The Week asked for my six favourite books. These are my picks. Though, to be honest, even if I had a choice of 60 books, it would have been difficult to know which ones would make the cut.

The Black Jacobins by CLR James (1938)

A seamless synthesis of novelistic narrative, factual reconstruction and polemical argument, The Black Jacobins helped transform both the writing of history and history itself. It was a “history from below” long before the phrase was coined. And in telling the story of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, James created a work that was to become indispensable to a new generation of Toussaint Louvertures, a new cadre of anti-colonial leaders.

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

The classic, and still indispensable, account of the emergence of working-class consciousness in England, a book that sought to “rescue the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver… from the enormous condescension of posterity.”

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

A haunting tale of the horror of slavery and of the tragic choices faced by slaves. A masterpiece about the ghosts of American history.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

Dostoevsky’s final novel, an exploration of faith, reason and doubt in a world undergoing deep, unsettling changes. A profoundly religious book that speaks to the atheist in me.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge (1949)

Serge was a revolutionary and dissenter, an anarchist who joined the Bolshevik Revolution and inevitably became one of Stalin’s victims. A novel about Soviet terror in the 1930s, this is both an evisceration of tyranny and a testament to hope. 

As Serious as Your Life by Val Wilmer (1977)

An account of the “new music” – the extraordinary innovations of free jazz pioneers such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sun Ra – almost fifty years on, it remains unsurpassed. Wilmer both gave voice to a generation of black musicians and placed their music and struggles against the background of the social ferment of postwar America.