We use cookies and other data for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used.
Add this topic to your myFT Digest for news straight to your inbox
Tiya Miles traces a simple cotton sack across generations of enslaved women to tell a powerful story of love and survival
Henrik Meinander’s balanced biography cuts through historical myths to reassess the towering, controversial statesman
From Ancient Rome to China’s Huawei, two new titles look to history as a guide for the geopolitical shape of things to come
A bravura sweep through an age of peace, politics, bloodshed and barbarians
The historian recounts his experience of growing up in Iraq, Israel and England — and brilliantly evokes a lost world
Two books paint a portrait of a brilliant generation falling prey to barbarism under the Third Reich
A masterful account of the 1945 treason case that forced a reckoning with four years of Nazi collaboration
Private contractors and paramilitary forces have stained modern European history with blood and terror
No genteel history of textiles, Aarathi Prasad’s book is a tour of the money-spinning activities of insects and arachnids
Tony Barber selects his best mid-year reads
The historian examines how medical knowledge and political force intersect to fight epidemic disease
Putin’s war on Ukraine exposes not only a rift between Russia and the west, but also divisions within eastern Europe
The author finds that a relative’s 18th-century diary offers a window to the past and a context for his own life
Two books by leading historians do a fine job in charting the path from fanaticism and violence to national reconciliation
Simon Winchester takes a lively, digressive look at how humans have ordered and passed on knowledge over time
Serhii Plokhy offers a compelling rejoinder to those who blame Putin’s war on western provocations
Matthew Dallek’s fine new history looks at the 1950s conspiracy movement that radicalised America’s Republican party
Born in the GDR, the author argues in her new book for a ‘but’ in the history of the reviled former Communist state
Two books take a tour of the glorious past and uncertain future of Britain’s coastal resorts
Éric Vuillard writes another historically acute account of big business and political elites at play
The uprisings of that year have had a greater impact on European politics and society than we think, argues Christopher Clark
Little that we know is truly original or without influences, argues Martin Puchner in a survey of discovery, borrowing and revival
Jonathan Kennedy argues that germs have shaped our world more than humankind has — and it’s time we took notice
In an absorbing book curated like a museum, Karl Schlögel immerses readers in fascinating details of life in the USSR
Anna Grzymała-Busse’s fine book argues that the religious powers of the Middle Ages were fundamental in forging today’s secular institutions
UK Edition