As I write this, Atomic Habits has spent 85 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list in the category ‘Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous’. This is extraordinary, and out of curiosity I decided to…

Ben Macintyre is a great storyteller, but to be fair, this is a great story just waiting to be told. Kim Philby is certainly a contender for the title of ‘most successful spy of all…

Three German soldiers — all middle-aged reservists — set out from their base in occupied Poland during the Second World War. Their job is to capture a Jew, any Jew, and return him to their…

Thomas Frank is best known as the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, which was a brilliant analysis of why working class people in America — and not only in Kansas — so often…

Andy Weir’s first published book, The Martian, was a sensation – and rightly so. For me, it reawakened an interest in science fiction. His second book, Artemis, sold well but had mixed critical reviews. I,…

Robert Harris is back. Having made his reputation with Second World War thrillers such as Enigma and Fatherland, Harris is on familiar territory here and knows how to tell a good story. I read the…

Sean McMeekin is an interesting historian and has written some fascinating books encouraging the rest of us to take a new look at things like the Russian Revolution or the Communist International. This door-stopper of…

I first came across Tim Wohlforth probably around half a century ago. A couple of members of his group stood outside the gates of my high school in Queens, New York. They were chatting with…

Derek Gow has campaigned for years to reintroduce beavers into Britain. The animals were hunted to extinction centuries ago, and the case for reintroducing them is a compelling one. Basically, beavers’ building activities, including damming,…

In the afterword to this book, author David F. Walker provides a rather nuanced view of the Black Panthers, and correctly sums it all up by saying that the conditions that gave birth to the…