• The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction - A Thousand Threads: A Memoir by Neneh Cherry
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction - The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction - Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction - Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter by Clare Mulley
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction - What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean by Helen Scales
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction - Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Women’s Prize for Nonfiction, recommended by Kavita Puri

Now in its second year, the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction aims to highlight the very best new nonfiction books written by women. We asked Kavita Puri, the journalist and chair of this year’s judging panel, to talk us through the shortlist: from a gentle lockdown animal memoir to a thrilling true story of a WW2 secret agent.

  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize - Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy by Mark Gilbert
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize - Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize - Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 by Noel Malcolm
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize - Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
  • The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize - Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin, and the Battle Between Science and Religion by Michael Taylor

The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize, recommended by Minoo Dinshaw

It’s a nonfiction book prize that values “style, rigour, argument, meatiness, readability, freshness, oddity and individuality,” says Minoo Dinshaw, author of Friends in Youth and one of this year’s judges. He introduces the six brilliant books that made the shortlist of this year’s Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize, from the history of post-World War II Italy to the disputes caused by the discovery of dinosaur fossils.  

  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruins of Empire by Howard Amos
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement by Benjamin Nathans
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko
  • The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize - ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate by Donald Rayfield

The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Gulnaz Sharafutdinova

The Pushkin House Book Prize is awarded annually for a nonfiction book that encourages “public understanding and intelligent debate about Russia.” Political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the six fantastic books shortlisted in 2025, illuminating different parts of Russia’s politics and history — from the memoir of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024, to a history of the Russian Orthodox Church and its role in propping up political regimes from the Middle Ages to the present.

  • The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing - At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China by Edward Wong
  • The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing - Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum
  • The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing - Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence by Mishal Husain
  • The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing - Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina
  • The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing - The Baton and the Cross: Russia's Church from Pagans to Putin by Lucy Ash
  • The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing - The Coming Storm: A Journey into the Heart of the Conspiracy Machine by Gabriel Gatehouse

The Best Politics Books of 2025: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing

From conspiracy theories wreaking havoc in US politics to poignant memoirs of painful events around the globe, the books shortlisted for the 2025 Orwell Prizes, the UK’s most prestigious awards for writing about politics, have been announced. These are the eight books shortlisted for the ‘Orwell Prize for Political Writing,’ awarded annually to a nonfiction book. The comments are from the judging panel, chaired by UK diplomat and former ambassador to the US Kim Darroch.

  • The best books on Austria - Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends by Lonnie Johnson
  • The best books on Austria - The Siege of Vienna: The Last Great Trial Between Cross & Crescent by John Stoye
  • The best books on Austria - Maria Theresa by Edward Crankshaw
  • The best books on Austria - Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World by Richard Cockett
  • The best books on Austria - The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
  • The best books on Austria - The Capuchin Crypt (aka The Emperor's Tomb) by Joseph Roth

The best books on Austria, recommended by Nicholas Parsons

Today, the Republic of 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 multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire—until it all fell apart after World War I. Nicholas Parsons, author of the excellent The Shortest History of Austria, introduces us to books and novels that bring to life the history of a political, intellectual, and cultural powerhouse.

  • The Best 19th-Century Books - Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  • The Best 19th-Century Books - Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
  • The Best 19th-Century Books - The Heart of Mid-Lothian by Walter Scott
  • The Best 19th-Century Books - Villette by Charlotte Brontë
  • The Best 19th-Century Books - Scarlet and Black by Stendhal
  • The Best 19th-Century Books - Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

The Best 19th-Century Books

The 19th century was a golden age for books, with the flourishing of great realist novels, as well as epic adventure stories and what would turn out to be distinct genres, including sci-fi, horror, and mystery. It was also an important time for the history of ideas, with the publication of key books that would change the world, and how we view it, forever.