Alastair Benn, Deputy Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

Daisy Christodoulou’s I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR (Swift Press) raises fundamental questions about technology and power, and answers them in great style. I loved Rose Tremain’s novel Absolutely and Forever (Vintage), a clarion call to rewrite the limiting stories we tell ourselves. And here are the books I discovered for the first time that I know I will never stop reading: Don Quixote; A Room with a View; Doktor Faustus; Madame Bovary; and The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Gill Bennett, author of The Zinoviev Letter: The Conspiracy that Never Dies

The extraordinary story of the rise and fall of Yevgeny Prigozhin has continuing relevance to events in Russia and Ukraine, and Anna Arutunyan and Mark Galeotti’s Downfall: Prigozhin, Putin and the New Fight for the Future of Russia (Ebury Press) is an essential guide. In Counter-Intelligence: What the Secret World Can Teach us About Problem-Solving and Creativity (HarperCollins) former GCHQ Director Robert Hannigan weaves history and counter-terrorism into an elegant guide to innovation and smart decision-making in any context. And I very much enjoyed Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann (Allen Lane), casting a new and often surprising light on the lives and work of those writers.

Rodric Braithwaite, author of Russia: Myths and Realities

It’s been a great year for timely and well-informed novels about current politics. Giuseppe da Empoli’s The Wizard of the Kremlin (Pushkin Press) purports to be the diary of Putin’s closest political adviser. It’s outstanding, a plausible, imaginative and illuminating account of Putin’s personality and Moscow politics today. Strongly recommended. Then there’s A Spy Alone (Canelo) a fine effort among a crop of fine spy novels. The protagonist, a disaffected former Secret Intelligence Service officer, runs an unsuccessful consultancy. He’s suckered into investigating Russian oligarchs and their British sycophants, some clearly based on well-known figures. The author, Charles Beaumont (allegedly also ex-SIS) is as angry as his hero at the way, he believes, the Russians have successfully laundered their money by corrupting the British state.

Richard Bratby, critic

The literary world seems rather to have cooled on Anthony Burgess the novelist; the musical world saved time by ignoring his music (he was a prolific composer) from the outset. The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993 (Carcanet Press) suggests that his true vocation lay as intermediary between the two. Stylishly edited by Paul Phillips, this wonderfully bingeable volume collects Burgess’s essays on music, revealing him as the heir to his hero George Bernard Shaw. He’s prescient, too: a writer who died in 1993 has no business being quite so clear-eyed about the cultural woes of our own fragmented century. Gin and tonic for the music-loving mind.

Ahron Bregman, author of The Spy Who Fell to Earth

Daniela Richterova’s Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries (Georgetown University Press) provides a gripping account of how Prague became a central hub for some of the world’s most notorious terrorists and revolutionaries during the 1970s and 1980s. Notable figures such as Carlos the Jackal and various factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization used the city as a base for refuge, recreation, and clandestine meetings. Richterova expertly explores the role of Czechoslovakia’s security and intelligence agency, the StB, in facilitating or monitoring these covert activities. While some individuals were welcomed, others were under strict surveillance and ultimately expelled. Drawing from newly declassified intelligence files, the book offers a fresh perspective and an engaging narrative that is both scholarly and accessible. This is a highly recommended read for those interested in Cold War history, intelligence operations, or the intersection of politics and espionage.

Juliette Bretan, journalist

A fiend for all things Polish and European that I am, I enjoyed Andrzej Busza’s Conrad’s European Context (Brill), which considers the cultural background to Joseph Conrad’s works; and Christopher GoGwilt’s The K-Effect: Romanization, Modernism, and the Timing and Spacing of Print Culture (Fordham University Press), a clever work on modernism and romanisation through the letter K – which takes as one example Conrad’s transliteration of his own name from the Polish Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to the English Joseph Conrad.

