New History Books for September 2025

Louis D. Hall casts his eyes over a selection of history books that will be released over the month ahead.

The Stolen Crown by Tracy Borman

Hodder, 4 September 2025

The 118-year Tudor dynasty is the history that keeps on giving. Author of Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I, who better to further enlighten us than Tracy Borman? In this meticulously researched tale of ‘treachery, deceit and death’ we are in her safe hands.

The Stolen Crown reads like a political thriller. From the off, Borman ushers the reader behind the palace doors and places us at the deathbed of Queen Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch.

We all know what happens next, James VI (a Stuart) is named as her successor. Or so we’ve been told. 

In this compelling account, Borman dusts off the final days of the Tudors, and reveals the untold treachery of James VI as he unlawfully takes the crown. What were Elizabeth’s true wishes? How would this have changed England?

Heiresses by Miranda Kaufmann

Oneworld, 4 September 2025

In need of something provoking? Look no further than Miranda Kaufmann's much anticipated follow up to Black Tudors. Digging beneath the pastel-hued, Jane Austen inspired image of the Georgian heiress, Kaufmann exposes the shocking role of woman in the slave trade. And in thrilling style.

Following the lives of nine heiresses, Kaufmann reveals a murky world of inheritance, fortune-hunting and human exploitation. From Jane Leigh Perrot, Austen’s light-fingered aunt, to Elizabeth Vassall Fox, who faked her daughter’s death to maintain custody during a tumultuous divorce,

Heiresses traces the avaricious lives of the women who helped build Britain’s Empire. Importantly, Kaufmann manages to intertwine the stories of the enslaved, whose unjust labour funded the lasting legacy of the men, women and families that benefited from them.

A History of England in 25 Poems by Catherine Clarke

Allen Lane, 4 September 2025

England has one of the oldest traditions of poetry in the world; what better way to understand its past than through a time machine of twenty-five poems?

Indeed from Beowulf to the present day, ‘poems have the power’. Here Catherine Clarke presents a reliving of history through the words of a country’s most sensitive tellers: a poet's eye on the Great Fire of London, the Miners’ Strike, royal courts, and more.

Historian, author, and specialist in the Middle Ages, Clarke has collated a poetic companion to a vast swathe of time, giving original perspective on how one nation continues to dream itself into existence.

Satirical, scabrous, tragic, lyrical, the ongoing English story is told anew. For all the autumn dreamers.

Assassins and Templars by Steve Tibble

Yale University Press, 9 September 2025

From the author of The Crusader Armies, The Crusader Strategy, Templars, and Crusader Criminals, Steve Tibble treats us to a gripping tale where truth is far stranger than fiction.

Violently opposed and with different ambitions, Tibble reveals the uncanny parallels between two of the medieval world's most extraordinary organisations: The Shi’ite Assassins and The Christian Templars.

From their origin to their demise by the Mamluks and Mongols, Tibble explores the legacy of these legendary groups, while unveiling fascinating details on how martyrdom was central to their effect and survival.

Too often wrapped up in myth, this is a rigorously researched and engagingly told work on the complex and misunderstood relationship between these enemy groups; rivals in faith that shared the same fate.

Dark Renaissance by Stephen Greenblatt

Bodley Head, 11 September 2025

Marching Christopher Marlowe out of the shadows, Pulitzer Prize winner and celebrated scholar Stephen Greenblatt uncovers a scintillating side to dark Elizabethan life that sees a cobbler’s son become the greatest known dramatist of his day.

Dark Renaissance is the thrilling biography of Chrisopher Marlowe. Born into a dystopian Elizabethan England of spies, fraudsters, ice-age and obscurity, Marlowe’s ear for Latin poetry provides him with the tools to see beyond the backwater. Murdered in a Deptford tavern aged 29, Greenblatt evocatively depicts Marlowe’s brief, troubled, and explosive life of genius and transgression.

Dark Renaissance vividly argues that it is young Marlowe, more than any other, that awakened the ‘genius of the English renaissance,’ inspiring Shakespeare and giving birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world.

An immersive autumn read.

Queen Elizabeth II by David Cannadine

Oxford University Press, 11 September 2025

How to surmise such a life? The most depicted human being in human history, Britain’s longest serving monarch, head of the Commonwealth and Queen of fast-changing nations: David Cannadine’s much anticipated biography explores the monarch that saw so much, yet gave so little away.

No doubt the first of many biographies to come, Cannadine provides a judicious, and authoritative approach to an unparalleled seventy years on the throne.

Interweaving domestic and international turbulence, setback and progression, this brief account of an historic life will serve as a benchmark for writers and readers to come.

To gain insight into the Queen’s story, showing iconic poise and duty in the face of trial and flux, Cannadine’s biography is where you might begin.

Nemesis: Medieval England’s Greatest Enemy by Catherine Hanley

Osprey, 11 September 2025

Scrubbed from history, or forgotten through shame? Nemesis is the tale of France’s Philip II and his momentous rise to power. A pocket rocket of history well overdue. 

Author of critically acclaimed 1217, historian Catherine Hanley provides a precise and well researched portrait of the man that took down four of England’s Plantagenet kings. Beginning his reign in 1180 with less control over France than Henry II, by 1223 the pendulum of power had swung the way of Philip II.

A lively expose of power, ambition, and betrayal, this insight is for lovers of history. Hanley draws on new research and fascinating medieval French archives to show how artfully one man led his country to become the powerhouse of Europe.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet

Hutchinson, 18 September 2025

Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, tells the turbulent story of Afghanistan’s modern history through the declining glamour of Kabul’s first luxury hotel.

Opened in 1969 after a decade of Soviet rule, the Inter-Continental Hotel served as a symbol of a country ready to connect, mingle, and modernise. Doucet first arrived at the hotel on Christmas Day, 1988. But by then, the dream had already begun to fade.

Fifty years since its opening, the hotel mirrors the Afghan people. Enduring Soviet occupation, multiple coups, civil war, a US invasion and the ultimate rise of the Taliban, the Inter-Continental still stands today.

A book inventive in style and compassionate in voice. Doucet reveals a tender and devastating portal into Afghanistan’s story of hopes and heartbreaks.

Rigby’s Encyclopedia of the Herring by Graeme Rigby

Hurst, 25 September 2025

As deep as the ocean, and deeper — BBC Radio 4’s Graeme Rigby has created an eccentric, encyclopaedic feast of a book, glistening with adventures, tales, and facts beginning and ending with either kippers, sardines, bloaters, reds, shuba, or herring: the mighty King of Fishes. This is the book you didn’t know you needed to read.

Beyond their much loved role in the kitchen - best served with chopped onion and a nip of Dutch Gin - Rigby reports on the role of herring in the drift of human history, from wars between Scotland and the Holy Roman Empire, to herring farts recorded by Soviet submarines.

Indeed it seems these small stars of the sea have shaped this planet far more than we might think.

Crucible of Light by Elizabeth Drayson

Picador, 25 September 2025

Serving as bold, unsung fact in the face of misinformation, this is a much needed, carefully examined intertwining of Christian and Muslim history. Sit comfortably for a whirlwind autumn epic as author and Cambridge historian rethinks the last thirteen centuries.

In a time when it would be too easy to show what divides, Drayson illuminates us with half a millennia of history that connects these two powerful religions, peoples that shaped Europe’s identity: ‘overlooked, misunderstood, untold.’

From the Silk Road to the London coffee houses; food to borders, architecture to art, language to discovery and academia to trade, Crucible of Light is an exhilarating sweep across cities and continents, bringing to the fore the shared wonders of these two ancient, interlinked worlds.

This month's Previews were by Louis D. Hall.