The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Reviewed by Terence Jagger This is a famous and fascinating book, and I think anyone interested in the Great War, or the wider question of how wars begin, would find…
Over the Ocean by Erica Fischer
Translated by Andrew Brown Reviewed by Jean Morris The media were full of the D-Day commemorations as I read this book – stories of wartime fear and bravery that I’d…
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson
Reviewed by Harriet Devine If I were to make a list of things I probably wouldn’t want to read a book about, aeroplanes, cars, baseball and finance would be somewhere near…
Domestic Manners of the Americans by Frances Trollope
Reviewed by Harriet Devine No author of the present day has been at once so much read, so much admired and so much abused. So wrote the New Monthly Review…
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill
Reviewed by Harriet Devine The Spanish Civil War (1936-39), a messy, bloody conflict in which Spanish Republicans fought to save their country from the forces of Fascism, foreshadowed the Second…
The Valley by Richard Benson
Reviewed by Victoria Best The best kind of non-fiction, I think, shows us how supposedly ‘average’ ordinary lives are really quite extraordinary. In the author’s foreward to his outstanding book…
Women of the World by Helen McCarthy
Reviewed by Victoria Best When I was sitting my A levels back in 1987, my school thought itself very advanced because it gave us all a careers questionnaire to fill…
Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses by Helen Rappaport
Reviewed by Harriet Devine On 17 July 1918, four young women walked down twenty-three steps into the cellar of a house in Ekaterinburg. The eldest was twenty-two, the youngest only…
The Love-Charm of Bombs by Lara Feigel
Reviewed by Harriet Devine For the past couple of years, I have been fascinated by the events of WW2, and have found myself drawn again and again to novels written…