David Butterfield, Editor of Antigone

While a nation waits for its flagship institution, the British Library, to regain access to its digital collections — an ocean of information rather less accessible than the utopian technocrats promised — it has been a good year for physical books about physical books.We have much to relearn about the contingency of survival and the human labour required to keep knowledge alive. Here to help remind us have been Robert Bartlett’s History In Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts (Cambridge University Press), Sara J. Charles’s The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages (Reaktion), Adam Smyth’s The Book Makers: A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives (Bodley Head), and Andrew Hui’s The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton University Press). As an alarming reminder that the physical book can still travel in ways that both baffle and appal, brace yourself for Roberta Mazza’s Stolen Fragments: Black Markets, Bad Faith, and the Illicit Trade in Ancient Artefacts (Redwood Press). A similar tale of what is lost when the physical gives way to the digital, and when greed takes over art, is told by Eamonn Forde’s excellent doorstopper of a book 1999: The Year the Record Industry Lost Control (Omnibus). A simple lesson for 2025: keep putting things on your shelves.

Helen Carr, author of The Red Prince

Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane) has been highly anticipated and did not disappoint. One of the finest historians of our time, Castor has a unique talent in unpicking the psychologies of power in her royal characters and who better than warring cousins, Richard and Henry. Rich in detail and told with narrative flair this is a brilliant book. On a completely different vein (but a much needed tonic after grappling with the politics of 14th century England), I adored David Nicholls You Are Here (Sceptre). Characteristically charming and comforting, Nicholls is sensitive to the undulations and contractions of what it means to be human and this was, for me, his most enjoyable and tender book yet.

One of the highlights of the year for me was the British Library’s Medieval Women exhibition and Hetta Howes’s Poet, Mystic Widow, Wife (Bloomsbury Publishing) was a wonderful accompanying read to what was on view. Charting the lives of women through writers Christine de Pizan, Marie de France, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, Howes offers a rich and often amusing account of what it meant to be a women in the Middle Ages.

Daisy Christodoulou, author of I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR

In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin), Jonathan Haidt argues that constant connectivity, curated online personas, and the pressures of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ have fundamentally reshaped adolescence, amplifying anxiety and depression. The book caused an enormous stir when it was first published in April, with many parents and educators feeling that it perfectly captured the problems of smartphones and social media. Some researchers argued that the causal link between phones and mental health is not as clear-cut as Haidt claims. Regardless of whether Haidt overplays his hand on the mental health evidence or not, it is an essential read which has reset the agenda for how we think about technology and adolescents.

I also enjoyed Nate Silver’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything (Allen Lane). Silver’s central conceit is to divide up the world between the ‘village’ and the ‘river’. In the village live academics, civil servants, and journalists. In the river are venture capitalists, crypto bros, and start-up founders. The culture clash between the two explains a lot about modern America, including the recent election.

Rachel Cockerell, author of Melting Point

My book of the year is The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance that Won the War (Hachette) by Giles Milton. Don’t be deceived by the cover (or the title) – at the heart of the book is Averell Harriman, the charming railroad magnate sent by Roosevelt to England and the Soviet Union to smooth diplomatic relations during the Second World War. I found it completely thrilling from first page to last. Orlando Reade’s What in Me is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost (Jonathan Cape) weaves the story of Paradise Lost through portraits of Milton’s most famous fans, including Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm X. Reade’s chapter on teaching the book to prisoners in New Jersey was particularly powerful. My final recommendation – because it hasn’t received much publicity – is Orbital (Jonathan Cape) by Samantha Harvey. I read it early in the year, but it’s still vivid in my mind.

Armand D’Angour, author of How to Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creating Change

After the Athenian expedition of 415-13 BC to conquer Syracuse ended in failure, thousands of Athenians were imprisoned in a grim, comfortless quarry to die. Their Sicilian captors were, however, fanatical audiences for Athenian drama, and Plutarch tells how the lives were spared of prisoners who were able to sing passages from Euripides, the most hip and modernistic of ancient dramatists. Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits (Penguin) picks up the tale, following two local potters as they devise a plan to stage Euripides’ Medea in the quarry. It’s impossible not to relish the Irish-tinged narrative voice in this imaginative, hilarious, and ultimately moving first novel.

