Ben Macintyre is a brilliant storyteller – and this is a brilliant story. The story is a relatively simple one: With an Allied invasion of Sicily imminent in 1943, the British decided to deceive the…

Science journalist David Robson makes something very clear early on in this book: this is NOT going to be one of those books (like Rhonda Byrne’s best-selling The Secret) that insists you can wish yourself…

Every time I think that the news is awful, that things cannot be worse, I try to imagine what it was like in the spring of 1940. The Germans took basically all of western Europe…

It’s been a half century since Paul Avrich’s definitive history of the Kronstadt mutiny first appeared — and a full century since the revolt itself. Others have written about how “Red Kronstadt”, whose sailors had…

While we wait for the next Slough House novel to come out (on 12 May, but who’s counting) and for the Apple TV series based on that those characters (no release date yet), along comes…

Owen Matthews knows the Soviet Union. First of all, he was born in Leningrad. He went on to become a journalist there, serving as Newsweek’s Moscow correspondent for years. He wrote an excellent biography of…

If you’re looking for a short book about the 1921 rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors against the Bolshevik dictatorship, this is not a bad place to start. Written from an activist rather than an academic…

What was the greatest maritime disaster in history? The Titanic? Not even close. It was the German cruise ship Wilhelm Gustloff, with over 10,000 people on board — some 9,000 of whom died in the…

Alice Sebold is a terrific writer and this book proves it. A memoir of her rape at a time when she was a young student at Syracuse University, it begins with a harrowing and honest…

Dan Randall is a British socialist and opponent of anti-semitism. That should be a tautology; after all, aren’t socialists by definition opponents of all forms of racism, including anti-semitism? Clearly not. Randall is a member…