Tim Abrahams, architecture writer

We have had over 100 years of Modernism in architecture and planning so it now has a rich, thick history. Richard J Williams’s excellent book The Expressway World (Polity) looks at the moments where cities and freeways meet around the world, such as Glasgow, São Paulo, and Los Angeles, analysing the outcomes when two competing ideas of modernity – urban living and the rise of the automobile – intersect. The textured, literate essay collection Dirty Old River (Park Books) by the architect Tom Emerson includes a welter of aperçues, including a fascinating rumination on the meaning of Milton Keynes as well as a claim for Frank Gehry’s early domestic buildings to represent the spirit of Los Angeles. For the sheer pleasure of reading and learning, I enjoyed Charles Saumarez Smith’s work, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture (Lund Humphries).

Caitlin Allen, Commissioning Editor at Engelsberg Ideas 

Books on the polarising effect of identity politics are not in short supply but few offer a solution as radical as Alexander Douglas. In Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self  (Penguin), Douglas deploys three thinkers from different epochs – ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi, 17th century Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza, and 20th century French theorist René Girard – to challenge us to abandon our attachment to any fixed identity and embrace our true nature as fundamentally fluid and indeterminate. This lucid book is a powerful reminder that the more narrowly we define ourselves, the more we are threatened by change. ‘Stay true to yourself’ is a hollow mantra when the world around us is constantly in flux.

Nigel Andrew, author of The Butterfly: Flights of Enchantment

Of the new books that have come my way this year, I was most impressed by Matt Ridley’s fascinating and racily-readable Birds, Sex and Beauty: The Extraordinary Implications of Charles Darwin’s Strangest Idea (HarperCollins) – the idea being that evolution is driven at least as much by sexual selection as by natural selection. The implications are indeed extraordinary, for animals and humans alike. Also impressive was Hallie Rubenhold’s Story of a Murder: The Wives, The Mistresses and Doctor Crippen (Penguin), which completely demolishes the popular image of Crippen as the mild, henpecked husband of an impossible wife. Rubenhold reinstates the unhappy Mrs Crippen as a likeable and successful woman who had the misfortune to marry a narcissistic psychopath.

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

In Flawed Strategy: Why Smart Leaders Make Bad Decisions (Polity), Beatrice Heuser deploys her expertise refreshingly, including explaining where and why she has changed her mind. Richard Davenport Hines’s History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft (HarperCollins), informative and entertaining, is also a scorching critique of current history teaching. I have found that Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Penguin) offers essential nourishment for a brain in danger of overload from the despair, stupidity, tragedy, and venality pervading world affairs.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai, writer

If you couldn’t make it to the National Gallery for the Siena exhibition earlier this year, and can’t make it to Florence for the Fra Angelico show that will be on until the end of January, then you can still flip through these magnificent catalogues, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 (Yale University Press) and Fra Angelico (Marsilio Arte), to watch the Renaissance begin to blossom before your eyes.

Speaking of the Renaissance: The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, Volume One: The Ancient World and Christendom (Encounter Books) is 1,200 pages of lavishly illustrated propaganda in service of Florentine supremacy. James Hankins has outdone himself with this book.

Cristina Campo (1923-1977) was brought up in Florence, looked like an angel from a Fra Angelico altarpiece, and became one of the half-dozen finest writers in any language since the Second World War. Alex Andriesse’s translation for New York Review Books Classics makes her work available in English at last. There is a short biography of this remarkable woman in The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals (Arouca Press), edited by Joseph Shaw. This collection is fascinating for non-Catholics, who often cherish the Church’s traditional Latin Mass far more than Catholics themselves do.

Cristina Campo was converted by her experience of the ancient liturgy, and tried to help rescue it from churchmen who sought to replace its beauty with ghastly 1970s aesthetics (those responsible for causing 80 per cent of Catholics in Europe to lose their faith) in the bizarre ‘culture war’ that has been raging for half a century inside the Church. Well-written histories of this have been difficult to find in English – until now. Yves Chiron’s Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism (Angelico Press) is masterly, and even boasts plenty of ammunition for loud, tiresome atheists.

Richard Bratby, critic

Two books, in particular, made me re-evaluate some of my lazier preconceptions about classical music, and provided new and formidable intellectual ammunition against bad faith arguments and the poison of identity politics. Nicholas Chong’s masterly The Catholic Beethoven (Oxford University Press) draws on the strongest possible sources – Beethoven’s own life and music – to demonstrate that the composer’s artistic radicalism is rooted in his lifelong (and sometimes highly conservative) Catholic faith. Alexandra Wilson’s Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British (Oxford University Press) is a readable, formidably-researched counterblast to the myth (in Britain, anyway) of opera as an ‘elitist’ art form. It should leave philistines of all political persuasions feeling very uncomfortable indeed.

Andreas Campomar, author of Golazo!

That the forty-seventh president of the United States deports himself as a Latin American strongman will come as no surprise to those conversant with the region. Greg Grandin is one of the keenest observers of the tensions inherent in the ‘Western Hemisphere’. In his excellent and groundbreaking new book, America, América: A New History of the New World (Torva), Grandin gives the context so badly needed in understanding the Americas: that one cannot grasp the history of the South without the North, and vice versa. On a smaller scale, but with what feels like a continental sweep, Roger Lewis gives biographical context in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (Riverrun), a primer in biographical brilliance: the ‘Centennial’ afterword is worth the price of entry alone.

