The best non-fiction to read this year
From memoirs by politicians to biographies of poets, this will be a year in which life-writing abounds
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Ian Thomson
Ian Thomson is a journalist and author whose books include Primo Levi: The Elements of a Life.
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The politics of murder
The history of assassinations, as Simon Ball points out in his book Death to Order, is one of myth-making,…
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How a Moscow archivist exposed the KGB, file by file
Gordon Corera’s account of the audacious counter-intelligence operative Vasili Mitrokhin is non-fiction that reads like a spy thriller.
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How cities change at night
Matthew Beaumont’s The Walker asks how the nocturnal metropolis differs from the city in daylight.
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Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season: a dyspeptic vision of Mexico today
This international Booker Prize-shortlisted “masterwork” is structurally adventurous, and rife with narco-style violence and expletive-heavy prose.
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The voice of the Jewish East End
The neglected postwar fiction of Alexander Baron.
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From Cuba to Greeneland: Graham Greene’s long relationship with the island republic
The story behind Our Man in Havana reveals a life tied up with espionage and betrayal.
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The return of the F-word: neo-fascism in 2018
Vainglorious sexual antics, boastfulness and scorn for democracy: has the blackshirt spirit returned in Donald Trump?
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Italy’s salvation will not come with a sleek and smarmy redeemer like Berlusconi
The 81-year-old politician is symptomatic of the “anti-elite” animus now affecting much of the western world.
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