Book Reviews for World Book Day 2026

The UK celebrates World Book Day on 5 March and to mark the occasion, the Archives team have decided to share our current work-related reading and some of the reflections these books have stirred in them, as we did in 2024. The selection spans a rich range of fiction and non-fiction, highlighting the many ways in which reading informs, challenges and inspires our professional practice. Each book offers a different lens through which to review our understanding of archives and record-keeping and demonstrate how reading can influence the way we approach our work.

Jamie (Cataloguing Archivist)

José Saramago, All The Names (Harvill Press, 1999)

I recently finished reading All The Names by Portuguese author José Saramago. Saramago, who only began writing novels aged 58, won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year after this book’s release, proving it’s never too late for a career change.     

This strange, Kafkaesque work tells the story of Senhor José, a low-level clerk in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, a sprawling, labyrinthine archive in an unnamed, highly bureaucratic state. An avid collector of information about famous people, he accidentally steals the record card for an unknown woman and becomes obsessed with finding out more about her. He gets himself into increasingly risky situations, forging false documents from his superiors and breaking into a school’s record office, imposing himself into the lives of those who know her, only to eventually discover that the woman had very recently died. Saramago’s highly unusual writing style (including a refusal to use quotation marks, normal punctuation or formatting) and the protagonist’s anxiety, vertigo, and imagined conversations with his ceiling, make for a disorienting read, to say the least.

There’s much to relate to for an archival professional, and much to be concerned by. José’s frustration at not finding records which simply should be there is all too familiar, as is his fascination with the lives of those represented in the records and a desire to learn more about them. However, in this novel fascination quickly becomes obsession with information gathering, and in fact the book acts as a warning against the potential inhumanity of getting bogged down in records and reducing people’s existence down to dates and documents. It’s an examination of the limitations of record-keeping, of how there will always be something which we can’t quite get at without having experienced it ourselves. As he puts it, “Lives are like paintings; you always need to look at them from four paces away.”

Perhaps most impactfully, Saramago presents a quietly devastating portrait of a very lonely man who is simply seeking connection the only way he knows how. He has no immediate family and his strictly hierarchical working environment is cold and uncompromising. We are lucky at the British Jesuit Archives to have a great team of four archivists, one PhD student, and a rotating ensemble of volunteers, so loneliness and boredom are not working conditions we experience often. Reading this book was a reminder that not all archivists and records managers are so fortunate and made me grateful to be part of such a friendly team!

Lucy (Rare Book Cataloguer and Assistant Archivist)

Robert Bartlett, History in flames: The destruction and survival of manuscripts.  Cambridge University Press. 2024. 

Robert Bartlett is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at St Andrews University and is also an experienced presenter of history programmes for the BBC. Both his erudition and his ability to tell complicated stories simply are evident throughout this very readable book.  

Bartlett looks at a series of case studies where manuscripts were destroyed by destructive human force — arson, shelling, bombing — rather than by accidents of fire or flood. Much of the book is taken up with narratives of these events, and the rest is an exposition of how many foundational texts only survived by the skin of their teeth — for example the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf, exists in one manuscript copy only, and that was severely charred by fire in 1731. Survival is matter of chance.

On the night of 24 August 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war three libraries in Strasbourg were shelled and destroyed by fire. Bartlett quotes a source that the burning of these libraries 'was felt by the whole learned world as an irreparable catastrophe'. The Town Library, destroyed in the conflagration, had housed particularly rich collections of rare books and manuscripts, transferred there from monasteries and other religious institutions closed following the French Revolution.  Among the destroyed manuscripts was a twelfth century sumptuously illustrated encyclopaedia, the Garden of Delights.

Bartlett's discussion of how we know some of the contents of The Garden of Delights centres on both the scholars who studied and copied it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those who 'gathered up the fragments' after 1870. They took advantage of new technologies, from a publication from 1818 of 12 engraved plates taken from tracings of the illustrations in The Garden of Delights made by Christian Moritz Engelhardt, to new lithographic processes used by a later scholar, the splendidly-named Count Auguste de Bastard D'Estang, in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1979 Rosalie Green edited what must be the most complete physical reconstruction possible, a facsimile with each page showing what, if anything, remains of that page, whether a copy of a photograph, a fragment, a scholar's notes.

