2011 Shortlist
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan, Rome and Naples through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and whores, prayer and violence. On the streets surrounding the churches and palaces, brawls and swordfights were regular occurrences. In one such fight Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni, a pimp, and fled to Naples and then Malta, home to the Knights of St John, where he escaped from prison following his conviction for another vicious assault. Shortly afterwards he died while returning to Rome to seek a papal pardon for his crimes. He was thirty-eight years old. In the course of this desperate life Caravaggio created the most dramatic paintings of his age, using ordinary men and women - often prostitutes and the very poor - to model for his depictions of classic religious scenes. Andrew Graham-Dixon's exceptionally illuminating readings of Caravaggio's pictures, which are the heart of the book, show very clearly how he created their drama, immediacy and humanity, and how completely he departed from the conventions of his time.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/caravaggio-by-andrew-graham-dixon

2011 Shortlist
On November 25, 1783, the last British troops pulled out of New York City, bringing the American Revolution to an end. Patriots celebrated their departure and the confirmation of U.S. independence. But for tens of thousands of American loyalists, the British evacuation spelled worry, not jubilation. What would happen to them in the new United States? Would they and their families be safe? Facing grave doubts about their futures, some sixty thousand loyalists-one in forty members of the American population-decided to leave their homes and become refugees elsewhere in the British Empire. They sailed for Britain, for Canada, for Jamaica, and for the Bahamas; some ventured as far as Sierra Leone and India. Wherever they went, the voyage out of America was a fresh beginning, and it carried them into a dynamic if uncertain new world. A groundbreaking history of the revolutionary era, Liberty's Exiles tells the story of this remarkable global diaspora. Through painstaking archival research and vivid storytelling, award-winning historian Maya Jasanoff re-creates the journeys of ordinary individuals whose lives were overturned by extraordinary events. She tells of refugees like Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia, who spent nearly thirty years as a migrant, searching for a home in Britain, Jamaica, and Canada. And of David George, a black preacher born into slavery, who found freedom and faith in the British Empire, and eventually led his followers to seek a new Jerusalem in Sierra Leone. Mohawk leader Joseph Brant resettled his people under British protection in Ontario, while the adventurer William Augustus Bowles tried to shape a loyalist Creek state in Florida. For all these people and more, it was the British Empire-not the United States-that held the promise of 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Yet as they dispersed across the empire, the loyalists also carried things from their former homes, revealing an enduring American influence on the wider British world. Ambitious, original, and personality-filled, Liberty's Exiles is at once an intimate narrative history and a provocative new analysis-a book that explores an unknown dimension of America's founding to illuminate the meanings of liberty itself.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/libertys-exiles-by-maya-jasanoff

2011 Shortlist
Matt Ridley, acclaimed author of the classics Genome and Nature via Nurture, turns from investigating human nature to investigating human progress. In The Rational Optimist Ridley offers a counterblast to the prevailing pessimism of our age, and proves, however much we like to think to the contrary, that things are getting better. Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than 6 billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. The availability of almost everything a person could want or need has been going erratically upwards for 10,000 years and has rapidly accelerated over the last 200 years: calories; vitamins; clean water; machines; privacy; the means to travel faster than we can run, and the ability to communicate over longer distances than we can shout. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous. In this original, optimistic book, Matt Ridley puts forward his surprisingly simple answer to how humans progress, arguing that we progress when we trade and we only really trade productively when we trust each other. The Rational Optimist will do for economics what Genome did for genomics and will show that the answer to our problems, imagined or real, is to keep on doing what we've been doing for 10,000 years - to keep on changing.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-rational-optimist-by-matt-ridley