Paul Cartledge, author of Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece

Youthful male beauty and sexual attraction as the Greeks of south Italy understood them in about 475 BC/E are on brilliant show in Heidelberg Professor Tonio Hölscher’s arrestingly original The Diver of Paestum: Youth, Eros, and the Sea in ancient Greece (Polity). Plato mattered – and mattered greatly – from the moment he created his dialogues a century later in the early fourth century BC/E, but it takes an exceptional interpreter and writer to bring out fully Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury). This is the title of distinguished Platonist Angie Hobbs’s new study, in which she covers salient features of our contemporary world from AI to politics, from ideas of beauty to cancel culture. Finally, there is room for yet another account of Alexander III of Macedon surnamed ‘the Great’, as is amply demonstrated in historian Stephen Harrison’s lively and not uncritical biography in a ‘Great Lives of the Ancient World’ series: Alexander the Great: Lives and Legacies (Reaktion Books).

David Chaffetz, author of Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

I’ve deepened my understanding of a vast subject with three books about India this year: The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury) by William Dalrymple, ever polemical and enlightening. Equally enlightening but at the same time encyclopedic is Audrey Truschke’s India, 5,000 Years of History (Princeton University Press). Even more encyclopedic with a microscopic focus is Salih Tripathi’s The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community (Aleph Book Company). I wish I had been able to read these books in 1981, when I first went to India.

Marc Le Chevallier, historian

What if culture, intelligence, and education were not a guarantee of wisdom, but actually predisposed one to error? In a country where l’intellectuel is worshipped like a demi-God, Samuel Fitoussi’s Pourquoi les intellectuels se trompent (L’observatoire) offers a scathing and powerful critique of the French intellectual. Timely and much-needed.

Caroline Eden, author of Green Mountains

I’m pretty up to date on what’s happening in the three Baltic States (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania) but certainly not all nine countries that border the Baltic Sea. Oliver Moody’s Baltic: The Future of Europe (John Murray Press) examines how they are not only a historic battleground of Russian aggression but also a factory of new ideas. There is much to learn from them, Moody argues, about how we might revive Europe, from the art of patience in Finland to resilience in Poland. Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan (Bloomsbury) by Joanna Lillis is an important book particularly at the moment as Uzbekistan’s powerful PR machine accelerates and the tourist dollars roll in. Lillis, who is based in neighbouring Kazakhstan, is in a unique position to offer shrewd insights backed up by journalistic integrity and years of experience. The book I enjoyed most this year, though, was How Animals Heal Us (Penguin) by Jay Griffiths, which examines how we are shaped by different creatures, from tigers to teddy bears. Read it, buy it for a friend too, and learn about the remarkable War Paws, which rescues the dogs that then rescue human beings.

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

My favorite book of the year was Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age (Bloomsbury). Unlike so many histories which purport to ‘deconstruct’ a well-known era, Palmer truly gives us a Renaissance infinitely richer, stranger, and more fascinating. She immerses us in the world of the Renaissance through many of its central figures, above all Florentines, and especially Florentine patriot Machiavelli, although she reminds us that historical ‘greatness’ is often a matter of survival – Florence’s centrality was reinforced when sister cities like Bologna were pounded to rubble in the Second World War. Proto-modernity, the Black Death, ‘genius’, humanism as ideology or vocation, and the question of ‘closeted atheists’ are just some of the strands that she weaves together. Pungent, irreverent, erudite. Worth reading and rereading for historians and lay-folk alike.

Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri, historian

Two recent books stand out for the seriousness with which they approach political life as a historical and moral experience. George Owers’s The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain (Constable) reconstructs the emotional and institutional worlds of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, presenting party as a formative condition of politics itself, sustained by habits of loyalty, religion, anger, and restraint. Josiah Osgood’s Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome (John Murray Press) returns to Cicero and the late Roman Republic, tracing the slow erosion of legal authority in a political culture that continued to speak the language of law long after its foundations had weakened. Both books illuminate the enduring tension between constitutional form and political reality.

Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of Modern China

Eva Dou’s The House of Huawei (Abacus Books) provides a fascinating account of the growth of one of China’s biggest and most controversial companies, shedding a great deal of light on the often opaque nature of the state capitalism which has underpinned the People’s Republic’s emergence as such a major global player. Dou, a technology reporter of the Washington Post, gives the most thorough picture available of the giant telecom firm’s growth and of how its reclusive founder, Ren Zhengfei, prospered within the cocoon of the Chinese Communist Party system. She also traces a lucid narrative of the prolonged and complex face-off following the detention in Canada on fraud charges brought by the United States of Ren’s daughter, the company’s chief financial officer, and of the concerns that have led some governments to seek to ban Huawei’s activities, however commercially attractive they might be. The result is an insight into the way Chinese state-business nexus works, warts and all.

Emmanuel Carrère’s Kolkhoze (Penguin) is an enthralling family memoir with particularly vivid evocations of his White Russian and Georgian ancestors – and his grandfather’s wartime collaboration with the Nazis – as well as his own visits to Georgia, Ukraine and Moscow. But it is, above all, a bittersweet portrait of his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, who rose from being the impoverished daughter of an aristocratic refugee family to become the grande dame of French Russian studies and pillar of the French intellectual establishment as  Permanent Secretary of the Académie Française. A prize winner in France, including the Prix Medicis, the book, told in the author’s highly individual style, is due to appear in an English translation in the autumn of 2026.

