The Death of Stalin is by Sheila Fitzpatrick, a pioneer of Soviet history. By homing in on one event, Fitzpatrick manages to pack in an enormous amount of information about the history of the Soviet Union, including how the US approached its Cold War opponent, in less than 100 pages—and that even includes photos. It probably helps to watch the darkly comic Armando Iannucci movie, The Death of Stalin , before reading it, though as Fitzpatrick writes, "not everything about Stalin's death is comic. It had serious implications for his country and the world in the twentieth century and beyond; this book set out to unravel them."
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🏆 Joint winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for History 🏆 Winner of the 2024 Cundill History Prize
In this sweeping, thousand-year history, Kathleen DuVal—a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—offers an overview of the shifting dynamics among more than 500 native peoples before and after the arrival of European colonists. The Wall Street Journal described it as "an essential American history."
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“Augustus the Strong—and I think, if you took the exact translation, he was known as ‘Augustus the Physically Strong,’ which implied that brain power didn’t have much to do with it—was a man who fought first and thought second. He was a bit of a rascal and a warmonger, and a notable fornicator and adulterer who shocked many of his contemporaries. In terms of power politics, he was the Elector of Saxony who forced his way into becoming elected King of Poland, which was an absolute disaster for Poland and for him.” Read more...
The Best Historical Biography: The 2025 Elizabeth Longford Prize
Roy Foster ,
Historian
“It’s an accessible introduction to conflicts across the region, written, according to the author, for readers wanting to understand the complex reality of the Middle East and looking for a place to start. He explains that by conflict he means not just outright wars, but also fraught politics and region-wide disputes. He covers Syria, Libya, Yemen, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Kurdistan and The Gulf as well as The Horn of Africa.” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
Today, Austria is a small country in Central Europe, but for centuries, it was the fulcrum of events going on in Europe, as the Habsburgs led the Holy Roman Empire and later the sprawling, multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is a short (fewer than 250 pages) introduction to the country's entire history.
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“The book is provocative, not only in what it argues about Greece, but what that means for nationalism generally—in particular states forged around the wholesale expulsion of an ethnic or religious group. It’s a very sad story with, as the title of the book suggests, horrible levels of violence.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Early 2025
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“It starts in Nazi Germany with the stories of individuals, illustrating the moral dilemmas of being part of a nation which is doing something utterly evil to some of its own people and to others too. Then there is the utter desolation, the devastation of 1945…Then the next decades, as Trentmann lays them out, are interesting. They are a story of what happens when you, or most of you, have utterly rejected the ideology in which you’ve lived. You’ve painfully reconstructed something which the victors imposed, but which is very different in its embrace of democracy and its obstinate wish to tell truth.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize
Diarmaid MacCulloch ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“For anyone wanting to celebrate female leadership in past centuries, she’s one of the most interesting exemplars. Richard Bassett’s biography is very pro-Maria Theresa (the subtitle is ‘the making of the Austrian Enlightenment’) and you find yourself rooting for her against Frederick the Great and other men of the time, including, at times, her own advisers.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Early 2025
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Also in military history and getting good reviews is The Vietnam War by Geoffrey Wawro. Wawro’s argument is that it was not a fear of the domino effect in Asia or geopolitical calculations that led (and kept) America in Vietnam, but domestic politics: successive leaders did not want to appear weak on Communism. This is what made for a complete lack of strategy and half-heartedness in how the US pursued the war .” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Fall 2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Once you’ve read this book, you can’t sustain complacent cliches about the Western part in the slave trade. The detail is extraordinary. What I found particularly interesting and different was the sense of the commercial dynamic driving it. The story starts with one monopoly company, the Royal African Company, chartered by the English monarchy. It’s based in London but is elbowed out of the way by provincial merchants in Bristol and Liverpool. They create a trade that’s far more profitable because it is much better organized, with absolute cynicism about the subject of the trade: human beings. They’re treated as commodities with advantages and disadvantages. There are the young, the elderly, the weak, the sick, and then there is the absolute prize: healthy young adult males. The essence of the trade is to acquire those assets, sort them out, and get them across the Atlantic with minimum loss, i.e. death.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize
Diarmaid MacCulloch ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“If you like Italy and history, one book that’s a lot of fun is The Shortest History of Italy , by Ross King, author of Brunelleschi’s Dome . In 234 pages, it covers the entire history from Aeneas’s mythical arrival and the founding of Rome to the present. It’s really satisfying to have Italy’s history told as a whole rather than the Roman Empire/Renaissance/Risorgimento etc. as separate history books.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“The Cleopatras by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is about all the queens called Cleopatra: the one most of us know about being, in fact, Cleopatra VII. You learn a lot about Ptolemaic Egypt as well as what was happening further East (the first Cleopatra was from Syria). Very striking is the marriage of brothers to their sisters within the royal family, and why that was seen as a good thing.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Another book that captured my attention was The Roads to Rome by Catherine Fletcher, which looks at the ancient road network across the Roman Empire but also across the centuries since they were built. It’s a travelogue, kind of: you join her going around Rome—including to the Via Appia Antica where, even today, the giant stones continue to give an idea of what parts of this 100,000-kilometer network of roads once looked like—and then out across 14 countries. It’s an account of how the roads captured people’s imagination, from writers like Goethe to dictators like Hitler.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“It’s about the period of American history between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the beginning of the American Civil War. (Note that in the UK, the book’s subtitle is: ‘Abraham Lincoln and America’s Road to Civil War’: this is not a story we are as familiar with on this side of the Atlantic).” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“It’s about the battle for spices in what is now Indonesia and focuses on the rivalry between Spain and Portugal over 60 years in the 16th century. That spices should be worth more than their weight in gold and prompt people to risk death exploring treacherous routes to get to them is a compelling story and Crowley tells it well.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction Books of Mid-2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
The Eastern Front is the second book in British military historian Nick Lloyd's trilogy about the First World War (the first book was about the Western Front). The book is around 500 pages long but it's highly readable. In it, Lloyd looks at the 'greater' Eastern front: from Riga in the Baltic down to Thessaloniki in the Aegean. This is a less well-known story to English readers than the battlefields of France and Belgium, and the focus on the war from the point of view of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires makes for very interesting reading. Russia lost more than 2.3 million soldiers in the war; the Austro-Hungarians over 1.1 million, only to collapse in 1918—with, as Lloyd writes in the preface, "the disintegration of both empires creating a human catastrophe of almost unimaginable proportions."
