Dwight Eisenhower: unlike almost all recent presidents, he kept the US out of foreign wars American Caesars by Nigel Hamilton (Bodley Head, £25) The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack...

  Race of a Lifetime: How Obama Won the White House by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (Penguin, £9.99) From the first sentence—“Barack Obama jerked bolt upright in bed at three...

The Lib-Con pact is riven with deep ideological faultlines

Today's leaders could learn a lot about crisis management from Gladstone

Even America is investing in high-speed rail. It's time Britain did the same, says the transport minister

In a reinvention of national service, top graduates are once again returning to teaching

Herbert Asquith mismanaged Ireland and sleepwalked into world war. Little wonder his centenary is neglected

The story of Britain's railways is one of chaotic genius in the Victorian era followed by a century of more or less uninterrupted decline. Christian Wolmar charts this history in admirable detail,...

Conrad Black's weighty new biography of Richard Nixon portrays him as a "mighty and mythic" figure who made a "dignified exit" after being unfairly hounded from office—a code it's little...

Michael Foot was the great rhetorician of his age. His tirades against government enlivened politics and helped sustain the credibility of parliament