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…
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.
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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The fall of a Stuart spin doctor
The Duke of Buckingham served King James I better as a lover than a statesman – and his blunders laid…
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Keir Starmer’s union problem
The government wants to reset its relationship with organised labour – but history shows this won’t be an easy task.
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How motherhood was weaponised
Is child-rearing political or deeply personal? Helen Charman’s new history reckons with the tension between mother and state.
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A bloody American ancestry
Advancing through fear and violence, amassing wealth and power, the Blood dynasty embodied the untamed spirits of a young nation.
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Hitler, Putin and the information wars
Peter Pomerantsev’s new book shows how Second World War propaganda tactics are being used by the Kremlin today.
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Escape from the oldest hatred
In Rachel Cockerell’s Melting Point, the forgotten story of America’s Jewish homeland sheds light on the tragedies of the present.
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Your own personal Jesus
In the beginning there were many different sons of God – Western Christianity triumphed not by destiny but accident.
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The myth of “the West”
Our simplistic attitude to Western civilisation overlooks the global trade and culture that created it.
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Ukraine’s history war
Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness confronts Ukraine's long struggle for nationhood in the face of Russia’s “imperial oblivion”.
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