Garima Garg, author of Heavens and Earth: The Story of Astrology Through Ages and Cultures

Elif Shafak’s There Are Rivers In The Sky (Penguin) brings together ancient Mesopotamia, war-torn Middle East, and modern West in a narrative that flows like a river. It reminds us that the past is never dead and the future is never certain – something we would do well to remember in these times of instant gratification. But more importantly, it reminds us why we need stories. Shafak delivers many beautiful and violent realities of life through her characters, which are only slightly fictional, but show us what it means to be human in a world that is constantly changing.

Katherine Harvey, author of The Medieval Guide to Healthy Living

This year I particularly enjoyed a trio of history books about the lives of ordinary people. Moudhy Al-Rashid’s Between Two Rivers (Hodder & Stoughton) is a very readable history of Ancient Mesopotamia. Covering everything from magical beliefs to maths lessons, it introduces us to colourful characters including Buzuza, a dishonest merchant who encouraged his couriers to smuggle valuable goods in their underwear.

Based on coroners’ accounts, Steven Gunn and Tomasz Gromelski’s An Accidental History of Tudor England (John Murray Press) is that rare thing: a book which has genuinely new things to say about the Tudors. Though squeamish readers may struggle with some of the gory details, the many unfortunate farm labourers impaled on their own tools have particularly stuck with me.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of Mary Chamberlain’s Fenwomen (Virago) is a less gruesome read. But her interviews with the female residents (many of whom recall tough early 20th-century childhoods) show that life in this isolated Cambridgeshire village was no rural idyll.

Matthew Hefler, historian

In a strong year for intelligence histories, two standouts are Daniela Richterova’s Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries (Georgetown University Press) and Aviva Guttman’s Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign (Cambridge University Press). Aside from remarkable research that reveals more of what Christopher Andrew called ‘The Secret World’, both advance our knowledge of espionage and covert political action outside of the Anglosphere, which is always of value to the field. Finally one should also mention Richard Vinen’s The Last Titans: Churchill and De Gaulle (Bloomsbury). By examining this pair of towering figures through the lens of their long association, Vinen manages to shed light on both men – a notable achievement in a crowded field.

Peter Hoskin, Books and Culture Editor at Prospect

I’ve already poured enough honeyed words on Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds: the Deep History of the Nuclear Age 1895-1965 (Penguin) elsewhere, so how about Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life (Pan Macmillan) by Tiffany Jenkins? It’s one of those history books that make you look at all history in a different way; in this case, as a huge tug of war over our right to privacy. Turns out, we weakened our grip in the 20th century — before letting go almost entirely in the 21st century. Still, at least I was able to find a quiet, undisturbed corner in which to read the newly translated Samurai Detectives series (Penguin) by Shotaro Ikenami. Think Sherlock Holmes meets Akira Kurosawa, and you’re not far off; a perfect winter warmer.

Christoph Irmscher, literary critic

Nearly three billion birds have died in North America since 1970, an unfathomable record of lives lost. In England, millions of farmland birds have disappeared, a second ‘Silent Spring’, according to Adam Nicolson. With such grim facts in mind, Nicolson, in Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood (HarperCollins), sets out to teach himself everything there is to learn about birds, starting with observations on his own patch of land, Hollow Flemings, an overgrown field on his farm in Sussex, home to robins, blackbirds, crows, wrens, thrushes, and marsh tits. As Nicolson, one of the greatest prose stylists of our time, studies the habits of his birds, their songs and migrations, he discovers that the only way to really get to know them is to accept that he can’t ever fully know them.

Henry Jeffreys, author of Vines in a Cold Climate

How could Craig Brown top Ma’am Darling, his gossipy, hilarious look at the life of Princess Margaret? With A Voyage Around the Queen (HarperCollins), of course. While the new book isn’t as deliciously bitchy as its predecessor, it is at times, just as funny, particularly the chapters on the palace corgis and ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’. There’s also an unexpected profundity and melancholy in Brown’s writing because it’s as much about how Britain has changed, not always for the better, during her long reign as it is about the Queen herself.

Tiffany Jenkins, author of Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life

Neurologist Suzan O’Sullivan’s The Age of Diagnosis (Hodder & Stoughton) is an urgent, lucid study of our expanding diagnostic culture, showing how the impulse to name ailments can burden as much as clarify. Her argument that we expect too much of medicine is made with quiet force.

Morten Høi Jensen, author of The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain

Daniel Elkind’s Dr. Chizhevsky’s Chandelier (Repeater Books) is a strange and original book that deserves a wide readership. ‘Everything is mixed up in my mind,’ Elkind confesses at one point, and so it is here: American anarchists, Jewish baseball players, Soviet heliobiologists, and much more. The result is a treasure trove of unexpected connections. I inhaled Edwin Frank’s Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel (Vintage), which does what every great work of criticism ought to: fills the reader with an insatiable desire to read and reread every single novel mentioned in its pages. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft (Bloomsbury) is a novel of fate and chance that will linger for quite some time. Anthony Passeron’s Sleeping Children (Picador) is an excellent debut novel about AIDS, family, and shame.

