Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War

Susan Southard

The searing account of five teenage hibakusha ("explosion-affected people"): how they survived the atom bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, and the terrible price they paid in the aftermath of the war.

Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

Bernard Cornwell

A great and terrible story of a battle that was fought 200 years ago, told with energy and clarity by a writer who has a deep understanding of men in combat and why they do what they do. "Waterloo" proves that Bernard Cornwell's non-fiction is as fine as his novels, if not finer.

The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East

Eugene Rogan

How a multinational Muslim empire was destroyed by the first world war, by a historian of the 20th century who is director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Timothy Snyder

A historian at Yale University has made a detailed study of where Jews were in most danger during the second world war. In France and Italy, three-quarters of the Jews survived. In eastern territories, which suffered "double occupation", first by the Soviets and then by the Nazis, at least 90% of them perished.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard

A masterly new chronicle, by Britain's most engaging historian of the ancient world, about Rome from its myth-shrouded origins to the early third century. She shows that the key to its dominance was granting citizenship to so many people.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History

Sven Beckert

By focusing on a sector that until 1900 was the world's most important manufacturing industry, Sven Beckert offers a fine account of 900 years of globalisation.

What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing

Brian Seibert

How tap-dancing entertained many, even as it had clear racist overtones. An engaging, warts-and-all history of one of America's greatest creative inventions by a dance critic at the New York Times.

Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia

Dominic Lieven

How Russia went to war. A gripping, poignant and in some respects revolutionary contribution to European history by a distinguished British scholar who is descended from several of the protagonists he describes.