From Alice Roberts to Ben Macintyre, here are the history books we've loved this year.
This was the year that Alice Loxton beguiled us with eighteen famous young lives frozen in time, Amy Jeffs reinvigorated medieval myth and Kate Summerscale explored the horror of the Rillington Place murders. Elsewhere, Dan Jones and Terry Deary sallied forth into battle with fresh accounts of Henry V and Britain's key enemies.
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From Geoffrey Chaucer to Richard Burton, Loxton's effervescent volume captures eighteen famous individuals at eighteen years old to paint a striking picture of the vivacity of youth.
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Consistently viewed as the acme of kingship by generations of historians and Britain's leading filmmakers, Henry V receives more nuanced and revealing treatment from the bestselling author of The Plantagenets in this pacy, pulsating biography.
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From the Romans to the Nazis, the genius behind Horrible Histories retells the story of Britain in hilarious yet always enlightening prose, through our relationships with our bitterest enemies.
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A mesmerising volume from the Waterstones Book of the Year nominated author of Storyland, Saints delves deep into the history of Britain's past through the tales that captured the medieval imagination.
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As relentlessly compelling as the most page-turning fiction, this true story of murder, sensation and miscarriages of justice in 1950s Britain is another tour de force of historical recreation from the author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.
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From Lancastrians to Victorians and beyond, the team behind the acclaimed History Hit podcast unravel the complex story of England in dramatic, punchy prose.
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The final revelatory volume in Alice Roberts' spellbinding trilogy, Crypt takes the reader on another evocative journey into the past through pathology and archaeological research, focusing on the lives and deaths of people in the Middle Ages.
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Deeply researched and engrossing, Alford's compelling biography of the Tudor and Stuart statesman and spymaster explains how Cecil foiled numerous attempts on the lives of English monarchs.
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From the Venerable Bede to C. S. Lewis, Ackroyd chronicles the fascinating history of Christianity in England in absorbing prose.
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From the author of the bestselling Murder: The Biography comes a gripping, eye-opening excursion into nineteenth and twentieth-century British legal history that mines the relationship between the law, violence and women in page-turning prose.
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An absolutely enthralling blend of political history and true crime thriller, Hemming's rigorously researched account of murder, terrorism and duplicity in 1980s Northern Ireland is also a testament to one detective's dogged investigation.
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Marking a century since the formation of the first British Labour government, Torrance's character-driven account of the working-class politicians who shook up the Westminster establishment makes for compelling and evocative reading.
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Blending travelogue and history with luminous life writing, Between Britain explores the past and the identities of England and Scotland through an eye-opening one-hundred-mile journey along the border of the two nations.
The ancient past received masterly treatment in 2024, with William Dalrymple's majestic analysis of Indian influence The Golden Road and Fall of Civilizations by Paul Cooper. Podcast stars Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook were back with more fascinating historical trivia, although Youtuber Adrian Bliss was not to be outdone with his hilarious The Greatest Nobodies of History.
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The historians and hosts of smash hit podcast The Rest is History return with a second volume of astonishing tales from the past, this time handily arranged as an A-Z.
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The acclaimed author of The Anarchy delivers a penetrating and exhilarating account of how Indian ideas in mathematics, philosophy, science and art were the crowning achievements of the ancient world and helped to forge a path toward modernity.
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The bestselling author of the award-winning Empireland delivers another powerful volume on the far-reaching consequences of British colonialism, this time exploring the UK's imperial legacy on a global scale.
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Hugely important and necessary, Badawi's compelling history of Africa charts a fascinating and informative journey from the origins of humanity to the pivotal new chapter of independence.
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Ranging from Mesopotamia to Roman Britain, Cooper's engrossing volume – based on his hit history podcast – charts the rise and decline of several ancient civilizations.
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The popular Youtuber takes a hilariously skewed look at history, bypassing the famous names in favour of celebrating the incidental and accidental figures who changed the world.
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From the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, Quinn's revisionist, magisterial volume re-writes the story of 'the West', shedding light on the enormous role mingling of cultures through migration and trade played in creating the western 'civilisations'.
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Uncovering the alternative Jesus Christs that were preached about in the early years of the first millennium, Nixey's revelatory volume presents a fascinating glimpse of what might have been had 'heretical' views won out.
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Addressing the all-important split between Sunni and Shia Muslims that continues to have such dramatic and far-reaching effects to this day, Rogerson's rigorously researched volume is a brilliant primer on Middle Eastern history.
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In this fascinating addition the Shortest History series, Lesley Downer chronicles the rich story of the Land of the Rising Sun through exceptional individuals from samurai to modern businessmen with novelistic skill.