The use of technology is a theme across Bartlett's case studies. Photography made a massive difference to what we can know about now destroyed manuscripts. The Municipal Library of Chartres, bombed by the USAF on 26 May 1944, had had extensive photographs taken of its collection by its archivist, Maurice Jusselin (1882-1964), a passionate photographer, whose collection of over 1,700 photographs is now preserved in the Chartres Library.

Another way of knowing about the destroyed records of the past which Bartlett considers at some length (and one which, as an archivist, I found particularly validating) is the work of archivists of listing, cataloguing, calendaring and describing. These are all ways that archivists represent what they have in their collections. Good archival work provides descriptions which can be at least a framework of what existed, should a collection be destroyed.

The bombing of the Public Record Office of Ireland in Dublin of 30 June 1922 is a sobering case study. For 50 years before 1922, Irish records had been the subject of a campaign of centralisation in the Records Office located in the Four Courts building in Dublin. It was this building, used by the IRA to store explosives in 1922 and shelled by the Free State Forces, which exploded catastrophically. As an example of the losses, of the 147 large parchment memoranda rolls produced by the medieval Irish Exchequer which were in the Record Office at the beginning of 1922, only two remained after the explosion.

However, the centralised records of the Public Record Office of Ireland had been in the care of archivists, and in 1919 Herbert Wood, Deputy Keeper of the Public Records, had published A guide to the Records deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland. This preserves the memory of the archives which had been kept there, including 55 pages describing the documents from the Chancery, 63 pages on those from the Exchequer, along with a great number of others such as 'Huguenot Records' and 'Irish Railway Commission'. Using this and other archival sources, we can at least know what we have lost. In the years after 1922 efforts were made to identify manuscripts which had survived by chance and in 1928 a list of salvaged records was published. But of far greater importance were the efforts put in to tracking down all published and unpublished summaries and copies of records, from 17th century antiquarians to early 20th century historians. Many of the records in the Public Record Office of Ireland were colonial records, and had counterparts and contemporary copies elsewhere, usually in Britain, and these have been copied and photographed and digitised and now represent some way of approximating what was lost.

In 2022, the 100th anniversary of the destruction of 1922 sparked an international collaborative research project to create a virtual reconstruction of the Record Office as it was before the bombing. The results of this reconstruction are described as 'an all-island and international collaborative research project working to create a virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland'. This includes a wonderful VR tour of the library as it was at the beginning of 1922, with clickable links to any extant documents, facsimiles, copies or descriptions.

This is the link — it's well worth a look: Virtual Record Treasury.

What stands out after reading and re-reading this book is that the survival of the past is fragile and capricious, and that much of what we know about it is thanks to individual or institutional collectors, archivists and librarians — yet that the very act of collecting and centralising makes the past more at risk of rapid, single-event destruction. Dispersed collections, documents kept singly in many places may be more likely to be lost due to ignorance, or perhaps by fire, water or rodents, but the capacity for catastrophic loss in large aggregated collections, especially in times of war, is sobering.  Food for thought indeed for archivists and collections managers.

Mary (Deputy Archivist)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been dipping into Michael Questier’s Catholics and Treason: Martyrology, Memory, & Politics in the Post-Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2022). As I’ve been cataloguing the archives of the Martyrs’ Cause Office intermittently over the last few years, I was especially keen to see how Questier, who draws on these records, may have used this underexplored body of material to reshape the narrative of the Catholic community and martyrdom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In this book, Questier seeks to take the texts gathered by generations of Catholic martyrologists and place them back into the broader contexts that produced them. Drawing on archival research, he reconstructs the origins of these documents to restore their historical setting and rescue the subject from what he calls the "abyss of irrelevance.” As he puts it, "this is a history of the post-Reformation Church and State with the politics (of violence) put back.” Although much of the book is narrative, this approach allows readers to grapple with the difficult questions raised by these events. Questier uses Bishop Richard Challoner’s Memoirs of Missionary Priests (1740s) - the Catholic community’s closest counterpart to John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs - as his starting point.

Before turning to the chronological chapters on martyrdom from the reign of Elizabeth I to the Popish Plot (1679), Part I examines Catholic martyrdom, the writing of Reformation history, and the construction of martyr narratives. Questier introduces key anthologisers such as Challoner, exploring their aims and methods. I was especially interested on the focus on how and why records are created. As an archivist, provenance interests me as much as, if not more than, content.

