The interwar years were as bewildering as the present
Alwyn Turner’s new history reassures us that the past is not, as many imagine, any cosier or more patriotic than…
ByHistory books
Discover all the New Statesman’s latest articles and reviews of history books. Here you can find expert opinion on the best reads for 2022.
Recovering the lost history of Gaza
Decades of conflict and displacement have obliterated the history of one of the world’s oldest human settlements
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How not to talk about capitalism
The more it penetrates our daily lives, the less we seem to understand the “system that runs the world”
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Islam is part of European history
Historians’ dismissal of the continent’s Muslim legacy is helping to feed contemporary divisions
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Who killed the social housing dream?
A new history of Britain’s tower blocks reveals the ways architecture and ideology have combined to ensure residents are always…
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The price of revolution
Jason Burke chronicles how radical activists in the 1970s found violent new ways to pursue their causes
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An Afghan hotel that has seen it all
Lyse Doucet’s The Finest Hotel in Kabul is a vivid and personal display of Afghanistan’s turbulent political history
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The liberating power of vodou
Slave risings across the Caribbean, argues Sudhir Hazareesingh’s new book, drew less on Enlightenment ideas than African spirit lore
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Christopher Marlowe’s stage fright
Stephen Greenblatt’s attempt to reconstruct the playwright’s story is brilliant – but Marlowe the man remains a mystery
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The struggle for Greenland
As Elizabeth Buchanan’s new history shows, Donald Trump is not the first foreigner to covet the Arctic territory. But his…
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Christianity’s political ascent
Alice Roberts’ history of the late Roman empire dispels the notion of a faith for the poor and oppressed –…
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Lord Byron’s sex education
This summer, take the epic satire Don Juan to the beach.
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English cricket’s greatest record
One wet summer over a century ago, Gilbert Jessop gave the country something to be cheerful about.
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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, bungled…
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Samuel Pepys’s diary of a somebody
Kate Loveman’s history of a national treasure preserves Pepys’s charm while revealing a discomfiting historical world.
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Xi Jinping’s daddy issues
The Chinese president’s concept of power was forged by the suffering of his revolutionary father, Xi Zhongxun.
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How terror came home on 7/7
In Three Weeks in July, Adam Wishart and James Nally show how the Islamist bomb attacks of July 2005 changed…
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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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Have we reached peak humanity?
Johan Norberg’s history of civilisation is an impressive conceptual achievement – but it has little to say about our own…
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How the world stopped Hitler
The Second World War was not just won on the battlefield, but in seemingly marginal regions from Ireland to Iraq.
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