2011 Shortlist
This is the life story of one of the most interesting human beings who ever lived. A political genius who remade Europe and united Germany between 1862 and 1890 by the sheer power of his great personality. It takes the reader into close proximity with a human being of almost superhuman abilities. We see him through the eyes of his secretaries, his old friends, his neighbours, his enemies and the press. Otto von Bismarck 'made' Germany but never 'ruled' it. For twenty eight years he acted as a prime minister without a party. He made speeches, brilliant in content but hesitant in delivery, and rarely addressed a public meeting. He planned three wars and after a certain stage in his career always wore military uniform to which he had no claim. The 'Iron Chancellor', the image of Prussian militarism, suffered from hypochondria and hysteria. Contemporaries called him a 'dictator' and several observers credited him with 'demonic' powers'. They were not wrong. The sheer power of his remarkable 'sovereign sel' awed even his enemies. William I observed that it was hard to be emperor under a man like Bismarck. He towered physically and intellectually over his contemporaries. His spoken and written prose sparkled with wit, insight, grand visions and petty malice. He united Germany and transformed Europe like Napoleon before and Hitler after him but with neither their control of the state nor command of great armies. He was and remained a royal servant. This new biography explores the greatness and limits of a huge and ultimately destructive self. It uses the diaries and letters of his contemporaries to explore the most remarkable figure of the nineteenth century, a man who never said a dull thing or wrote a slack sentence. A political genius who combined creative and destructive traits, generosity and pettiness, tolerance and ferocious enmity, courtesy and rudeness - in short, not only the most important nineteenth-century statesman but by far the most entertaining.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/bismarck-by-jonathan-steinberg

2011 Shortlist
1641. The Scots are in open rebellion. Revolt is brewing in Ireland. England stands at the brink of civil war. In London, as Parliament tightens its grip on the king, scuffles and parleys break out between crowds of protesters and demobbed officers they denounce as 'cavaliers': fashionable 'gallants', braggards and dandies distinguished by their long hair, silken suits and hatred of Puritans. Reprobates offers a chronicle of how this faction was created, and re-made over time. Drawing on the writings and experiences of wits, womanisers and wanderers, John Stubbs' new book follows cavaliers-in-the-making from early privilege through Continental warfare, and back to their urban recreations. This is an account of all their campaigns, through peacetime, civil war and exile, across town and across Europe, from the Blackfriars Playhouse to the battlefields of Charles' kingdoms, and their part in a national disaster. From disastrous foreign forays to syphilitic poets, from political intriguing to ambitious young playwrights keen to curry favour with the king, John Stubbs brings alive the vibrant cast of characters that were at the centre of the English Civil War. Stubbs shows the reader just how the country was brought to one of the most destructive moments in its history.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/reprobates-by-john-stubbs

2012 Winner
If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war.

Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: 'the price of life is death.' Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but 'a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day'.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/into-the-silence-by-wade-davis

2012 Shortlist
Annawadi is a slum at the edge of Mumbai Airport, in the shadow of shining new luxury hotels. Its residents are garbage recyclers, construction workers and economic migrants, all of them living in the hope that a small part of India's booming future will eventually be theirs. But when a crime rocks the slum community and global recession and terrorism shocks the city, tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy begin to turn brutal. As Boo gets to know those who dwell at Mumbai's margins, she evokes an extraordinarily vivid and vigorous group of individuals flourishing against the odds amid the complications, corruptions and gross inequalities of the new India. 

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/behind-the-beautiful-forevers-by-katherine-boo

2012 Shortlist
In the spring of 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed shakos, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk.

On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen.

Return of a King is the definitive analysis of the First Afghan War, told through the lives of unforgettable characters on all sides and using for the first time contemporary Afghan accounts of the conflict. Prize-winning and bestselling historian William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful and important parable of colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and hubris, for our times.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/return-of-a-king-by-william-dalrymple

2012 Shortlist
Contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millennia and decades. Can violence really have declined? The images of conflict we see daily on our screens from around the world suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Steven Pinker shows violence within and between societies - both murder and warfare - really has declined from prehistory to today. Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage' and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a  'nasty, brutish and short' life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-by-allen-lane

2012 Shortlist
The Old Ways is Robert Macfarlane's inspiring, subtle exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt ancient paths, a fusion of geology, archaeology, natural history and cartography which explores the complex and profound ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-old-ways-by-robert-macfarlane

2012 Shortlist
The first, authoritative history of Spain’s darkest period. In a work of meticulous scholarship and research, Paul Preston, the world’s foremost historian of 20th-century Spain, charts how and why Franco and his supporters set out to eliminate all ‘those who do not think as we do’ – some 200,000 innocent men, women and children across Spain.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/the-spanish-holocaust-by-paul-preston

2012 Shortlist
Novelist, satirist, poet, photographer, painter, alchemist and hellraiser – August Strindberg was all of these, and yet he is principally known in Arthur Miller’s words as ‘the mad inventor of modern theater’ who led playwriting out of the drawing room into the snake pit of psychological warfare. A gripping and highly readable narrative, this biography describes the eventful and complicated life of a playwright whose influence is undiminished 100 years after his death.

https://www.thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk/books-and-authors/strindberg-a-life-by-sue-prideaux