Resistance & Rebellion

The Middle East scholar tells us what to read if we’re to understand where upheaval in the Arab world came from, and where it’s going.

The journalist and author tells us what happens when protest meets pop music, which book inspired Springsteen and where hip-hop is most potent today

Hazareesingh's book choices include de Gaulle’s "very readable" war diaries. In books of condolences after the leader's death, people wrote things like, "Goodbye Charles, you were greater than Napoleon"

The historian and author chooses five books on de Gaulle and the Resistance. He says the British tried to veto de Gaulle’s famous 1940 speech from London calling on the French to stand up to German occupation

In August 1979, Timothy Knatchbull and his family went out in a boat off the coast of Ireland. Neither his grandparents or his twin brother would return from the IRA bomb attack that shocked Britain and the world. Here he talks about books that helped him better understand 'the Troubles,' and his own book, From a Clear Blue Sky, about his own journey to come to terms with that happened that bank holiday weekend.

Countries do have to come to terms with their own history, and it's unhealthy that China has not yet come to terms with the Cultural Revolution, argues the West's leading scholar of the period, Roderick MacFarquhar. He chooses the best five books on the Cultural Revolution.

Professor David Waddington tells us why riots are neither irrational nor mere hooliganism, and says the approach police take is critical in determining how a protest develops

British novelist and poet Adam Foulds discusses fading empire in the context of Kenya, including the horrors of British gulags, the Mau Mau uprising, and the social deprivation endured by the Kikuyu.

Five recommendations from the BBC’s Central Europe correspondent, who witnessed the collapse of Yugoslavia, popular uprisings in Bulgaria and Serbia, and the transformation of non-violent to violent resistance in Kosovo

For anybody wanting to go into politics a mastery of the French Revolution is an enormous help and a knowledge of history essential, says Peregrine Worsthorne, the columnist and former editor of Britain’s Sunday Telegraph. He recommends the best books on the French Revolution, both for and against.