Reviews

It may not have been the first, argues John Hardiman in The French Revolution: A Political History, but it was the first of its kind.

A Popular History of Idi Amin’s Uganda by Derek R. Peterson looks for the ordinary people who kept the regime’s wheels turning.

African queens and Anglo-Saxon towns, Indira Gandhi and Irish STEM, Celtic Studies and the caste system: 10 more historians choose their favourite new history books of 2025.

Christianity at the Crossroads: The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era by David N. Hempton peers beyond the pulpit and into the congregation.

Peasants and popes, free speech and fashion, sentimentality and special forces: the first 10 of 20 historians choose their favourite new history books of 2025.

Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery by Miranda Kaufman follows the money to reveal how Britain’s women of means profited from plantations.

In Turncoat: Roundhead to Royalist, the Double Life of Cromwell’s Spy, Dennis Sewell asks whether George Downing was the ‘biggest scoundrel in Stuart England’?

The Maginot Line: A New History by Kevin Passmore confronts the myths surrounding the fall of France in 1940.

The Heretic of Cacheu by Toby Green and Worlds of Unfreedom by Roquinaldo Ferreira, painstakingly recreate the worlds at the beginning and end of Portugal’s slave trade.

Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster by Melanie Arndt discovers how Soviet civil society flourished – and then faltered – in the fallout.