Paul Lay, Senior Editor at Engelsberg Ideas

Nicholas Wright’s Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain (Pan Macmillan) is a compelling and accessible account of why the human brain is the most formidable weapon of them all – and probably the best means to reconciliation, too. Wright, a leading neurologist, strategist and technologist, also offers a glimpse into the origins of Artificial Intelligence in Queen’s Square, the research hotbed in London’s Bloomsbury, which deserves an expanded history in itself.

No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One (Yale University Press) by the veteran naval historian Andrew Lambert, recalls an era when British diplomacy, in league with the Royal Navy, ruled the waves and brought almost a century of peace to Europe. That harmony came to an end in 1914, when Britain forgot to enforce the crucial Continental strategy of Wellington and, above all, the peerless Nelson.

What is it the West seeks to defend? Among its treasures – perhaps the treasure – is classical music and, in Music’s Odyssey: An Invitation to Western Classical Music (Penguin) the composer Robin Holloway offers a broadly chronological, highly opinionated (Hildegard of Bingen is a ‘psychedelic bore’, minimalism is swiftly dismissed) history of its many forms. But anyone who loves Wagner and Ravel and rates Schubert ‘the very heart of music’ is fine by me.

Keith Lowe, historian

There were two books that really surprised me this year. Jack Fairweather’s The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice (Penguin) is a biography of a minor figure in a provincial backwater of Germany in the 1950s and 60s: on the face of it, there’s no reason why it should be interesting. But this particular figure, Fritz Bauer, and his campaign to bring former Nazis to justice, ended up being so important to German identity that his story absolutely demands attention. The same goes for Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits (Penguin), which came out in paperback this year. Ostensibly it’s a story about a couple of men in ancient Syracuse putting on a play – a premise that left me lukewarm at best. But the deep humanity of this novel, its shocking brutality and glorious sense of fun, had me captivated from the very first page.

Michael Lucchese, Associate Editor of Law & Liberty

In 2025, conservative parties across the West seem more confused than ever about what exactly they are trying to preserve. Two recent books pointing us back to our roots can help us remember what it means to fight for the Permanent Things. Kit Kowol’s Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War (Oxford University Press) is an historical study of the ideas that animated the British Conservative party during the Second World War, and its vision of a future made safe for what Edmund Burke once described as ‘exalted freedom’ – something we must recover today. Paul Kingsnorth’s anti-tech jeremiad, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (Penguin), is too pessimistic about the future, but it is a powerful reminder of the threats modernity itself poses to our civilization’s way of life.

Robert Lyman, historian

Ben Barry’s The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025 (Osprey Publishing) is a forensic analysis of how an army designed over decades to counter a first-class opponent has been allowed to be run into the ground by successive governments since 1990.

Mathew Lyons, writer and critic

Peter Ross’s Upon A White Horse: Journeys in Ancient Britain and Ireland (Headline) is a subtle and evocative exploration of our search for meaning in the ancient British and Irish landscapes. Lucid, profound and moving, it is his best book. I found Anne Sebba’s The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (W&N) hauntingly powerful. Sebba handles the complex, morally nuanced testimonies with consummate skill, in the process restoring dignity, life, and humanity amidst the horror. A remarkable book. Tiffany Jenkins’s Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life (Pan Macmillan) traces the evolution of privacy since the Reformation. Thoughtful, learned and perceptive, it is packed with insight and has important things to say about the present moment.

Rob Macaire, Former British Ambassador to Iran

I loved Tim Willasey-Wilsey’s The Spy and the Devil: The untold story of the MI6 agent who penetrated Hitler’s inner circle (John Blake Publishing), which tells the extraordinary history of an MI6 agent who got very close to Hitler. But it also captures brilliantly the tail-end of a period when national identities in Europe were still fluid. The protagonist is a Balt who can pass as a German, Russian, Frenchman or Englishman – he fights for Britain in the First World War and makes his life in England, but is able to penetrate Hitler’s inner circle.

But the book I enjoyed most this year is This is for Everyone (Pan Macmillan) by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. The background to the early days of computing and the internet, told through his personal and family history, is interesting, but the magic of the book is his thinking through the decades about the benefits and societal impact of the web. His work has moved on to a passionate campaign for people to be able to own their own data, upending the exploitative model of the big tech companies. The book is worth reading for the sheer thoughtfulness and humanity of the author – an antidote to the hubris of the ‘tech bro’ fraternity.

George Magnus, author of Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy

Tim Bouverie’s Allies At War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler (Penguin) throws the spotlight on the triangular relationships that Churchill, FDR and Stalin had with one another throughout the Second World War, using interesting primary sources and archives, and revealing how their interactions evolved, and would shape the post-war order. The history is well known of course, the details not as much, and this book invites readers not just to a front row seat of the big three powers, but also the treatment and fate of France, Poland, Greece, and China among others. The far more contemporary and topical Chokepoints: How the Global Economy became a Weapon of War (Elliott & Thompson) by Edward Fishman raises the curtain on the international usage of sanctions and export controls, now commonplace in today’s fragmenting world, and their role in foreign and commercial policies. The United States, China, Russia and Iran all figure prominently.

