Our Favourite History Books of 2025

Christmas Day lies dead ahead and there's few more trusty presents than a quality history book. Here are ten of our favourites, published over the past year.

The North Pole by Erling Kagge

Viking, 27 February, 2025

The Norwegian writer and adventurer Erling Kagge grounds his new book in the story of his 1990 expedition to the North Pole. Back then his aim was to become the first (along with his friend Børge) to reach the pole unsupported. Now, a generation on, his ambition is quite different. In The North Pole Kagge sets out to understand what drove him on that quest? What lure was so enticing that he risked great dangers in trying to accomplish it?

The North Pole is a dazzling book. Brisk and evocative, it is a mix of history and memoir that examines the very human nature of adventure and 'obsession'. We might think there is just one North Pole, Kagge explains, but actually the term could refer to several different ideas — celestial, magnetic, geographic or imaginary.

Striking back through time to the earliest attempts to locate the top of the world, the book then traces the shifting meaning of the term through the ages that follow. An enchanting read.

From our February 2025 preview.

Hidden Portraits by Sue Roe

Faber, 27 March, 2025

Sue Roe's new biographically-driven history seeks a new perspective on a familiar subject. That subject is Pablo Picasso, the wildly talented Spanish artist who lived through such a swathe of historical events. While his creative life is well documented, Roe's book pivots from the familiar to document the 'untold stories of six women' who loved him.

This is a refreshing and enticing approach. Throughout life Picasso moved through successive intense relationships with women. Often these have been dismissed as being either 'models' or 'muses', important in a way but not fundamentally so. In Hidden Portraits Roe counters this view. Her narrative spans a great sweep of time and places, from Montmartre in the early 1900 through to Paris in the Second World War and Picasso's final years of seclusion.

Roe is an author of great gifts and Hidden Portraits is full of critical insight. Picasso you may already know, but here Fernande Olivier, Olga Khokhlova, Marie-Therese Walter, Dora Maar, Francoise Gilot, and Jacqueline Roque lie in wait, ready to finally be met.

From our March 2025 preview.

John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie

Faber, 27 March, 2025

'Lennon and McCartney' could be said to be the songwriting credit of the twentieth-century. It is, after all, the tag that runs alongside a vast constellation of hits, from Love Me Do to Get Back — songs that evoke one of the great moments in British cultural history.

Reconfigured here as 'John & Paul', Ian Leslie's tender book traces the arc of these men's extraordinary friendship. Opening with their chance encounter at Woolton Village Fete in 1957 and tumbling through the years of success, rivalry, tension, acrimony and reconciliation that followed, it's clear that within this one relationship lies a great spectrum of complex emotion.

Leslie defines this as 'a love story', an affectionate way to interpret the complexity. The Beatles are an evergreen subject, but there is freshness and insight here as Leslie uses the songs themselves as the structure for his narrative. The result is a book that will reward even the most ardent of their fans with something new.

From our March 2025 preview.

Saint Petersburg by Sinclair McKay

Viking, 10 April, 2025

A succession of books have appeared since February 2022 that seek to understand the Russian mind. Sinclair McKay's Saint Petersburg is the latest addition to this genre and his approach is an appealing one. His book is ostensibly the story of a single city, but in this one story is contained much of the explanation for what is happening in Russia today.

In comparison with Kiev and Moscow, Saint Petersburg is a rather recent construction. Famously founded as 'the Window on the West' by Peter the Great in 1703, McKay nimbly reminds us that windows operate in two directions.

Much of the book is focussed on the city's most traumatic moment – the Nazi siege of 1941-4. This was a staggering, shocking event that remains unparalleled in world history. In just one winter, for instance, around a million inhabitants perished from hunger.

In this sacrifice, this 'defiance', the people of Saint Petersburg left a powerful legacy. This inheritance is felt, McKay points out, by few more strongly than Vladimir Putin who was born in the city in 1952.

From our April 2025 preview.

Wreckers by Simon Park

Viking, 17 April, 2025

'The Age of Discovery' is a term filled with awe and energy. It has traditionally been used to describe the years following Columbus's 1492 voyage, when a series of intrepid Europeans struck out into the blue with more courage than knowledge.