Thomas de Waal, journalist

We are in an era more characterized by war, than peace. Stephanie Baker’s Punishing Putin: Inside the Global Economic War to Bring Down Russia (HarperCollins) is a revelatory book about the West’s economic war with Russia, bravely and closely reported. She doesn’t tell us that sanctions have failed or succeeded, she tells the story of how Russia is hurt and then adapts, and the battle changes to a new front, latterly over the oil price cap. Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton) brings you viscerally inside an ancient war. It is compelling stuff and it’s a measure of how good it is that I can only take it in small doses.

Daisy Dunn, author of The Missing Thread

It’s been a strong year for history, but I was immediately grabbed by Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane). The book is an expansive and beautifully written dual biography of King Richard II and Henry IV, two cousins who were as different as could be. We know Shakespeare’s version, but Castor takes us beneath the skin of the historical characters, unknitting exactly how it was that one came to depose the other. Castor is particularly good on the Christian underpinning of events. I also much enjoyed Saul David’s Sky Warriors: British Airborne Forces in the Second World War (HarperCollins) on Churchill’s maroon beret-wearing ‘Red Devils’ and their role in everything from the capture of Arnhem Bridge to Operation Varsity.

Caroline Eden, author of Cold Kitchen

The two most memorable books I’ve read this year are Night Train to Odesa: Covering the Human Cost of Russia’s War (Polygon) by Jen Stout, an account of her life as a young female reporter covering the war, and the remarkable people she meets in Ukraine during Russia’s full-scale invasion. And How to Feed the World: A Factful Guide (Viking) by Vaclav Smil, a fascinating book spilling over with fresh ideas, backed up with cold hard numbers, to show how we can fix the world’s broken food system.

Jonathan Esty, Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy Predoctoral Fellow

Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario (Torva) renders in unblinking, nightmarish detail what even a limited nuclear exchange would entail. With the pacing of a Tom Clancy thriller but undergirded by deep journalistic rigour, including dozens of interviews with Cold War policymakers, the work is not without its shortcomings. For instance, Jacobsen’s treatment of deterrence and MAD is somewhat lopsided, and her book would perhaps better be subtitled A Worst-Case Scenario (would even Putin launch the entire Russian arsenal at the American homeland if the US attacked North Korea?) Nonetheless, her book is perfectly timed. For lay audiences who believed the atomic demon exorcised, Jacobsen will send a justified shiver down many spines.

Samuel Gregg, Friedrich Hayek Chair in Economics and Economic History, American Institute for Economic Research

Madness comes in different sizes, but few exceed that which swept Germany in 1923. That is made abundantly clear in Volker Ullrich’s Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler’s Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis (Liveright). Month by month, Ullrich takes us through the cast of characters, economic traumas, and political upheavals that took the Weimar Republic to the brink of collapse as the worth of people’s money was destroyed and the political system came under assault from the extremes of right and left. Readers are left simultaneously enthralled and disturbed as Germany approaches, and then narrowly avoids, the abyss.

Katherine Harvey, author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages

In a year in which women’s bodies have been much discussed, Kathleen Crowther’s Policing Pregnant Bodies: From Ancient Greece to Post-Roe America (John Hopkins University Press) and Helen King’s Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies (Profile Books) both provided useful historical context to modern debates.

And 2024 has also been a good year for books offering new perspectives on the Reformation. Peter Marshall’s magisterial Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (William Collins) turns the spotlight on a region often ignored by historians, whilst Merry Wiesner-Hanks’ Women and the Reformations: A Global History (Yale University Press) offers a readable account of religious change from a female perspective. I also enjoyed Francesca Kay’s The Book of Days (Swift Press), a beautifully written novel set in the turbulent final months of Henry VIII’s reign.

Thomas W. Hodgkinson, author of How to be Cool

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Notwithstanding that syndrome, which affects most authors, Roland Allen makes a convincing case, in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books), that the creation of affordable paper notebooks triggered the Renaissance and just about everything that followed. For anyone looking to indulge in a fest of schadenfreude, I recommend Tim Robey’s Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops (Faber & Faber)—a compulsively readable account of some of the biggest cinematic turkeys of the last century. What exactly happened with Cats? Find out here.