In the preface, Questier reflects on why Catholic martyr narratives have often been marginalised in mainstream histories. He notes that accounts of suffering were collected almost immediately - circulating orally, in manuscript, and sometimes in print - and gradually became embedded in Catholic historical traditions. Early efforts by figures like Challoner represent some of the first sustained attempts at Catholic historical research. Yet such narratives were long dismissed by “serious” scholars, who saw martyrdom as resistant to conventional secular analysis. As a result, Reformation historiography has struggled to integrate martyrdom into broader interpretations of the early modern world. Questier contends that restoring Catholic experience to the centre of contemporary politics would significantly reshape our understanding of the post-Reformation period.

These questions, about whether martyr narratives qualify as legitimate historical sources, given the circumstances and purposes of their compilation, reminded me of debates around community archives during my Masters in Archives and Records Management. Some could argue that the archives of marginalised groups do not count as ‘proper’ archives, particularly when materials are retrospectively gathered to recover stories excluded from dominant narratives. In post-Reformation England, martyrdom has been largely framed through the work of the Protestant polemicist John Foxe, which had its own agenda. Catholic compilers, often without direct memory of events, actively sought out and assembled testimonies for their own purposes. In this sense, their work resembles that of community archives today: collecting and curating dispersed materials to reintegrate overlooked histories into the wider narrative.

As an archivist rather than a historian, my role is not to interpret the material but to organise it so others can use it effectively. Reading this book, however, prompted me to see the Martyrs’ Cause collection differently: as a body of memory and as a continuation of Challoner’s work. Questier’s study is ambitious and impressively researched, though it assumes some prior knowledge and is best suited to readers seeking a deeper understanding of martyrdom and its political context. I hope the publication of the Martyrs’ Cause catalogue, once complete, will open new avenues for research, and I look forward to Questier’s

next book, Memory, Sanctity and Religion in England c. 1850–1987.

Rebecca (Archivist)

Unlike my colleagues I have chosen a book that I am only part way through reading: The Birth of the Archive: A history of knowledge by Markus Friedrich (translated by John Noël Dillon), 2018. From the moment the book arrived in our reading room, I have wanted to read it and was unsurprised to see that the Jesuit Order has 10 entries in the index!

The book offers an engaging and scholarly exploration of how archives emerged and evolved in Europe from the late Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, showing how record-keeping practices became deeply woven into cultural, political, and intellectual life. Friedrich discusses the different roles archives have played, highlighting their fragility as well as their social significance. He uses historical examples throughout to demonstrate this archival evolution.

One of many examples he includes is that in 1194 not only did Richard Lionheart win territory, but almost more significantly captured the entire document collection that the French king Philip II had as part of his baggage train. This included all the papers of all the subjects of the king of England who had deserted him and alerted Richard to the fact that his brother John had betrayed him to conspire with France. Even though substantial portions of this parchment plunder were restored to Philip, the temporary loss of his documents had dramatic consequences for him and taught him not to carry his documents with him in future. The concept of itinerant archives gives me a sense of unease and I am grateful for the stability of our repositories.

So far what has struck me is how much 17th century archives dealt with similar issues that a modern day archivist would recognise such as the sharing of best practices between institutions, the recognition of investment in hiring personnel and cataloguing collections, and that

"archives with unknown contents made officials very uneasy. The lack of complete knowledge of their holdings raised the likelihood of unpleasant discoveries".

There was a short section on how some material was marked as "useless" and "considered unnecessary to read through", a practice that had serious consequences. This reminded me of our ongoing aversion to 'miscellaneous' categorisation in archival cataloguing and the importance of good appraisal practices.

A final observation I want to share is with regards to the cover image chosen. It is a copy of Pieter Brueghel the Younger's ‘The Village Lawyer’. The scene is lively and richly detailed, but it would likely make any modern records manager or archivist shudder. Papers are strewn liberally across the room, scattered over the floor, stacked precariously on tables, and heaped onto every available surface. The teetering piles and apparent lack of order stand in comic contrast to contemporary archival principles of careful arrangement and controlled storage. Yet the image also serves as a reminder of the long history of record-keeping and the enduring human challenge of managing information, a challenge that remains at the heart of our work.

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If you need a further suggestion for a book to read: then why not consider the newly released Second World War through Jesuit Archives: The Case of Europe 1939-1945, which the British Jesuit Archives has contributed to.

A few of the books mentioned above are available for consultation in our archives reading room. We are gradually adding our reference library books to an online catalogue which can be found here: Search results › Heythrop Library catalogue Pl