It is this orthodox telling that Simon Park, an academic at the University of Oxford, riffs against in his bright and eloquent Wreckers. So much for the traditional story, he counters. The voyages that followed Columbus's - da Gama's, Magellan's and so on - were far more likely to end in catastrophe or embarrassment than success.

To illustrate his argument Park has plucked out a dozen or so stories that tell of the 'disasters in the Age of Discovery'. In these accounts are tales of shipwrecks, maroonings, cannibalism and business speculations gone wildly wrong. Arranged in a chronological narrative that unfurls over the century following 1492, Park's book is both a brilliantly researched work of global history and a brisk corrective to the old, now exploded 'discovery' narrative.

From our April 2025 preview.

Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England by Joanne Paul

Penguin Michael Joseph, 29 May, 2025

In the late fifteenth-century the clever young son of a lawyer came out of Cheapside in the City of London and followed an upward path the carried him right to the summit of English politics. He sat beside King Henry VIII and then, when he fell out of favour, was executed. It's a story not so very different to the (now) more famous one of Thomas Cromwell. But this one belongs to another of that famous generation: Thomas More.

More is a brilliant but divisive subject. Historians of the sixteenth-century tend to hold very strong views about him. He was inspiring or malign; a zealot or a saint. Founded on firm scholarly ground, Joanne Paul's investigation of his life weaves artfully through his literary output and his political contributions, and situates him admirably in a setting that remains as vividly enticing as any.

From our May 2025 preview.

The Big Hop by David Rooney

Chatto & Windus, 12 June, 2025

David Rooney's enchanting narrative history looks back to the early years of the twentieth-century when the skies were opening up as a place of travel, pleasure and potential.

The book's title, 'The Big Hop', refers to a 1919 competition that involved four teams of aviators who raced each other to become the first to fly over the Atlantic. Starting in Newfoundland and taking a course to the east, they aimed to make it all the way to Ireland.

The race provides Rooney with a motor for his plot, which blends biography and scientific history in nimble measure. There's an aura to this period Rooney reanimates, which was one characterised by risk taking in the immediate aftermath of a hideous war.

A century on, there's a real thrill in revisiting a story filled with so much human agency. Did any of the teams make it across the Atlantic? For this I refer you to David Rooney and his very fine book.

From our June 2025 preview.

Small Earthquakes by Shafik Meghji

C Hurst & Co Publishers, 24 July, 2025

Beyond Lord Cochrane, nitrate kings, missionaries, football, or the Falklands, there are deep-rooted ties between Britain and South America, for better and for worse.

From someone who has lived, worked and travelled in the continent for more than 15 years, this is a rich account of these unexpected links. Award-winning travel writer and journalist Shafik Meghji uncovers Britain's impact on Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, from instigating wars, forging national identities to redrawing borders. Significantly, Meghji goes a step further and explores how South America has helped shape Britain in return.

Small Earthquakes combines firsthand reporting with eccentric characters and granular historical detail: Victorian-era foundries to Chatwin-esque Welsh Patagonian tea rooms.

A thrilling, illuminating perspective on a continent that is closer than we think.

From our Summer 2025 preview.

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.

From our September 2025 preview.

Mavericks by Nick Higham

Bloomsbury, 9 October. 2025

Set in a forgotten corner of World War One, Mavericks is the rogue tale of oil, Empire, espionage and vanity.

With peace finally in sight, British minds turn towards the Caspian Sea. Sensing danger and opportunity, six officials plot a daring campaign to block the advancing Turks, hold back the Bolsheviks, prevent a jihad overwhelming India, and secure the vital supply of oil from Baku.

Eccentric, mad and full of risk - this is a classic tale of British overseas meddling.

Meticulous in its research, Mavericks elucidates the varmint characters behind the legends. An inventor, a Scottish aristocrat, a spy and others, ex-BBC journalist Nick Higham presents lives and times lived both with danger and style.

A rakish adventure for autumn.

From our October 2025 preview.