The 21st century has seen an explosion of feminist activism, with movements like #MeToo and the Women’s March. Accompanying this heightened attention to the lived experience of women, several extraordinary books have been published. Writer, feminist, critic and broadcaster Bidisha selects the best ones.

Systems thinking is key to figuring out how relationships work, says Mira Kirshenbaum, psychotherapist and clinical director of the Chestnut Hill Institute. She chooses the best books to help us understand modern relationship therapy.

Why has anti-Semitism been such a problem down the ages, and why does it persist today? The emeritus director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, recommends the best books to better understand anti-Semitism.

The friend and adviser to Martin Luther King Jr, who contributed to the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, tells us how great speeches come about and what they can mean.

The long-time foreign correspondent and author of books on Zaire, Eritrea and Kenya tells us where to turn for engaging foreign perspectives on Africa. She picks the best books on Africa.

PJ O’Rourke talks Swift, Huxley, Orwell and Waugh and says we now live in the world of 1984 but, instead of being a horror show, a television that looks back at you is just a pain in the ass

Inner-city crime is a matter of deprivation not race. It comes from a street culture that respects extreme violence, says Gavin Knight, an author who spent two years among British gangs and the police units covering them

Russian literature specialist Michael Nicholson, Emeritus Fellow at University College, Oxford, talks us through a range of books on the Soviet dissident and winner of the Nobel literature prize, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The former editor of Time magazine and CEO of CNN talks to us about the life and work of Albert Einstein, including the bet with his wife that left her with his Nobel Prize money and him with a divorce.

Robert Chandler, one of the best known translators of Russian literature, recommends some of his favourite tales of Soviet Russia. There’s the one about a dog in space and the one about the Soviet café which stocked nothing but champagne and Mars bars…

Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky recommends the best books about one of the most important economists of all time, John Maynard Keynes.

European poker champion, author and presenter, Victoria Coren Mitchell, talks us through her library of the best books on poker.

Via five engrossing memoirs, the Zimbabwe-born journalist Georgina Godwin talks wistfully about her country; amongst the older generation, she says, there is a feeling that Rhodesia was sold down the river by Britain and things needn’t have turned out the way they did.