History: specific events & topics

The Spy in the Archive: How one man tried to kill the KGB

LONGLISTED for the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2026

The compulsively readable new book from The Rest is Classified host Gordon Corera. About how one man – Vasili Mitrokhin – turned first disaffected dissident and then traitor to the KGB, stealing the most secret Soviet archives and smuggling them to the West.

I, Vera: The Many Lives of Vera Gedroits, a Radical Princess

‘Vera Gedroits was a true medical heroine: outrageous, intrepid and devoted to saving lives. Miranda Seymour’s genius as a story teller brings this astonishing woman blazing back to life. I shall never forget her’ LADY ANTONIA FRASER

‘Miranda Seymour has written a wonderful and unputdownable book about an astonishing woman’ MEL GIEDROYC

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York

THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLER

A Book of the Year in The Times and Financial Times

‘This isn’t a book; it’s a case for revolution’ CAMILLA LONG, SUNDAY TIMES

‘A damning cannonball of truth through the York ramparts’ MAIL ON SUNDAY

‘Surely has a claim to the title of book of the year, for its seismic impact’ JANINE GIBSON, FINANCIAL TIMES

Parallel Lives: A Love Story from a Lost Continent

This is the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.

Sword: D-Day – Trial by Battle

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

A Times and Waterstones Book of the Year

‘The messy, dirty, bloody reality of Operation Overlord comes alive in Sword, Hastings’s portrait of the individual soldiers who risked their lives on the beaches of Normandy. He brings these men to life with sensitivity and beautiful prose’ THE TIMES

The Scramble for America: How the United States Conquered a Continent

‘Shows how a scrappy band of 13 colonies fought and bought its way to superpower size’ THE TIMES

For seven years after the Declaration of Independence the United States had no internationally recognized boundaries and no defined sovereign territory. It was more an idea than a country.

Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century

‘A book to underline endlessly, to carry around until battered, and then to tell all your friends to buy because you’re too reluctant to give up your own copy. A wonder’ Polly Barton

‘Brings a welcome freshness of vision and a dashing style … provocative and illuminating’ The Spectator

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Lifeboat at the End of the World: A Volunteer’s Story

‘Unflinchingly candid and extraordinarily powerful’ DAILY TELEGRAPH

‘Dominic Gregory hasn’t just delivered a survey of courage and determination – Lifeboat at the End of the World is a hymn to human decency, and that makes it a very timely book indeed’ TIM WINTON

Do you really think all lives are worth saving?

After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

‘The twenty-first century’s counterpart to Hobbes’s Leviathan.’ EMMANUELE COCCIA

What has happened to the nation-state? From a prizewinning writer, After Nations offers a sweeping history of this most unquestioned of modern structures and a bold speculation about its future.

Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos

Winner of The 2025 Duke of Wellington Medal Winner for Military History

An Aspects of History Best Book of the Year; An Engelsberg Ideas Best Book of the Year

Shortlisted for the HWA Non-fiction Crown Award

‘A rigorous, myth-busting look at the city’s chaotic recovery in the wake of war and fascism’ FINANCIAL TIMES

Searching for My Slave Roots

Malik Al Nasir was born in Liverpool to mixed parentage, with a white mother and a black father. Bemused by childhood memories of racist shouts for him to ‘go back to where you came from’ – he came from Liverpool after all – he began to look into his father’s ancestry.

Africonomics: A History of Western Ignorance

‘A historically insightful read’Financial Times

‘A wry, rollicking, and provocative history’ Michael Taylor, author of The Interest

‘A thought-provoking analysis of Africa’s relationship with economic imperialism’ Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It’s A Continent

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs

Asa Briggs’s energy fuelled him to write more than fifty books, including five formidable volumes on the history of broadcasting. At the zenith of his fame he was one of the best-known historians of his generation, his name on a cover a guarantee of substantial sales.

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