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…
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.
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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The murder that shocked the Edwardians
The case of Dr Crippen contains a story of multiple on-the-make lives as well as gruesome death.
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The fight for wages for housework
In the Seventies, one feminist movement campaigned to make domestic labour both visible and recompensed.
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The thwarted Marxist of Balliol
Christopher Hill was much better at analysing the revolution than he was at fomenting one.
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Why we’re stuck in ancient Rome
The enduring resonance of the Roman empire is often remarked upon – but rarely understood.
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The long reign of the Caesars
Charlemagne and The Sopranos, Trump and I, Claudius – all owe a debt to the imperial biographies of Suetonius.
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The moderate voices of the English Civil War
A story of two friends who took opposite sides asks: does ideology always triumph over loyalty?
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Did the Tories create modern Britain?
A revisionist history claims the postwar consensus was shaped by Conservative visions.
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Myths of the great statesmen
New studies of Winston Churchill and Harold Wilson show the rewards and perils of political biography.
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How India made the ancient world
William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road places India, not China or Europe, as the global wellspring of learning and power.
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