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From the author of the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners Prize-scooping 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare comes a fascinating and timely account of how Roosevelt's plans for progressive theatre were targeted by the House Un-American Committee and its message for today's culture wars.
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The celebrated novelist and author of the Ibis trilogy explores the transformative effect the opium trade had on the nineteenth-century world and how his own family history is inextricably bound up in the consequences.
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Searing, passionate and immensely authoritative, the final opus from the revered journalist and author of The Great War for Civilisation delivers a trenchant critique of Western interference in the Middle East.
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Weaving together letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles and interviews into a breathtakingly vivid narrative, Cockerel's captivating account of the Galveston Movement that brought 10,000 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Texas is both deeply moving and brilliantly inventive in style.
From state-sponsored murder on Waterloo Bridge to pen portraits of the Third Reich's most diabolical figures, Europe's rich and complex history was expertly dissected in a range of compelling volumes.
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One of the Cold War's most indelible mysteries, the killing of an exiled Bulgarian dissident in 1978 London is meticulously investigated in this enthralling slice of real-life espionage peopled by unforgettable characters from the shadows.
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Traversing Europe along twenty-one borderlines, Baston's erudite and illuminating book exposes how much of the modern map was arbitrarily drawn after the two World Wars and what effect this has had on the peoples of the continent.
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Zooming in on a group of Hungarian activists to shed light on the world-changing events just before and after the collapse of the USSR, The Picnic captures the wild dreams and disillusionment of 1989 with extraordinary vividness.
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Through startling and insightful profiles of leading figures of the Third Reich, the celebrated historian and author of In Defence of History provides a perceptive analysis of why so many ordinary Germans continued to follow Adolf Hitler to the very end.
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From the myth of the Cyclops to the 1974 Turkish invasion, Christofi's sweeping history of Cyprus combines the natural beauty of the island with the bloody turbulence of its twentieth century in lyrical prose.
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The author of the acclaimed Aftermath expertly recounts the rise and fall of Germany's first democratic government in this penetrating study of societal liberation, economic upheaval and shattered illusions.
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In this absorbing and intimate chronicle of Parisian life from the journalist and author of Chums, Simon Kuper explores the first two dramatic and transformative decades of the century in his adoptive home city.
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Enthralling and illuminating, Dark Brilliance explores the various internal conflicts and international wars that happened alongside the staggering developments in philosophy, social justice and the sciences usually associated with the era of the Enlightenment.
Ranging from the Eastern Front to the liberation of Paris, numerous theatres of war saw definitive chronicles in 2024. Read about the thrilling British raid on a German radar station in Max Hastings' Operation Biting, the attritional Italian campaign in James Holland's Cassino '44 and many other gripping stories of courage and conflict with our pick of the year's best military history.
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From the bestselling author of Operation Mincemeat and Colditz comes the compellingly told story of the storming of the Iranian embassy in 1980, recounting in incredibly suspenseful prose the week-long siege and rescue operation.
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The master of enthralling narrative military history and author of Operation Pedestal brings the heart-pounding, high stakes World War II commando raid on a crucial German radar installation to vivid life.
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The author of The Savage Storm and Normandy '44 returns with a visceral account of World War II's attritional Italian campaign, brought to vivid life by diaries, letters and contemporary sources.
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Structured as a heart-pounding countdown narrative, Bishop's account of the liberation of Paris during the Second World War views the drama through the eyes of everyone from a Resistance gunwoman to Ernest Hemingway.
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The former Royal Air Force officer and author of Eject! Eject! and Tornado Down delivers a poignant and important account of the unidentified dead of the First World War and how the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior came to exemplify a generation's tragic sacrifice.
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The historian, presenter and author of Barbarossa recounts the twists and turns of Operation Bagration – the Soviet offensive that won the Second World War for the allies and cemented Stalin's postwar power – in pacy, page-turning prose.
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An immersive and eye-opening work of transnational history, Bass' vivid and profound examination of the postwar trial of Japan’s leaders as war criminals is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the subsequent relations between Asia-Pacific and the West.
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The comedian and author of the acclaimed Command delivers a suspenseful account of twenty-four hours of the Battle of Arnhem, framing life-and-death decisions without the benefit of hindsight.
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Unravelling a unique operation in the Second World War, this compelling, highly topical volume from the author of Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible explores British propagandist Sefton Delmer's ingenious plot to trick Hitler.
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The second instalment in Lloyd's bravura history of the First World War, The Eastern Front chronicles the bloody fighting in Eastern Europe and the Balkans through diary entries, eyewitness reports and memoirs.
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As compelling as it is comprehensive, Overy's magisterial volume about the causes of warfare and humankind's propensity for conflict explores every facet of war from biology and psychology to belief and security.
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