Sumantra Maitra, author of The Sources of Russian Aggression

Emma Ashford’s First Among Equals: U.S. Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World (Yale University Press), coins the phrase ‘unbalanced multipolarity’, an appropriate description of the emergent lopsided order, not dissimilar to a post-Napoleonic Europe. It is thought provoking, and raises a few questions for middle powers, who are trying to find ways to navigate an order, where conquest, imperialism, and spheres of influences have returned. A similar theme is explored in The Return of Geopolitics and Imperial Conflict: Understanding the New World Disorder (Springer) – the clue is in the name – by Francesco M. Bongiovanni. Aside from those, I have been reading a lot about the Ottoman empire, and have recently re-read Marc David Baer’s The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs (Basic Books), often unfairly maligned by the far-right, but a remarkable book and template for students of history, on how to actually successfully run a multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan empire.

Alec Marsh, author of Cut and Run

One book I really could not put down this year was Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War (William Collins) by Roger Moorhouse, an astonishingly vivid military history from the other side and one that brought understanding and compassion to the party for good measure. From fiction, I loved Dan Jones’s Lion Hearts (Bloomsbury), the final action-packed instalment in his blood-and-profanity drenched trilogy set against the backdrop of the Hundred Years War. For wartime spies, Alex Gerlis’s The Second Traitor (Canelo) excelled in glorious treachery.

Jenny McCartney, journalist

The absorbing detail and ambitious scope of the evolutionary biologist Max Telford’s The Tree of Life: Solving Science’s Greatest Puzzle (John Murray) charts a scholarly but highly readable journey through the four-billion-year history of every species on earth, and the curious characters – in every sense – who probed the connections between them. There’s a different kind of road trip in the beautifully written Booker-shortlisted novel The Rest of Our Lives (Faber) by Ben Markovits, in which the middle-aged protagonist tries to navigate some way out of a landscape of nagging dissatisfaction. And Jonathan Freedland’s account of high-society Germans who secretly resisted Hitler in The Traitors Circle: The Forgotten Rebels Who Resisted the Third Reich (John Murray) is constructed like a thriller but has all the poignancy and punch of a true story.

Andrew Monaghan, author of Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War

There are plenty of books out there on AI, but I enjoyed Anthony King’s AI, Automation and War: The Rise of a Military-Tech Complex (Princeton University Press): a sociologist’s concise, clear introduction to the military applications of new technology and their implications for strategy and decision making. Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints: How the Global Economy Became a Weapon of War (Elliott & Thompson) puts all this into the broader context of the contest for control over advanced microchip technology and critical energy supply chains. Together, they make for more questions than answers.

Fitzroy Morrissey, author of A Short History of Islamic Thought

I was pleased to see the appearance this year of the book version of Alec Ryrie’s 2022 Bampton Lectures, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It (Reaktion). Ryrie, a historian of the Reformation, argues provocatively that whereas a century ago ‘the most potent moral figure in Western society was Jesus Christ’, that role is now ascribed to Adolf Hitler, the evil of Nazism having come to define our sense of right and wrong. Yet the ‘age of Hitler’ too, Ryrie argues, is now coming to an end, as Western societies increasingly lack any form of coherent moral framework. That last point was famously made by the late Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued that the problem of moral decline could be solved by a return to Aristotle via Aquinas.

The most original book I read in my own field of Islamic Studies this year, Companionship and Virtue in Classical Sufism: The Contribution of al-Sulamī (I.B. Tauris) by Jason Welle, insightfully brought MacIntyre’s theories of virtue, practice, and tradition into conversation with one of the most important theorists of mystical Islam.

Equally gripping, though for very different reasons, was Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Penguin), which is not only the most readable and comprehensive history of Muslim slavery ever published, but also manages to be deeply humane without ever lapsing into moralizing presentism.

This year saw the 1700^th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Of the books published to mark the occasion, Jane Williams’ Giver of Life: The Holy Spirit in the Creed and Christian Life Today (SPCK) particularly stood out as theologically and spiritually enriching. As for secular religion, Scyld Berry is perhaps our most brilliant – and certainly the most prolific – living cricket writer. 500 Declared: The Joys of Covering 500 Cricket Tests (Bloomsbury) is a precious account of fifty years of writing about the highest form of the greatest game.

Nicholas Morton, author of Mongol Storm

There have been a lot of really good history books published this year in the fields of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern history, covering the Medieval and Early Modern periods. One top contender is A Crusader’s Death and Life in Acre (Cornell University Press) by Anne E. Lester and Laura K. Morreale. This offers an insightful exploration into the little-known sources for the last days of the crusader Eudes of Nevers, son of the duke of Burgundy (d.1266). It also provides further studies and sources on related topics.

Another is Si Sheppard’s panoramic overview of the Ottoman Empire’s early centuries, Crescent Dawn: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and the Making of the Modern Age (Osprey). Covering war and diplomacy spanning many continents, and encompassing the policies and perspectives of many different civilisations, this book is extremely thought-provoking while also being a real page-turner.

George Owers, author of The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain

Bijan Omrani’s God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England (Swift Press) brought out the myriad ways in which England’s culture, politics, literature and very identity are intimately bound up with our Christian past with style and erudition: I greatly enjoyed it. On a similar note, I also loved Fergus Butler-Gallie’s Twelve Churches: an Unlikely Story of the Buildings that Made Christianity (Hodder & Stoughton), a rich and unconventional history of Christianity, and Cosima Gillhammer’s Light on Darkness: The Untold Story of the Liturgy (Reaktion), which illustrated the extraordinary power and resonance of the western liturgical tradition. A more than honourable mention also goes to David Hendon’s entertaining history of snooker, Pots of Gold: A History of Snooker (Swift Press).