Joshua C. Huminski, analyst

The fighting in Ukraine has regressed to an unexpected combination of First World War-style trench warfare matched with 21^st century technologies. As the war continues to unfold, military leaders and politicians alike are attempting to divine the lessons of conflict today for the conflicts of tomorrow. Too often these attempts draw sweeping strategic conclusions from what are manifestly tactical developments. Jack Watling’s The Arms of the Future (Bloomsbury Academic) is a rich, thoughtful volume. It avoids techno-fetishism, grounding innovation in such practical considerations as power, weight, and mobility, making it a valuable contribution.

Lawrence James, author of Empires in the Sun

Rachel Chrastil’s Bismarck’s War: The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (Allen Lane) is a crisp and fascinating account of the conflict with some vivid first-hand quotations. A Bavarian officer recalled ‘One thing is certain few are wounded by the mitraillueuse. If it hits you, you’re dead’. There is also a chilling account of the Hautefaye affair, a Zolaesque incident deep in the French countryside in which the Bonapartist peasantry lynch a prominent local bourgeois. The culprits are guillotined in the village square at the bidding of infant Third Republic in Paris. A film noir waiting to be made.

Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War (Penguin) covers the First World War on the frontiers of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy and in the Balkans. It is also the story of the slow and agonising deaths of the Romanov and Habsburg dynasties. Both found themselves incapable of handling the human stresses, administrative and economic demands, and technical novelties of the new warfare. States and their armies rot from the head downwards and Lloyd describes the process in a compelling and highly readable manner. He concludes with a brief and necessarily gloomy on the immediate consequences of these campaigns for Europe.

Tobias Jones, author of The Po

My books of the year have tight time frames: one a year and one a decade. I admired Keith Lowe’s Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (HarperCollins) for being so gritty what happened when the Allies replaced Nazi Germany in that wrecked city. It slays some legends about that much-mythologised era, but somehow makes the city seem even more pitiful and murky. Alice Hunt’s Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649–1660 (Faber & Faber) describes a period some of us are deeply ambivalent about. Hunt gives a vivid, year-by-year account of Britain’s most radical decade.

Paul Lay, Senior Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

There is no greater model of integrity among historians than Helen Castor, who manages to mix scholarship of the highest order with considerable literary flair. Her latest masterpiece, The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane), is her finest work so far, Shakespearean in both breadth and depth, illuminating two intertwined medieval lives, both of which ended in despair. Richard Davenport-Hines has found a niche documenting the lives of historians in that golden age – for men at least – before academic utilitarianism, HR and the REF combined to take the human out of the humanities. History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft (William Collins) does what is says on the tin, revealing the eccentricities, backbiting and wit of generation that graced Christ Church – the House – grandest of Oxford colleges. There has been much talk of an official biography of Queen Elizabeth II. But the supreme account of her life has already been written. Craig Brown, a supreme stylist, has reinvented the biography. His tangential portraits of vicious corgis, errant equerries and dynastic rivalries offer, in a A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate), a brilliant, vivid and complex portrait of the late lamented monarch, who was once believed to be unknowable.

Dan Lomas, historian

Robert Hannigan’s Counter-Intelligence: What the Secret World Can Teach Us About Problem Solving and Creativity (HarperCollins) is a refreshing angle on what lessons the UK’s signals intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), can teach us about thinking outside the box and the role of individuals in driving innovation even in the digital age. Hannigan, a former Director of GCHQ (2014 – 2017), provides anecdotes from the world of Bletchley Park and wartime codebreaking, as well as the modern-day GCHQ, to show how British SIGINT has always been able to foster talent and use diversity to its advantage and keep the UK safe. It’s a refreshing look at intelligence from a senior official.

If you’re also interested in the world of spies, Claire Hubbard Hall’s Her Secret Service: The Forgotten Women of British Intelligence (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) offers an important insight into the significant role played by women within the UK intelligence community. Hubbard Hall’s exhaustive mining of private papers, alongside declassified agency files, offers a series of fascinating vignettes of the personalities within SIS (MI6), MI5, GCHQ and their historical predecessors, including the real-life Miss Moneypenny.

