Sophie Roell, Editor

The weapons and tactics of war may change, but the human experience of battle does not, argues Iain MacGregor, author of Battle: The Moments that Transformed Warfare from Ancient Greece to Ukraine. He highlights five books that bring that experience to life, from the ordinary soldier at Agincourt to the brutal realities of the Pacific War and the Falklands.

When Jenny Evans was writing her memoir, Don’t Let It Break You, Honey, she read lots of other memoirs to figure out how best to go about it—studying how their authors shaped a life into a story, recreated the past and navigated the line between memory and fact. Here, she shares the five memoirs that taught her the most.

For all its rugged individualism, frontier violence, and capitalist churn, there’s always a search for grace in America, argues Don Watson, author of the excellent The Shortest History of the United States of America. As the country celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, we asked him for books to read to learn more about it.

While often associated with populism and economic dissatisfaction, the success of the MAGA movement in the United States is also rooted in a distinctive set of ideas about culture, identity, authority, and national renewal. Political theorist Laura Field recommends five books that explore the movement’s intellectual challenge to liberal democracy, from the work of Carl Schmitt in 1930s Germany to cultural shifts in evangelical Christianity today.

With hindsight, it seems inevitable that the Allies would eventually defeat the Axis powers in World War II, but at the time it seemed anything but. Tim Bouverie, author of the prize-winning Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler, talks us through some of the best nonfiction books about the war and the alliances that led to Allied victory.

The Allied army that ultimately won against the Japanese in Burma was one of the largest in the world, with a million men under command. Military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson, whose grandfather fought in the Burma campaign, talks us through the best books to understand more about it, from big-picture strategic overviews to heart-wrenching memoirs and firsthand accounts of soldiers who were there.

With its music and fashion and the ever-present threat of nuclear war, the 1980s are ripe for fiction, argues Eleanor Anstruther, author of Fallout, a novel about the decades-long protest against cruise missiles at Greenham Common. She recommends five of her favourites—including two Booker Prize winners—from the excesses of Thatcherite London to a coming of age on the slagheaps of Glasgow.

Five Books is all about human expertise—speaking to people, in person or via Zoom, about the best books in their field. Once a year, however, we make an exception and turn to a non-human interviewee: ChatGPT, to ask for its recommendations on the best books about artificial intelligence. Here are the five books the AI chose in 2026, along with its recommendation for the single book to read if you were to choose just one.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” wrote L.P. Hartley. The question is: in what ways? Historian Ian Mortimer talks us through five influential books that shed light on daily life in medieval England—from monastic communities and great households to the gruelling lives of the peasantry.

The best spy fiction combines the genre’s thrills and intrigue with profound moral and existential questions about what it means to be human, argues novelist Alex Preston. Here, he discusses five of his favourite literary spy novels, ranging from colonial Vietnam to contemporary London.