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

In a 2019 article, The New York Times infamously asked: ‘Is it time Gauguin got cancelled?’ In it, nearly everyone concurred, nodding gravely, that yes, it was high time the rascal, for want of a better term, be cancelled. And then, Sue Prideaux, like Inspector Clouseau, went on the case. After thorough research, she produced Wild Thing, A Life of Paul Gauguin (Faber & Faber), a superb investigation and exhilarating narrative about the stockbroker-turned-artist who lost everything, his family, his health and his fortune, in his quest for truth and art. His time in the tropics, Tahiti in particular, is examined with nuance and depth. And while it is true that Gauguin submitted to local customs by accepting the gift of teenage girls as partners, the man was not only the monster that today’s terse white notices on museum walls would have you believe. As so often, the reality is far more complex than the simplified version we might prefer in 2025. Thank heaven for Sue Prideaux and her balanced account of a wild life lived at the height of the Belle Epoque.

Marc Polymeropoulos, former CIA senior intelligence service officer

Tim Weiner’s The Mission: The CIA in the 21st Century (William Collins) took the intelligence world by storm, not only because of the extraordinary sourcing and feel that Weiner seemingly walked the halls of Langley or the retiree haunts in Mclean, Virginia gathering his material (an admission here, I was quoted on the record several times in the book), but more so as it chronicled in great detail some of the agency’s public failures and greatest successes since 9/11. Love it or hate it (or a combination of both), it provoked a great deal of discussion amongst the national security set.  David McCloskey too made waves, with his latest spy novel The Persian (W.W Norton and Company).  Highlighting Mossad’s unique tradecraft in the shadow war with Iran, McCloskey hits another home run in describing the actual feel of espionage operations. Former case officers like myself have celebrated McCloskey’s writing, as getting our old world just right.

Cath Pound, arts journalist

Frances Wilson’s elegant biography of Muriel Spark, Electric Spark: the Enigma of Dame Muriel (Bloomsbury) focuses on the drama of her early years – marriage to a violent paranoiac, divorce, poverty, love affairs and a dramatic conversion to Catholicism – and shows how these experiences provided the seedbed for her spikily original novels. Like many others, I found Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (Persephone Books) compelling and disturbing in equal measure. Written and set during the rise of Nazism it shows with terrifying clarity how quickly extremism can take hold among ordinary people in economically troubled times. Its unnerving parallels with our own era are impossible to ignore.

David Priess, author of The President’s Book of Secrets

A horizon-widening favourite this year was Laura Spinney’s splendid exploration of the origin and spread of Indo-European languages, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (HarperCollins). Borrowing from recent developments in fields ranging from linguistics to archaeology to genetics to ethnography, Spinney writes a powerful story that had me looking at both maps and dictionaries with fresh eyes. I also deeply enjoyed Phillips O’Brien’s War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why (Penguin), a refreshing new take on the sources of national power, packed with challenges to readers’ assumptions about what makes countries ‘great’ in the international system.

Michael Prodger, art critic

Elizabeth Goldring’s Holbein: Renaissance Master (Yale University Press) is an immaculate piece of scholarship wrapped up in the most handsome of volumes. Goldring revisits the sources and archives to present an unromanticised version of the painter who defined the Tudor court for subsequent ages. Her Holbein was as talented at negotiating the deadly waters swum by Henrician favourites as with a brush and she stresses that, above all, art was a business in which inspiration was less valued than industry. In Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found (Penguin), Andrew Graham-Dixon plausibly places the painter not as an enigmatic onlooker but deeply connected to the religious and philosophical concerns of his times.

Joshua Rovner, author of Strategy and Grand Strategy

International politics often plays out beneath the surface of everyday diplomacy. This was the case in the twentieth century, as great powers built rival intelligence agencies, and it remains the case today. Jon R. Lindsay peers into this murky world in Age of Deception: Cybersecurity as Secret Statecraft (Cornell University Press). Domestic politics, by contrast, is often a story of charismatic leadership out in the open. Charisma is a familiar sensation, but the concept is hard to pin down. Molly Worthen proves up to the task in Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Penguin Random House).

Samuel Rubinstein, writer and historian 

The book which has made the greatest impression on me this year is Justin Marozzi’s extraordinary Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Penguin). The book takes up a challenging and politically sensitive subject with commendable sobriety, precision, and flair. It is worth reading not only to learn a great deal about the past, but also to shine a light on ongoing realities which we would often prefer to push out of mind.

Gareth Russell, historian 

Toby Wilkinson’s The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fantastic piece of history, both epic and intimate. The chapters alternate between an exploration of one aspect of everyday life in Egypt and then a chapter on the royal family, who were a dichotomy of murderous and magnificent. Anyone who can make the uniform naming of the Ptolemaic pharaohs comprehensible has my admiration.

Colin Shindler, author of A Forever War: Israel, Palestine and the Struggles for Statehood

Shaun Walker’s book The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West (Profile) tells the history of Russia’s deep cover spies from the October Revolution in 1917 until the present day. Inspired originally by ideology and idealism and today by an unquestioning nationalism, it is remarkable how individuals become human chameleons.

The centrepiece was the discovery and arrest of the all-American, fresh-faced Foleys (Elena Vavilova, and Andrei Bezrukov) in 2010. They were planted in Canada by the KGB in the 1980s and reactivated by Putin’s people in the US after the fall of the Soviet Union. Their teenage sons only accepted the dramatic truth when they were shown photographs of their parents in their youth – wearing KGB uniforms. A book of revelations – and good detective work.

