Edited extract: 'The Torchlight List'

An edited extract from Prof Jim Flynn's latest book The Torchlist List: Around the World in 200 Books.

Britain and her empire (the (93rd on the list): Blackwell Classic Histories of England begin with the Saxon kings and run all the way to the present House of Windsor.

They are excellent.

Particularly touching was the last attempt of an English king (William IV) to rule as well as reign.

Charles Dickens portrays England just as the stagecoach gave way to rail and she entered the industrial revolution.

He has a lively sense of sympathy with its victims.

If you must read only two of his novels, try (94) Tale of Two Cities, which will give you an English perspective on the French Revolution, and (95) David Copperfield, which is autobiographical. Dickens's mother, at a time when she was finically desperate, sent him to work in a shoe-dye factory and wanted him to stay at work when his father, a few months later, got out of debtors prison. He never forgave her.

From childhood he dreamed of being a gentleman, and although he deplores the fact that Pip in Great Expectations became a snob, he never questions the class hierarchy of Britain.

America is the story of ethnicity and race and unusual opportunities to make money.

England tells something of the same story with opportunity less present and everything overlaid with class, its upper classes strange, aloof, never doubting their prerogatives.

Howard Spring's (96) Fame is the Spur is worthwhile, because of its moving account of the British working class at the end of the 19th century and how they tried to better their lot in the 20th.

The sword of Peterloo is a symbol of their oppression.

It was captured by a worker at the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when British mounted troops used swords to cut down working people who had peacefully met to express their grievances.

The book tells of the rise of the trade union movement and the Labour Party and the suffragettes (and the vicious things that were done to them).

Cecil Woodham Smith's (97) The Reason Why tells how the aristocracy could buy the right to outfit a brigade and lead it into battle.

But it is not just the suffering or the privilege: it is the attitudes.

There is reason to believe that the Light Brigade charged into the valley of death because Lord Cardigan misinterpreted the orders of Lord Lucan.

But Lord Cardigan was not speaking to Lord Lucan and would not humble himself to ask for clarification.

In Barbra Tuchman's (98) The Proud Tower, read the vignette on Keir Hardie. His employer dismisses him, a child of eight, the only member of his family in work.

Tuchman has written a wonderful history of the early days of World War 1, (99) The Guns of August.

The common cause of the war did not bridge the gulf that separated the classes.

Lord Curzon, a leader in the War Cabinet, observed British soldiers bathing: How is it that I have never been informed that the lower orders have such white skins? A pity the lower orders were useful as servants. Otherwise these strange white-skinned creatures could have been kept in zoos.

R. H. Tawney's (100) The Acquisitive Society takes us into the 20th century.

He describes those who live among ordinary Britons as if surrounded by aborigines, and think nothing of the fact that they wear several men's clothes, eat several men's dinners, occupy several family's houses, and live several men's lives. They thought nothing odd about privilege without responsibility.

Eton, Oxbridge, a club in town, London in June, the moors in August, pheasant shooting in October, Cannes in December, and hunting in February and March.