Volume 63 Issue 12 December 2013

Abu Raihan al-Biruni, an Islamic scholar from Central Asia, may have discovered the New World centuries before Columbus – without leaving his study.

The issues raised by Philip Morgan in a 2007 article on Italian Fascism have been rekindled, says Christopher Duggan.

In 1961, rattled by Soviet advances in space, President John F. Kennedy declared that, within a decade, the United States would land a man on the Moon. David Baker tells the story of how it took the US Air Force to change NASA and make the dream a reality.

Loan sharks, youth debt, peer pressure and parental responsibility are not just issues of the moment. Nicola Phillips tells the story of a young Regency buck who pushed his father a financial step too far.

A photograph of shipbuilders working on the liner Queen Mary taken in 1935 tells a wider story, by Roger Hudson.

The Daily Mail has recently caused controversy with its views on patriotism. Adrian Bingham looks back at a time when the newspaper’s belief in its national duty provoked intense debate and copies were burnt in the City of London.

As Home Secretary in 1911 Winston Churchill intervened in a debate about Britain’s role in a future European conflict. His observations were remarkably prescient and, had they been implemented, might have shortened the First World War, says Allan Mallinson.

Mary Sparks describes a female citizen of Sarajevo, whose life in the city coincided with the period of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and whose impact on the social and cultural events reflected the modern aspirations of the city in the time leading up to the First World War

During the First World War, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist William Lawrence Bragg devised a system to locate enemy guns, which made a dramatic impact on the Allied war effort and beyond, says Taylor Downing.

We ask some of our leading historians to tell us about the books that they have found most stimulating over the past 12 months.