode. He concludes that ‘The story is not over. What happened in this small corner of northwestern Europe could happen anywhere, as long as young men and women feel that death is their only way home.’

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/murder-in-amsterdam-by-ian-buruma

2007 Shortlist
Having It So Good evokes Britain’s emergence from the shadow of war and the privations of rationing into a period of growing affluence – but declining influence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and new coffee bars of 1950s Britain – and also into the secret Cabinet rooms where politicians and mandarins made contingency plans for the possible catastrophe of a nuclear war. Hennessy brings to life the ageing Churchill; the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking the country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion; and the rise of Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/having-it-so-good-by-peter-hennessy

2007 Shortlist
At a time when women were still largely excluded from both education and the workplace, Gertrude Bell was an archaeologist, spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer and mountaineer - but until the Iraq War of 2003 few people had heard her name. During the course of her extraordinary life she abandoned her privileged background of country house parties and debutante balls to become one of the first women to graduate from Oxford. She also travelled into the desert as an archaeologist, where she used her command of Arabic and knowledge of tribal affiliations to become indispensable to the Cairo Office of the British government.

A friend of T.E. Lawrence and an adviser to the Viceroy of India, during the First World War, Bell travelled from Delhi to Mesopotamia where she championed the creation of an autonomous Arab nation for Iraq, promoting and manipulating the election of King Faisal to the throne and helping to draw the borders of the fledgling state.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/daughter-of-the-desert-by-georgina-howell

2007 Shortlist
Madness, piracy, murder and adultery – The Verneys tells the story of a unique English family in the seventeenth century. Based on the near-miraculous survival of tens of thousands of Verney family letters in an attic, Adrian Tinniswood explores the history of one family in the most intimate detail. By drawing on this wealth of personal correspondence, he reveals the private and public world of members of the Buckinghamshire gentry, offering extraordinary insights into 16th Century family life.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-verneys-by-adrian-tinniswood

2008 Winner
It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, reaches Road Hill House a fortnight later. He faces an unenviable task: to solve a case in which the grieving family are the suspects. The murder provokes national hysteria. The thought of what might be festering behind the closed doors of respectable middle-class homes - scheming servants, rebellious children, insanity, jealousy, loneliness and loathing - arouses fear and a kind of excitement. But when Whicher reaches his shocking conclusion there is uproar and bewilderment. A true story that inspired a generation of writers such as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, this has all the hallmarks of the classic murder mystery - a body; a detective; and, a country house steeped in secrets. In The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale untangles the facts behind this notorious case, bringing it back to vivid, extraordinary life.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-suspicions-of-mr-whicher-by-kate-summerscale

2008 Shortlist
When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H. M. Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was ‘suicidal’, Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid workers to a campaigning pygmy, he followed in the footsteps of the great Victorian adventurers. Butcher's journey was a remarkable feat, but the story of the Congo, told expertly and vividly in this book, is more remarkable still.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/blood-river-by-tim-butcher

2008 Shortlist
Rooks and jackdaws are both members of the same bird family. To ornithologists the group is known as the corvids, to the layperson they are ‘crows’. But to Mark Cocker these two species have become a fixation and a way of life. When he moved with his family to a rundown cottage in the Norfolk Broads he acquired first a naturalist's perfect home in the countryside, then the keys to a secret landscape. Twice a day flight-lines of rooks and jackdaws pass over the house on their way to a roost in the Yare Valley. Following them down to the river one winter's night, Cocker discovered a roiling, deafening flock of birds which rises at its peak to 40,000. From the moment he watched the flock, these gloriously commonplace birds were unsheathed entirely from their ordinariness. Step by step he pieces together the complexities of the birds' inner lives, the historical depth of the British relationship with the rook and the unforeseen richness hidden in that sombre voice, a raucous crow song that he calls 'our landscape made audible'. Crow Country is a prose poem in a long tradition of English pastoral writing.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/crow-country-by-mark-cocker

2008 Shortlist
The Whisperers illuminates as never before the hidden histories of the ordinary people who lived under Stalin's tyranny. It reveals a society where everyone spoke in whispers: whether to protect themselves, their families or friends - or to betray them. Drawing on hundreds of private family archives concealed in secret drawers and under mattresses in homes across Russia, and on countless interviews with survivors, Orlando Figes recreates the maze in which people found themselves: a world of terrible moral choices and compromises, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-whisperers-by-orlando-figes

2008 Shortlist
Patrick French has been granted unique access to V.S. Naipaul's private papers and his personal recollections. With respect for Naipaul's formidable body of work, he has produced a luminous account of one of the most compelling literary figures of the last fifty years. Beginning in Trinidad, where V.S. Naipaul was born into an Indian family, French examines early privations, Naipaul's first recollections, his life within a displaced community, and his talent and fierce ambition at school, which won him a scholarship to Oxford at the age of seventeen. He describes how, once in England, homesickness and depression struck with great force, and the ways in which Naipaul's first wife helped him to cope with his ‘double exile’.

They were to stay, tenuously, together for over four decades, even after Naipaul embarked on an intense, 25 year affair that was to inspire a second wave of work. Naipaul's extraordinary gift - producing, masterpieces of both fiction and non-fiction - is born of a forceful, visionary impulse, whose roots Patrick French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight that does full justice to this enigmatic genius.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-world-is-what-it-is-by-patrick-french

2008 Shortlist
A sweeping musical history that goes from the salons of pre-war Vienna to Velvet Underground shows in the sixties. In The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker, gives us a riveting tour of the wild landscape of twentieth-century classical music: portraits of individuals, cultures, and nations reveal the predicament of the composer in a noisy, chaotic century. Taking as his starting point a production of Richard Strauss's Salome, conducted by the composer on 16th May 1906 with Puccini, Schoenberg, Berg and Adolf Hitler seated in the stalls, Ross suggests how this evening can be considered the century's musical watershed rather than the riotous premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring seven years later. Ross goes on to explore the mythology of modernism, Sibelius and the music of small countries, Kurt Weill, the music of the Third Reich, Britten, Boulez and the post-war avant-garde, and interactions between minimalist composers and rock bands in the sixties and seventies.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-rest-is-noise-by-alex-ross

2009 Winner
After Herman Melville published his book Moby Dick in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again, having created a modern myth out of an already legendary beast. But what is the true nature of the whale? Why does it fascinate us? In Leviathan, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify his life-long obsession with this mythical creature of the sea. From his childhood fascination with the gigantic models of London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves, Philip Hoare has been obsessed with whales. Leviathan is a gripping voyage of discovery into the heart of this obsession and Moby-Dick, the book that inspired it. Travelling around the globe and taking the reader deep into the whale’s domain, Philip Hoare sheds light on our perennial fascination with whales, whose nature remains tantalizingly undiscovered.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/leviathan-or-the-whale-by-philip-hoare