Brendan Simms, historian

‘One of of our most important priorities’, the British Minister announced, ‘is to make a fresh start to Britain’s relations with the rest of the EU and draw a line under the recent past’. These words could have been spoken immediately after the United Kingdom joined the EEC in 1973, or after the 2024 general election, but in fact they were spoken in 1997 by the New Labour Minister for Europe Doug Henderson, after Tony Blair was swept to power by an earlier landslide. They are to be found in Tom McTague’s rightly celebrated Between the waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (Pan Macmillan). It is a much-needed reminder of the complexities and continuities of Britain’s most important and enduring issue. Above all, the author has penned a ‘purple’ work which readers of both main political hues can read feeling that their viewpoint has been respected and the story fairly told. I was also both engrossed and appalled by the persuasive dystopia outlined in Carlo Masala’s If Russia Wins: A Scenario (Atlantic Books).

Max Skjönsberg, author of The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain

My book of the year is Georgios Varouxakis’s The West: The History of an Idea (Princeton University Press), which traces the modern idea of ‘the West’ as a socio-political – rather than geographic – concept, and as the name for a political association based on cultural commonality. The West is a monumental achievement of scholarship, whose chief contribution is the decentering of imperial and racial paradigms, which have become politicised and turned into stale orthodoxies. As a historian of 18th-century party politics, I must also recommend George Owers’s The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain (Constable), a learned and entertaining narrative history of one of the most consequential topics and episodes in modern political history.

James Snell, journalist

A year after the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, we have begun to see the first of what will be a large, otiose crop of retrospective histories. Rime Allaf’s It Started in Damascus: How the Long Syrian Revolution Reshaped Our World (Hurst) is among the best. It shows rather than tells what it was like to live in a society modelled on Ceausescu’s Romania and the North Korea owned by the Kim family. Like Kim Il-sung, Hafez al-Assad (Assad père) was prematurely styled an ‘eternal leader.’ William Boyd’s The Predicament (Penguin) – the continuation of his series on travel writer and reluctant spy, Gabriel Dax – is reassuringly accomplished.

Oliver Soden, author of Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward

It’s been a bumper year for literary correspondence. In what must count as one of the great editorial feats of our time, John Haffenden this year reached Volume Ten of The Letters of T. S. Eliot (Faber), which chronicles the poet’s life during the Second World War. So frequent were the night-time bombing raids that, Eliot admitted, ‘I have taken […] to sleeping in my teeth’. From such details can the past be thrillingly resuscitated. William Golding: The Faber Letters (Faber) was a reminder of a mighty novelist, as was John Updike: A Life in Letters (Hamish Hamilton), which contains Updike’s usual mixture – embarrassing, ravishing – of prose both earthy and celestial. The Letters of Muriel Spark (Virago) are to be spread over two books and Volume I made me eager for more. This year even brought us The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh University Press): over 1,400 newly discovered or hitherto unpublished documents. Riches, all – only you must be rich to purchase them. The Eliot and the Golding editions will each set you back £60, and the Woolf costs £195. Still, with the literary world crumbling about our ears these are considerable and treasurable publications, gathering the last remnants from the world of letters.

Guy Stagg, author of The World Within

Most people spend most of their time working, but contemporary fiction largely ignores the office. This is what makes Alexander Starritt’s Drayton & Mackenzie (Swift Press) so thrilling: a big, comic novel about management consultancy, the Financial Crisis and two entrepreneurs building a tidal energy start-up. It’s a brilliant tale of ambition and male friendship set against the backdrop of this century’s economic turmoil. I also admired Megan Hunter’s Days of Light (Pan Macmillan) a graceful and formally daring novel about Bloomsbury, Modernism, and – much to my surprise and delight – belief.

DJ Taylor, author of Orwell: The Life

I was thoroughly beguiled by Stefan Collini’s exhaustive yet highly amusing Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain (Oxford University Press). If literary culture still ran to mage-like F.R. Leavis figures, then Professor Collini would be their prime ornament.

Ian Thomson, writer

Zachary Leader, the pre-eminent biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, produced his best work yet with Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker (Harvard University Press). From start to finish I was captivated by this account of the American scholar Richard Ellmann and the making of his 1959 life of James Joyce. Another Dublin-born wit, Oscar Wilde, found an ideal chronicler in his grandson Merlin Holland, whose After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal (Europa Editions) considered Wilde’s posthumous obloquy and eventual rehabilitation. A quite exceptional book.

Phil Tinline, author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain

The inside story of how Britain’s Labour Party finally got back into power is expertly chronicled in Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer (Bodley Head). Its authors Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund are not only journalists with unrivalled contacts. They also know how to do that thing the Labour government apparently cannot: tell a compelling story.

One way Labour could try to pull that off would be to exercise power so visibly, and with such effect, that its story of transforming the country told itself. Why is that impossible? A clue is provided by the American urban management scholar Marc J. Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress – and How to Bring It Back (Public Affairs). Dunkelman deftly reveals that well-meaning progressives have played a crucial role in blocking their own chances of success. They have been so determined to design systems to stop the state doing bad things, they have stopped it doing good things.