Mathew Lyons, writer and historian

Two masterclasses in narrative history demonstrating what the best writers can do with the driest and barest of sources. In The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV (Allen Lane), Helen Castor gives us both a page-turning political thriller and a psychological study of great acuity and depth. Comparison with Shakespeare is inevitable and not to Shakespeare’s advantage.

Daisy Dunn’s The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It (Weidenfield & Nicholson) brings the history of antiquity from Minoan Crete to Boudica’s rebellion back to thrilling life by restoring women, known and unknown, to the narrative. The scale is epic but the effect is vivid, intimate and moving. Elegant in both writing and judgement, this is classical history at its most fully human.

Rana Mitter, author of China’s Good War

There’s no shortage of books out there on China, but Thomas Mullaney’s The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press) really is something different. Mullaney tells a superbly-researched and original tale of how the ideographic (character-based) form of Chinese writing became adapted to the QWERTY keyboard: in other words, the history of hundreds of millions of Chinese today can type into their phones. Very different but just as contrarian and compelling is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (Allen Lane), which gleefully busts myths about sexuality in Christian history, and does what centuries’ worth of archbishops have failed to do: humanize it.

Andrew Monaghan, author of The New Politics of Russia

Dima Adamsky’s The Russian Way of Deterrence: Strategic Culture, Coercion, and War (Stanford University Press) is a detailed look into Moscow’s strategic culture. Concise and yet deeply researched, Adamsky contextualises the war in Ukraine the longer-term aspects of Moscow’s actions, and offers a stimulating horizon for thinking about the future.

Gregory Carleton’s Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare (Hurst) looks to the past, to the Crimean War, which he calls the ‘greatest international crisis of the Victorian era’. A modern war of firepower, infrastructure and communications, he relates how Lev Tolstoy and Howard Russell brought news of that war to their home publics. Fascinating reading.

Nicholas Morton, author of The Mongol Storm

In his The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford University Press), Anthony Kaldellis offers a startlingly vivid history of the Byzantine Empire from the time of Emperor Constantine through to the fall of Constantinople (1453). Encompassing titanic wars, bitter religious disputes, and massive building projects, this is history writing on an epic scale. My other choice is Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s history of the Capetian kings of France, House of Lilies: The Dynasty that Made Medieval France (Allen Lane). I could scarcely put this book down. Filled with the remarkable – often lurid – doings of the French royal house, Firnhaber-Baker brings to life the elite culture of a kingdom underdoing enormous change.

Agnès Poirier, author of Notre-Dame: The Soul of France 

Ten years after his debut novel The Meursault Investigation, which was a response to Albert Camus’ The Outsider as seen from the point of view of the Arab, Kamel Daoud is back with an even more powerful and accomplished novel, this time tackling the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, a forbidden topic in Algeria. For this reason, Kamel Daoud has had to exile himself to France where Houris (Gallimard) won this year’s Prix Goncourt. It is the story of a young woman who lost her voice as a child after her throat was slashed by Islamists. She tells her story to her unborn child. While Daoud lives free in France, his compatriot, the great novelist Boualem Sansal, whose latest book, Français, parlons-en! is a brilliant essay on universalism and the French language, has been imprisoned by Algerian authorities for ‘being a threat to the country’s security’ and denied a lawyer. Brilliantly translated into English by Frank Wynne, Boualem Sansal’s novels such as Harraga and The German Mujahid are an absolute must read.

Will Quinn, Deputy Director and Research Fellow, The Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy

Probing the origins of the present is always a worthwhile exercise. Sometimes the result is sublime, as with Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis (Virago), a crystalline illumination of that holy text as the story about the origins of evil and the persistence of God’s love for humanity. At other times, one can merely shake one’s head, as with first-time author John Ganz’s remarkable When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s (Macmillan), which discerns connections to our present political moment in the post-Cold War crack-up in 1992 with a cast of characters including David Duke, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, John Gotti, and the Weaver family on Ruby Ridge. One can quibble with some of Ganz’s interpretations but can only admire his insight and verve. Finally, my friend David Roll’s Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World (Dutton) tells a very different story of beginnings in a riveting fashion at the other end of the Cold War, as the death of an exhausted FDR gave way to the transformative, surprising first years of Harry Truman’s presidency in which a capable but ill-prepared politician made critical decisions that created the US-anchored post-war world.

