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History books

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  • Thursday, 28 September, 2023
    The best books of the week
    Return of the Caesars: the making of emperors and dictators

    Autocracy is something today’s democracies thought they had left behind, but two books — one focused on antiquity, the other on modern history — shed light on how it is enabled

    A statue of Julius Caesar in Naples looks out to sea towards a couple of container ships
  • Wednesday, 20 September, 2023
    ReviewFT Books Essay
    Germany’s chaotic year: 1923 and the lessons for today

    Crisis bred crisis in the Weimar Republic. On the centenary of the turbulent period, two books offer a reminder of the vigilance required to sustain democracy

  • Thursday, 14 September, 2023
    Review
    Backbone of the Nation — the miners’ strike that divided Britain

    Robert Gildea’s oral history gives voice to the communities left scarred by the often violent industrial dispute of 1984-85

    A black-and-white photograph of miners on a picket line in March 1984. A line of policemen face the strikers and a queue of cars, including an old Mini, is trying to enter the colliery
  • Wednesday, 13 September, 2023
    Review
    Eighteen Days in October — how Israel turned the tide

    An enthralling account with contemporary resonance examines how Israel regained the initiative in 1973’s Yom Kippur war

  • Monday, 11 September, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    The Dictionary People — a homage to the eclectic lexicographers of the OED

    Sarah Ogilvie brings to life the unexpected characters — from murderers and a vicar to Karl Marx’s daughter — who were its early contributors

    A team of people and an old man with a long, white beard sit at desks working in an office filled with books and paper
  • Friday, 8 September, 2023
    ReviewFT Books Essay
    Oh, Vienna: what Austria’s turmoil means for the west

    Two books look at the capital’s outsized influence on western liberalism and the nation’s loudening drumbeat of far-right politics

  • Friday, 8 September, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Spies — Russia, China and the long intelligence war with the west

    Calder Walton’s engrossing history of a century of rival spookery offers lessons for the present

    A man in a suit arrives at a court building. Behind him a man wearing a hat holds a box of objects and papers
  • Thursday, 24 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    The Loom of Time — Robert D Kaplan on the reshaping of the Middle East

    A lively and provocative new study explores the powerful forces influencing the region in a disorderly, multipolar world

    A group of six sultans and emirs sit in a line on throne-like chairs
  • Wednesday, 23 August, 2023
    ReviewFT Books Essay
    The delusions that put Putin on the path to war

    In two piercing accounts, Sergei Medvedev and Jade McGlynn expose the manipulation of history used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

    Vladimir Putin appears on a big screen, flanked by veterans in military uniform, to address a parade of soldiers on Moscow’s Red Square in 2021
  • Tuesday, 22 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Eurowhiteness — the limits of European solidarity

    Hans Kundnani offers a stinging critique of the EU as a bloc rooted in ‘imperial amnesia’

    Monument of King Leopold II in Brussels, Belgium
  • Thursday, 17 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Invisible Lines — the hidden borders that really divide the world

    Unseen boundaries are the ones with the most life-changing consequences, argues Maxim Samson’s illuminating collection of case studies

    A long kite in multiple sections of green-coloured shapes of Chinese-style temples and with triangular red flags along its sides
  • Tuesday, 15 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    The Wager by David Grann — mutiny and the beasts within

    A gripping retelling of a well-known story that inspired Melville and Golding captures the barbarity of survivors of an 18th-century shipwreck

  • Tuesday, 15 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    How the lives — and sexual freedoms — of Genghis Khan’s Mongolians helped shape a civilisation

    An intimate history of sexuality in central Asia; and a sweeping account of 45 centuries of nomadic tribes in the region

  • Monday, 14 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Ancestral Voices in Irish Politics — the architects of nationalism

    An intricate account brings out the contrasts and commonalities in the lives of John Dillon and Charles Stewart Parnell

  • Friday, 11 August, 2023
    Tony Barber
    Russia provides an updated lesson in distorting history

    A new school textbook forms part of a wider effort to make society proud of a state-designed version of the past

  • Friday, 11 August, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Camp! — a snappy guide to an all-conquering aesthetic

    Paul Baker has written a stimulating history of a sensibility that is easier to recognise than to define

    Katy Perry wears a glittering chandelier gown at the 2019 Met Gala
  • Friday, 11 August, 2023
    ReviewFT Books Essay
    Shadows at Noon — Joya Chatterji exposes the beating heart of south Asia

    A fast-paced history blends the writer’s own experiences with an examination of the region’s political and cultural contradictions and commonalities

  • Tuesday, 1 August, 2023
    All That She Carried — the extraordinary history of a mother’s gift

    Tiya Miles traces a simple cotton sack across generations of enslaved women to tell a powerful story of love and survival

  • Friday, 28 July, 2023
    Review
    Mannerheim, Marshal of Finland — nation-builder and Nazi partner

    Henrik Meinander’s balanced biography cuts through historical myths to reassess the towering, controversial statesman

    Hitler and Mannerheim shake hands
  • Thursday, 27 July, 2023
    ReviewFT Books Essay
    What makes empires rise and fall?

    From Ancient Rome to China’s Huawei, two new titles look to history as a guide for the geopolitical shape of things to come

    Three columns of an ancient Roman temple stand against a sunny blue sky
  • Thursday, 20 July, 2023
    Review
    Pax by Tom Holland — Rome’s golden days, brought to vivid life

    A bravura sweep through an age of peace, politics, bloodshed and barbarians

  • Friday, 14 July, 2023
    ReviewBiography and memoir
    Three Worlds by Avi Shlaim — a fascinating memoir of an Arab-Jewish life

    The historian recounts his experience of growing up in Iraq, Israel and England — and brilliantly evokes a lost world

    A family portrait of a man and woman in 1940s dress, with a little boy and a smiling three-year-old girl
  • Tuesday, 11 July, 2023
    ReviewNon-Fiction
    Descent into hell: writers and artists in Hitler’s Germany

    Two books paint a portrait of a brilliant generation falling prey to barbarism under the Third Reich

    Actor Marlene Dietrich poses in cabaret costume in a film from 1930
  • Tuesday, 4 July, 2023
    Review
    France on Trial by Julian Jackson — Marshal Pétain in the dock

    A masterful account of the 1945 treason case that forced a reckoning with four years of Nazi collaboration

  • Friday, 30 June, 2023
    Tony Barber
    Wagner is the monstrous legacy of a Russian mercenary tradition

    Private contractors and paramilitary forces have stained modern European history with blood and terror

    Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin
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