A non-fictional feast!

Although some have argued the non-fiction book market is shrinking, 2025 produced a veritable avalanche of high-quality history and current affairs volumes, perhaps because the year coincided with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. Writers new and old have offered us deeply researched, well written and incisive volumes, providing fresh takes on a range of past and current conflicts, the warriors and their equipment. In no particular order, these are my 26 must-reads, one per fortnight, of the last year.

• Tank: The 10 War Machines that Changed the World and the Remarkable Men Behind Them (Viking) by Mark Urban

Today, no modern army would consider itself complete without a range of well-armoured, tracked and turreted tanks in the vanguard, but are their days numbered in the age of the drone? Tank is driven by Urban’s timely reaction to the Russo-Ukrainian struggle in the mud of a new eastern front. He opts to conduct his insightful study via 10 iconic vehicles and those who manned them, from the rhomboid British Mark IV and turreted Renault FT of the Great War era, via the Panzer IV, T-34, Sherman and Tiger of the World War Two, to post-war tanks of different vintages, the Centurion, T-64, Merkava and M1 Abrams. 

• War and Power. Who Wins Wars and Why (Viking) by Phillips Payson O’Brien.

O’Brien is Professor of Strategic Studies at St. Andrews and an astute revisionist geopolitician who runs a lively podcast. He contends that, counterintuitively, small nations often overwhelm great nations in war. Britain was defeated by the American colonies, failed to conquer tiny Ireland, and almost lost to a collection of Boer farmers. The US failed to prevail in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. With an eye on Ukraine, he argues that it is decisions of national leaders, not manufactured geopolitical tensions, that cause wars, which are then won by resources and persistence, not battlefield victories. 

• Warhead: How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain (St Martin’s Press) by Nicholas Wright.

Neuroscientist Wright takes us on a fascinating journey through our brain to show how it fashions our behaviour in conflict and war, in the office and on the battlefield. Examining issues like trusting an ally, or how to make clearer decisions under pressure, Wright ponders why some leaders see through the fog of conflict, make better decisions, and communicate them, and above all, how human conflict will shape future technologies.

• Tunisgrad: Victory in Africa (William Collins) by Saul David

Hitherto little-understood or explored in books, on 8 November 1942, whilst Montgomery was fighting and winning the better-known battle of El Alamein, an Anglo-American army invaded French North Africa in Operation Torch. Combing though extensive new sources, Saul David, writer par excellence with over 20 significant volumes of military history to his name, shows us how this force eventually joined hands with Montgomery’s veteran desert warriors, making the defeat of Rommel’s Italo-German army group inevitable. 

• Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War (Apollo) by Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst.

The Great War has been much explored, but mostly through national lenses. Churchill and Eberholst give us its first year, 1914, as a series of regional clashes that eventually merged into worldwide conflagration on land and sea and later in the air. Fully understanding the driving forces of logistics, they have mined eyewitness accounts in more than a dozen languages from neutrals and combatants, and take us far away from the usual Tommy and Fritz floundering in the trenches of the Western Front.

• Shamrocks Among the Poppies: Musa Qal’eh 2006 — A Bloody Siege and the Failures Behind It (Helion) by Lt. Col. Derek Plews.

This is a timely unit-level examination of how a Royal Irish Regiment battlegroup fought a Whac-a-Mole campaign against Taliban insurgents in the mud-brick compounds of Northern Helmand in 2006. In a sombre and justifiably angry book, Plews also highlights failures of intelligence and higher-level decision-making that resulted in the dispatch of an under-resourced team, their resultant losses, and the longer-term effects of on the mental health of those who were there. Read with Ben Barry’s book.

• The Rise and Fall of the British Army, 1975–2025 (Osprey) by Ben Barry.

Brigadier (retd) Barry’s book was well reviewed and caused much debate on its publication earlier in 2025. He drew on his personal experience, complemented by interviews, to reinterpret the current state of the force he loves, which made for alarming reading. Barry warns that in 2025 the UK no longer has the land force it once boasted. During the last 35 years it has been stripped of its once-extensive warfighting capabilities by repeated defence reviews and financial cuts.

• Lithuania: A History (Hurst) by Richard Butterwick. 

Specialising in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the age of Enlightenment, Butterwick brings us a much-needed and timely history of the state that joined NATO and the EU in 2004, and now sits uneasily between hostile Belarus and Russian Kaliningrad. Via the Grand Ducy of Lithuania, which with Poland once ruled from the Baltic shores to the steppes north of the Black Sea, we are reminded that some in the Kremlin today wish to take Russia’s borders back to pre-Soviet times, and again swallow this delicate Baltic flower.

• Cold War Britain: Fifty years in the Shadow of the Bomb (Collins) by Fraser McCallum.

I am sure this will become a valuable teaching resource of a period of history through which many readers lived. In a lavishly illustrated work, McCallum, who works for the Imperial War Museum, intelligently pulls together themes as varied as the US-UK special relationship, nuclear weaponry, the peace movements of the era, and the tumultuous events, from Thatcher, Reagan and Gorbachev, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which marked its end.

• Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich (Allen Lane) by Richard Evans.

The world’s foremost scholar of Nazi Germany, and chief architect of David Irving’s fall in the Deborah Lipstadt libel trial, Sir Richard Evans, has picked up a theme advanced 60 years ago by Joachim C. Fest in the The Face of the Third Reich.

Using a lifetime of archive work, he examines how a wide range of key figures in Hitler’s entourage, plus fellow-travellers from many walks of life, responded to and supported Hitler. Peeling the Nazi onion leaves us wondering if this could happen again.

• Korea: War Without End (Osprey) by General Richard Dannatt and Major Robert Lyman.

The duo who wrote a faultless history of the British Army from 1918-40, remind us that within five years of World War Two, a mostly American force was fighting a large-scale anti-Communist ground war, using 1945-era weapons, in South East Asia. By the winter of 1950, British forces had helped push the North Korean Army almost to their northern border, whereupon waves of Chinese troops, with Soviet air support, flooded over their frontier and counter-attacked the United Nations troops. The vicious struggle was a far cry from television’s M*A*S*H series, and has condemned the US Eighth Army to garrison South Korea as a deterrent ever since. Read with Cold War Britain.

• Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War (William Collins) by Roger Moorhouse

Roger Moorhouse, known for a dozen excellent studies of the Third Reich and Poland, has turned his attention to the U-boat war, chillingly brought to life in Wolfgang Petersen’s 1981 movie Das Boot. Eschewing a formula of impersonal statistics, this gripping new study brings us the claustrophobia of life in the narrow ‘iron coffins,’ the sweaty tension of their unwashed, half-fed crews bickering and fighting for life, the constant throb overhead of dying merchant vessels and avenging warships, and fear of winged death from prowling aircraft.

• Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War Two (William Collins) by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore.

Apart from the ships and their cargoes, this important and mature new history of the perilous Arctic convoys draws in new studies of the sailors from Britain, America, Holland, Norway, Poland, and Russia, who manned the ships through killer seas. He explores the seamen who ended up in primitive Russian hospitals where amputations were carried out without general anaesthetics, and others who experienced the murky worlds of the NKVD, gulags, famine and prostitution. Read with Morehouse’s Wolfpack. 

• The Secret Dome: Anti-Aircraft Gunnery Training in the Second World War (Pen & Sword) by Ewan Ward-Thomas. 

The interesting story of Lt Cdr Henry Stephens, descendant of Victorian ink inventors and politicians. Before 1939, he put his inventive brain and money to the problem of how to counter the Luftwaffe threat against merchant shipping and developed the Dome Trainer, an indoor cinema which projected images of attacking aircraft to train anti-aircraft gunners. Some 300 examples were deployed around the world, including Sydney, Bombay, Newfoundland and Durban, but only one remains, the Langham Dome in Norfolk, as a tribute to this remarkable grass roots device.

• The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It (Constable) by Iain MacGregor.

This well-rounded and harrowing history of the road to using the first atomic bomb in anger, and its aftermath, first follows scientists tentatively assembling their knowledge. A laudable and fascinating aspect of this polished author’s research was his visit to Hiroshima, to view its archives and interview survivors. Along the way, we learn that conventional B-29 fire-bombing raids caused more deaths than atomic weapons. Also unveiled is Pulitzer Prize-winning John Hersey’s experience of post-war Japan and his exposure of then-unknown radiation poisoning.

• The Maginot Line: A New History (Yale) by Kevin Passmore.

A long-overdue study of why and how the controversial defence line, north and south, was built, its collapse, and how it has been interpreted in military and political terms in years since. Part of Passmore’s approach is to use the line as a device through which to explore the wider history of France. He argues it achieved some of its aims in blocking routes to Paris, Alsace, and Nice and was not the disproportionate burden on defence spending often claimed. Above all, Passmore refutes the portrayal of the Maginot Line as a symbol of a defeatist French mentality, as first argued by Charles de Gaulle’s supporters, and many since.

• Into the Reich: The Red Army’s Advance to the Oder in 1945 (Osprey) by Prit Buttar.

I am a great fan of this prolific author, former army doctor and fluent in German and Russian, who has made operational studies of the eastern front in both world wars his genre. After 15 titles, we now follow the Red Army’s January 1945 offensive across the Vistula to drive the Wehrmacht out of Poland, and achieve a start line for the capture of Berlin. Packing his narrative with first-hand accounts from both sides, he is also fully alive to Stalin’s wider strategic ambitions to push the boundaries of the Soviet Union further west, securing vast industrial and mineral wealth. His next title, Berlin: Endgame 1945, will be with us in 2026.

• The Ministry of Munitions in the First World War: Doing Their Bit (Pen & Sword) by Andrew Rawson.