Suzanne Raine, Visiting Professor, Department of War Studies, KCL

Bruce Hoffman has been studying terrorism since 1981, and violent, far-right extremism was where he began. After a detour via Al-Qaeda he has returned to the subject, with his colleague Jacob Ware, in God, Guns and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia University Press). The action follows the development of American accelerationist movements from the 1980s onwards, charting the means by which white supremacist groups have sought to foment chaos to seize power. The cast of characters – often profoundly influenced by their engagement in the US’s overseas conflicts – could have come straight from the 1850s. This is a sobering reminder of the pervasive role of militia forces in the United States.

Angus Reilly, Assistant Editor, Engelsberg Ideas

Steve Coll once again proved his mastery of historical investigation in The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the Middle East, 1979–2003  (Allen Lane), his sweeping account of the fraught relationship between the CIA and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq is as incisive as it is illuminating, expertly pairing with Afshon Ostovar’s Wars of Ambition: The United States, Iran, and the Struggle for the Middle East (Oxford University Press) a gripping exploration of Iran’s conflicts since the invasion of Iraq. On the other side of Asia, Rahul Bhatia’s The New India (Hachette) delivers a poetically brilliant account of the struggles and contradictions of the world’s largest democracy. For a deeper exploration of what it takes to forge a nation, Caroline Burt and Richard Partington’s Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber) offers an epic and immersive narrative of the power struggles that shaped medieval England.

Samuel Rubinstein, historian

Kunal M. Parker’s The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought 1870-1970 (Cambridge University Press) is intellectual history done right. The book probes three notionally discrete fields – law, political science, and economics – to discover what lies beneath the surface. In each of those fields, Parker argues, there was a profound shift from a concern with ‘truths, ends, and foundations’ to one with ‘methods, processes, and techniques’. Perhaps, he suggests, something vital was lost in this transition. This is an academic work with much to offer a layman; its ingenious and riveting arguments will be debated for decades to come.

Thomas A. Schwartz, author of Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography

I.S. Berry, a former CIA operations officer, has written one of the best and most suspenseful espionage novels for 21^st century American foreign policy with The Peacock and the Sparrow (Simon and Schuster).  Set in Bahrain during the Arab Spring, Berry captures the moral complexities as well as gritty nature of intelligence work in the same spirit of John le Carrè’s Cold War spies who came in from the cold. On a completely different note, Alexei Navalny’s PATRIOT (Bodley Head) is the compelling and powerful memoir of an incredibly courageous man. Knowing what will happen to him casts a shadow over the book, but Navalny’s sense of humor and resistance to the dictatorship, as well as his faith, makes this an inspiring read.

Guy Stagg, author of The Crossway

Two books made a big impression on me this year. The first was Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land (Headline), Rachel Cockerell’s fascinating and creative account of the exiled Russian Jews seeking a homeland in Texas – told entirely through original quotations and sources. The second was Mr Geography (Harvill Secker) the new novel by Tim Parks. An aging narrator hikes across the Alps, recreating the journey he made with a lover many decades ago, and the journey D.H. Lawrence made in 1912. Past and present are expertly threaded together, the virtuoso technical skill matched with deep emotional resonance.

Phil Tinline, author of The Death of Consensus

It makes a bleak sort of sense that Dorian Lynskey has followed up his splendid biography of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with a full-on tour of the doom horizon: Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (Pan Macmillan). Ranging from nuclear apocalypse to climate collapse, he once more pulls together a vast array of fearful material, and synthesises it into witty, sensitive prose. If there’s one group who should read Lynskey’s book more than any other, it’s probably the American radical right – a political grouping steeped in prophecies of doom. As Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman show in White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy (Random House), rural whites do have much to fear. They just don’t necessarily blame the right people. This stokes polarisation, as each side casts the prospect of their opponents winning as the end of the world.