Katie Tobin, critic

My books of this year are a strange and spiky constellation formed of three books from Solvej Balle’s brilliant timeloop septology, On the Calculation of Volume (Faber & Faber); Thomas Pynchon’s Shadow Ticket (Penguin), a shaggy dog noir featuring a missing cheese heiress; Patti Smith’s brilliant new memoir, Bread of Angels (Bloomsbury); and two new translations from Penguin International Writers: Eimear McBride’s paean to 90s London, The City Changes Its Face (Faber & Faber); Tove Ditlevsen’s erudite and tender poetry collection, There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die (Penguin) and Ágota Kristóf’s Haneke-esque short story collection, I Don’t Care (Penguin).

Derek Turner, author, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire

Helm (Faber) by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber) is a novel personifying England’s only named wind, which has coursed down the Eden Valley from the northeast since before the valley existed – an elemental power here diverging from its usual vast indifference to observe all the upheavals below, including the advent of tiny featherless bipeds who sometimes wilt under Helm’s blast, but are bound to its being. Human evolution is also the subject of Jonathan Leaf’s The Primate Myth (Bombardier), which holds out a hope that we are less apelike than we imagine, a self-image which has great significance for our societies.

Duncan Weldon, economic historian

Once upon a time, economists took land seriously. For the classical economists of the nineteenth century, it sat alongside labour and capital as one of the key factors of production. Mike Bird’s The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset (Hodder Press) reminds modern readers that land matters. It is still the single largest component of global wealth and, as Bird convincingly argues, nothing is more important to global finance. Fascinating and engagingly written.

Tim Wigmore’s Test Cricket, A History (Quercus) is an enjoyable and comprehensive run through of almost a century and a half of the game’s highest form, from its Victorian origins to the era of Bazball. A welcome distraction from the Ashes.

Duncan Wheeler, Chair of Spanish Studies, University of Leeds

The bibliography on the Spanish Civil War is vast. It has, however, been a long time since I’ve read anything as original as Jorge Marco’s Paradise in Hell: Alcohol and Drugs in the Spanish Civil War (UWP), fascinating and sad in equal measure. Demystifying the so-called last romantic war, the book is as strong on the historical reconstruction of toxic intake on both sides as it is on how consumption was articulated in relation to complex and often contradictory normative masculine and political identities.

Alexandra Wilson, author of Someone Else’s Music: Opera and the British

Fabrics, like food, were in extremely short supply after the Second World War, but Susan L. Carruthers’ Making Do: Britons and the Refashioning of the Postwar World (Cambridge University Press) is about far more than rationing. This elegantly written material history of the world’s far-from-straightforward emergence from global warfare explores topics as wide-ranging as how to clothe survivors of concentration camps (and impoverished former enemies), tensions over civilian clothing allowances and voluminous new fashions, resentment at a royal wedding dress, and the symbolic power of clothing for victors and losers. If it was a huge logistical effort to get troops home, so too did shipping garments around the world to those in most need require concerted international cooperation.

Eliot Wilson, writer and historian

Original Sin (Penguin) by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson was jaw-dropping: a meticulous and well-sourced dissection of the power of group-think which exposed the worst of politics. Joe Biden’s closest advisers reassured themselves the president was still acute and switched-on for big decisions, transformed secrecy into a virtue and turned on naysayers as traitors. They ignored what everyone else could see, with disastrous results. Gripping and depressing.

In a parallel world, Graydon Carter’s When The Going Was Good (Penguin) told an irresistible tale of a golden age of journalism at Time, Life, Spy and Vanity Fair. Grandiose, glittering, gossipy and arch, exactly as it had to be, and enormous fun from beginning to end.

Muriel Zagha, critic

I spend much of my professional life parsing the many cultural angles of difference between France and Britain, and I enjoyed Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History (Pan Macmillan) in which the historian criss-crosses Britain ‘at the speed of a nineteenth-century stage coach’ on his bike, retracing transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes and pilgrim paths and recreating the process of mapping Britain. A perfect companion piece is Robb’s previous exploration The Discovery of France (Pan Macmillan) which illuminates the ways in which France gradually colonised itself into a centralised nation.

Another highlight was the astonishing Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark (Bloomsbury)  by Frances Wilson – a truly revelatory literary biography. Wilson posits, cosmically, that Spark’s fiction – a succession of slender, subversive novels – should be read chronologically as a coherent single work spanning a single day. She also strips back the strangeness of Spark’s output and the corresponding strangeness of the consciousness that produced it. The artistic temperament of Spark, who may, at some time, have been a spy, was anything but benevolent. It bordered on possession, especially after her conversion to Catholicism. Wilson is also a Jamesian scholar, and fully conversant with what Henry James called ‘the madness of art’.

Vladislav Zubok, author of The World of the Cold War 

Those who now wonder why Eastern Europe no longer gives us the Walesas and the Havels should read Benjamin Nathan’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: the Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement (Princeton University Press). The book explains why global conversation about universal values erupted in such unlikely place as Brezhnev’s Soviet Union, but also why it was a unique phenomenon, never to be replicated in any other parts of the world outside the West. Moving along the timeline, I recommend Stephan Kieninger’s Securing Peace in Europe: Strobe Talbott, NATO, and Russia after the Cold War (Columbia University Press). Distinct from other treatments of that topic, the book depicts the Clinton Administration’s construction of ‘European security architecture’ in 1993-99 as an excessively idealistic strategy that predictably fell short of its design, caught in a welter of intractable contradictions.