 | The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 15671659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries' Wars (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History) by Geoffrey Parker
Buy used from: £9.78 Nuts and bolts of a very specific historical question (How to march a few thousands Spaniards from Milan to Antwerp, again and again and again?). My first example of serious academic history.
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 | European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750 by Jonathan I. Israel
Buy used from: £11.50 A broad overview of a fascinating topic: one of the books that made me decide to study History (rather than Eng Lit)
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 | Ecclesiastical History of the English People: With Bede's Letter to Egbert and Cuthbert's Letter on the Death of Bede (Classics) by Bede
Buy new: £6.96 / Used from: £2.80 The first (and best!) history book that I read as an undergraduate.
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 | The Coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England by Henry Mayr-Harting
Buy new: £14.14 / Used from: £10.11 The necessary accompaniment to no. 3 above, and a book that made me certain I'd made the right choice of studies.
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 | Helena (Twentieth Century Classics) by Evelyn Waugh
Buy new: £8.41 / Used from: £3.24 A highly entertaining reminder that however beautiful or awful the myths, their relationship to reality is what matters.
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 | The Age of Bede (Penguin Classics) by Bede
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £3.64 One of the most interesting things about history is that it shows the variety of different contexts that make different types of sanctity possible or necessary (see too isbn 1871217636 or 0312369999)
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 | The Count-Duke of Olivares: Statesman in an Age of Decline by Elliott
Buy new: £21.38 / Used from: £11.89 A modern example of historical biography on an epic scale; it sets a benchmark for the rest of us
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| The Life of Captain Alonso de Contreras ... written by himself, 1582 to 1633. Translated ... by Catherine Alison Phillips, etc. With plates by Alonso de Contreras
Who needs Captain Alatriste when they could be reading Captain Alonso de Contreras?
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 | LEST DARKNESS FALL by L. Sprague De Camp
Buy used from: £11.54 One way to get teenagers to read Procopius.
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 | The Vinland Sagas: "Graenlendinga Saga" and "Eirik's Saga": The Norse Discovery of America (Classics) by PENGUIN GROUP (UK)
Buy used from: £0.48 How much of even the most historical sagas is invented is never entirely clear, but at 11 years old I read this as though it was news reports (although perhaps the same holds for news reports ...)
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 | Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney (Classics) by none
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £2.50 As with 10 above (although I was a couple of years older by the time I read this)
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 | King Harald's Saga: Harald Hardradi of Norway from Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (Classics) by Snorri Sturluson
Buy new: £5.48 / Used from: £2.50 Apart from Lord of the Rings and the historical books of the Bible, my most memorable teenage reading was Penguin translations of the sagas (I won't list all of them)
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| Vikings, The (Peoples of the Past S) by Michael Gibson
Buy used from: £0.01 This was before there were "Horrible Histories".
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 | The Viking Saga: "Viking's Dawn", "Road to Miklagard" and "Viking's Sunset" (Puffin Books) by Henry Treece
Buy used from: £7.99 How to get 10-year-olds reading sagas, and things like 13 above.
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| Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
Buy used from: £0.01 This is about as modern as it gets (there was a little book full of diagrams about the Russo-Japanese War, but I don't know who wrote it, or what it was called).
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| Horatius Keeps the Bridge (Phoenix 60p paperbacks) by Thomas Babington Macaulay
Buy used from: £0.01 I read it in an anthology, but that makes no difference. It set me thinking "Did this really happen?" - the most important question for a historian (jesting Pilate notwithstanding).
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| Bible: Good News Bible
Buy used from: £0.01 A First Communion present of incalculable importance, with the history of the People of Israel and of the earliest Church.
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