Paul Tucker, author of Global Discord

Two books on France have been incredibly interesting, and disturbingly resonant. Robert Darnton’s The Revolutionary Temper (Allen Lane) reveals the way that discontent with the ancien regime built over many decades, undermining its legitimacy before the dam finally broke. Julian Jackson’s France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain (Penguin) treads through the agonies of facing up to the past in ways that don’t undermine the present.

Jeremy Wikeley, writer

It was a good year for cultural histories: Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Profile Books), Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (Picador) and Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (Oneworld Publications) all take imaginative, eclectic and personable approaches to apparently familiar subjects. (They’d all make good gifts, too.) My novel of the year was Mark Bowles’s All My Precious Madness (Galley Beggar Press), a furious and often hilarious diatribe against modern life delivered by one of the strangest, most compelling characters in modern fiction. It must be good because I still don’t know what to make of it.

David Wootton, author of Power, Pleasure, and Profit

Mandeville is in many ways the most important moral and social theorist of the eighteenth century. He asked two questions: a) How does society function if we are indeed selfish creatures? and b) How did selfish creatures domesticate themselves to make social life possible? One can evade these questions if one denies that human beings are fundamentally selfish, but then it becomes very difficult to explain what motivates our behaviour. The respectable Enlightenment — Hume, Smith, Hutcheson — and the radical Enlightenment — Rousseau — struggled to come to terms with Mandeville, and so have historians of moral philosophy and social theory ever since. What made him so problematic is that he chose to write in a wickedly playful style, so that it is often difficult to know just which of his claims are serious and which are primarily intended to cause shock and dismay. John Callanan’s Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe (Princeton University Press) is by far the best discussion we have of this paradoxical, and immensely influential thinker, and everyone interested in the history of moral, social, or economic theorising should read it.

George Woudhuysen, critic

Tom Chivers’ Everything is Predictable (Weidenfield & Nicolson) is a fascinating study of Bayesian probability theory and its applications to … well, everything. Crisply and clearly written, it is an excellent introduction to thinking about the world in a profoundly different way. Yaroslav Trofimov’s Our Enemies Will Vanish (Penguin) is an exceptionally vivid account of the war in Ukraine, based on extensive on-the-ground reporting – it is by turns moving, evocative, and not without hope’.

Muriel Zagha, critic

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Samuel Paty atrocities, French society is facing challenges to its Republican tradition of laïcité (French secularism). Florence Bergeaud-Blackler’s Le frérisme et ses réseaux (Odile Jacob) provides a sobering analysis of the tactics deployed in France by the Muslim Brotherhood movement. I also enjoyed Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris 1900-1939 (Yale), a lively companion to the exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery about the cosmopolitan experiences of unconventional female expatriates in avant-garde Paris.

Adam Zamoyski, author of Izabela the Valiant

Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. (Penguin) is a gripping analysis of how dirty money feeds autocratic governments and dictatorships all over the world. In the past, they have relied on ‘bayonets around the throne’, today they are supported by hidden networks which connect them with individuals creating wealth by illicit means in a world-wide web of mutual interdependency. This enables them to dominate their populations through corruption, defy sanctions, and undermine democracy everywhere. Unlike most doomsayers, Applebaum suggests some relatively simple ways of stemming the flow of autocracy’s financial lifeblood and stripping gangsters of their immunity. A must read.

Theo Zenou, journalist and historian

This year marked the 20 year anniversary of Hard Case Crime, the New York publisher of pulp fiction. To celebrate, Hard Case brought out Death Comes Too Late (Hard Case Crime), a short story collection by its founder Charles Ardai. It’s a rollicking read packed with PIs, wandering salesmen and femme fatales. Ardai gleefully sends up pulp clichés and creates something fresh in the process. Another artist who has made a career out of subverting clichés is Pedro Almodóvar, the director of All About My Mother and Volver. The Spanish maestro’s first book, The Last Dream (Harvill Secker), is also a short story collection. And it lives up to its promise, delivering zany, moving vignettes. Vintage Almodóvar.