Volume 75 Issue 10 October 2025

Peacemaker: U Thant, the United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s by Thant Myint-U captures the optimism and ambition of Burma’s bridge between worlds.

‘What is the most common misconception about my field? That “anarchic” and “fanatical” Poland was partitioned by its more “enlightened”, “tolerant” absolutist neighbours.’

The climate crisis is a hot topic, but what does it mean to study the history of our relationship with the natural world?

Parliament’s champion of the people or scandalous, self-serving politician? Georgian radical John Wilkes kept a foot in both camps.

In Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, John Blair proves that you can’t keep a good corpse down.

On 16 October 1930 Britain’s sense of its historical greatness was skewered with the release of 1066 and All That.

The dismissal of a government scientist over the unproven battery additive AD-X2 galvanised the American scientific community in the 1950s.

In the chaos unleashed by the October Revolution, Mikhail Bulgakov found a past become fragmented and confused, and history the domain of madmen and devils.

The Diver of Paestum: Youth, Eros and the Sea in Ancient Greece by Tonio Hölscher – and translated by Robert Savage – searches beneath the surface for the meaning behind a beguiling fresco.

On 9 October 1676 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek – the ‘Father of Microbiology’ – presented his findings to the Royal Society.