Note: if you're interested in reading about the Eastern Front in English, see also books by Alexander Watson, such as The Fortress.
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Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City is a new history of Venice by Dennis Romano, a historian at Syracuse University who has authored a number of books on the city. It's a long book (just over 600 pages) but covers the entire history of the city, from its mythic beginnings, through to the present with sections on medieval times, the Renaissance, 'old regime' Venicee as well as modern and contemporary Venice.
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“Pétain had been the hero of Verdun, a great figure, but he was being tried for treason for signing the armistice with the Nazi regime and being the leader of the Vichy regime in France. He was on trial for his life, accused of collusion with Nazi Germany, and the verdict wasn’t much in doubt. It’s about more than the fate of a particular person—it’s a judgment on these four years of French history. It was newly liberated France’s first opportunity to look back on what it had done and how it had come to this. It’s a terrible account of moral ambivalence, and what you should do when faced with a conquering army. France is asking itself what it could have done, faced with total defeat by Hitler.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize
Susan Brigden ,
Historian
“Gulbadan was the daughter of Babur, founder of the Mughal Empire, and the aunt of Akbar, sometimes called ‘the Great.’ Gulbadan was born in Kabul, ended up in Akbar’s harem in Agra, and eventually went on a trip to Saudi Arabia, to visit the holy places of Islam. Lal manages to recreate all this beautifully.” Read more...
Nonfiction Books to Look Out for in Early 2024
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Revolusi is an epic work, but it is a rather overdue one, because Indonesia is a hugely important country that has been very much neglected. The case that he is making is not only that we should care more about it because it’s a large country, with the world’s largest Muslim population etc. He also argues that the anti-colonial struggle in Indonesia was the first anti-colonial struggle. It triggered and set the tone for a whole series of anti-colonial struggles thereafter. The conference at Bandung in 1955 was the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement—another theme which is very much around at the moment. It’s time that we looked at the role that Indonesia played in shaping post-colonial thinking.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Isabel Hilton ,
Journalist
“Irene Vallejo is a classicist and a novelist. She combines academic research and creative writing to produce a highly accessible book about the ancient world. The book deals with how, in the Mediterranean region, books were produced, cherished, read, burnt, and destroyed. Books are part of our lives now, but we can’t take them for granted. The book explores the history of libraries, specifically the famous library in Alexandria. In a nutshell, Vallejo explores how the ancient world invented tablets, papyrus, and later books. We learn about how Athens and Rome wrote and preserved the word.” Read more...
The 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding
Madawi Al-Rasheed ,
Anthropologist
“In 1615, Thomas Roe arrived as an ambassador to the Mughal Emperor from the court of King James I of England and VI of Scotland, hung around for three years, and really didn’t achieve anything. He was constantly ill. He misunderstood customs. He bigged himself up in his own mind but, very revealingly, left no trace in the diaries of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, whom Roe presents as a bosom buddy and hugely impressed by him. Clearly, Jahangir wasn’t. Roe was a bedraggled person from a puzzlingly faraway country with which the emperor had very little dealings and not much interest.” Read more...
The Best History Books of 2024: The Wolfson History Prize
Diarmaid MacCulloch ,
Theologians & Historians of Religion
“It’s very vivid. He’s looking at the great revolutions of 1848, from Budapest and Vienna and Galicia and Moldavia to France and Milan and Sicily…He takes you to the particular sufferings of the peasantry and the townspeople—but finds that economic suffering may be partly a cause, but it’s not a sufficient cause of these revolutions. He’s looking to politics and political ideas…I read on, agog. It’s just full of wonders and surprises and particular people with whom you feel sympathy and the bravery of the participants in all this.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Duff Cooper Prize
Susan Brigden ,
Historian
“Other biographies out these past three months include Ramesses the Great by Toby Wilkinson, the Cambridge Egyptologist…Both rulers spent a lot of time and energy building their reputations, which may be why we’re reading about them three millennia…later” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“Messalina, the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, was not so lucky, going down in the history books as a debauched adulteress. In Messalina: A Story of Empire, Slander and Adultery, PhD student Honor Cargill-Martin makes a valiant attempt to restore her reputation, though it’s hard going as little is known about her, beyond that she was a young (perhaps very young) bride.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early Summer 2023
Sophie Roell ,
Journalist
“There’s a brilliant book by Katja Hoyer called Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, which analyses the impression that the West has of East Germans at that time. They were viewed as being miserable and desperate, and wanting to flee. Both Siblings and Beyond the Wall depict the East Germans in a more nuanced manner. The GDR was the reality in which they were born, got married, and died. They had hook-ups and rubbish jobs.” Read more...
The best books on Being Average
Eleanor Ross ,
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