Isaac Don Levine had a remarkable track record of writing breakthrough books about the twentieth century, routinely missing the main point. His 1917 book on the Russian Revolution failed to mention Lenin and the Bolsheviks….

Richard Overy is a first-class historian and an excellent writer. He’s also an expert on the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Second World War, so this short book was full of promise. It lived…

The publication of a new Mark Billingham novel is always a cause for celebration and this one is no different. Well, it is different, actually. It marks the return of Billingham’s iconic London police detective…

Many people with only a passing famililarity with Russian history will have heard about the revolution of 1905 — and about the massacre of unarmed workers by the Tsar’s troops in January of that year….

From the very first page of this compelling book, you’re in the thick of it. James Bloodworth describes participating in a course to teach him how to pick up girls in London’s Leicester Square. That…

Writing history has one serious problem: how does an author maintain suspense when the outcome is known in advance? Timothy Ryback does this very successfully in Takeover where one can easily imagine another result in…

What a strange book. It has elements of time travel, but it’s not really a time travel book. Much of it consists of an interrogation taking place we don’t know where in which the interrogator…

This is one of a crop of very short biographies of Soviet dictator published in recent years. Here is what I loved about it: Harold Shukman is a well-known academic, an expert on Soviet history….

First of all, that’s a great title for a spy thriller. But “Red Widow” is not a great spy thriller. Having spent many hours reading it, I don’t see the point of the story. Not…