I am grateful that Rawson, who has over 40 fine military history titles under his belt, ranging from medieval warlords to Vietnam and the Second Gulf, has turned his attention to a vital enabler of victory in World War One. Here is a valuable study of the UK government department first established in May 1915, that within a year had become the nation’s largest buyer, seller and employer. Initially under Lloyd George, its most notable minister from July 1917-January 1919 was Wiston Churchill. This volume thus provides insights not only into the Great War but the intriguing character of Britain’s prime minister in the next war.

• Slog or Swan: British Army Effectiveness in Operation Veritable, February & March 1945 (Helion) by Dermot Rooney.

Field Marshal Montgomery dismissed the last few months of World War II in about 30 pages. Eisenhower was not much more helpful. To enlighten us, Rooney dives into the Rhineland weeds of Operation Veritable (fought in February-March 1945, prior to the Rhine crossings). Although Horrocks hoped his XXX Corps would punch through the German defences in four days, weather and terrain conspired to extend his campaign to a month of muddy, freezing attacks, replete with non-combat casualties. Rooney argues that Veritable demoralised the allies at least as much as the Germans, but redefined British fighting power in time for the advance into the Reich.

• SAS The Great Train Raid: The Most Daring SAS Mission of WWII (Quercus) by Damien Lewis. 

Lewis, a gifted storyteller with a first-class nose for a story, has made a specialism of special forces tales of World War Two. In this latest treat, he recounts Operation Loco, a 2 SAS mission to take over a train, break into an Italian concentration camp, liberate its 180 inmates in September 1943 before they are spirited away to Germany. It sounds like the plot of at least two Hollywood war movies, but in this case was true. As intriguing is the way Lewis tracks down obscure sources, for no official account was written down. ‘It’s been a very tough one to unpick,’ he admits. Unlike some war narratives, Lewis deftly moves his at electric pace, which leaves the reader breathless at the end.

• Infantry: A Global History (Pen & Sword) by Jeremy Black.

Lunch with Jeremy Black is always delightful. His knows his way around a wine list as well as a battlefield. Authoring around three titles a year, from crime fiction, Shakespeare and maps, to industrial revolutions, battles and railways, he has lost exact count of the number of tomes credited to him. It is well over 200. Yet, none of his titles resemble marmalade spread thinly on toast. They are the result of a mature, learned and eclectic mind. Infantry, the narrow but deep story of “the grunts on the ground”, is no exception. We read of their weaponry, recruitment, doctrines and impact. Away from front line fighting, Black also ponders their role in civil and asymmetrical war, well aware they can be crucial to political history and nation-building.

• Rhineland: Hitler’s Last Defence 1944-45 (Osprey) by Anthony Tucker-Jones.

Schooled in intelligence matters, Tucker-Jones, a Churchill and World War II scholar, examines Hitler’s defence of the Rhineland, via Aachen and the Hürtgen in 1944, to defending the Reichswald and opposing the river crossings of 1945. His signature is recounting these bitter battles from the German point of view, as he has done for Normandy (Falaise: Flawed Victory), Arnhem (The Devil’s Bridge) and the Bulge (Hitler’s Winter). Read with Rooney’s Slog or Swan. 

• 1945: The Reckoning: War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World (Hodder & Stoughton) by Phil Craig.

The last of Craig’s trilogy, which began with Finest Hour (1999), followed by End of the Beginning (2002), concludes with an account of the missed opportunities and flaws of the end World War II. In this more nuanced, political volume, author and filmmaker Craig concentrates on the false dawns in India, Burma, Borneo, French Vietnam and Dutch Indonesia, which led to more lives being lost, as the former colonial powers failed to realise the world had changed and their former subjects needed independence after helping in the war against the Japanese.

• The White Lady: The Story of British Secret Service Networks Behind German Lines (Yale) by Helen Fry.

This account begins with a much-needed examination of The White Lady, Britain’s secret service network in Belgium during the First World War. By 1940 they were needed again and reformed as The Clarence Service. Fry examines who the agents were, their recruitment and the means devised to transmit their intelligence to Britain, in person and by wireless. Astutely, she also assesses their impact in both conflicts. 

• Victory ’45: the End of the War in Eight Surrenders (Bantam) by James Holland & Al Murray.

The irrepressible duo of World War Two podcasting here hit upon a winning formula to tell the story of the end of global war in 1945. It is often not realised how messy the German and Japanese surrenders were, necessitating several formal capitulations. Their story ranges from the Italian Alps to northern Germany, to London, New York, Washington and Tokyo, and underlines how extraordinary that summer must have been, one which has shaped our world ever since. 

• Mitchell: Father of the Spitfire (Elliott & Thompson) by Paul Beaver.

Having grown up in the North Staffordshire landscape of Reginald Mitchell amidst his descendants, I am grateful to Beaver for unpicking almost everything I thought I knew about the pioneer behind the legendary Spitfire. It turns out that Leslie Howard’s 1942 movie First of the Few is only a distant cousin to the truth of the man and his invention. Drawing on new interviews, private archives and previously unpublished material, Beaver presents us with the leader of a talented team, with a flair for collaboration with Rolls-Royce, rather than a lonely genius.