Politics & reportage
From this vantage point at the end of 2025, it is scarcely believable that Keir Starmer’s Labour waltzed into government just last year with a parliamentary majority of 174. But it really did happen; there’s proof—including Get In, the definitive account of Labour’s reinvention under Starmer, by the Times journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund. Except, after reading, you may come to believe that “under Starmer” is a bit of a stretch. Perhaps “under Morgan McSweeney” is closer to the truth?
For a longer-term assessment of Britain’s politics, as well as its place in the world, try Tom McTague’s Between the Waves. This mix of historical analysis and present-day reportage tells, with a touch of lyricism, the story of our country’s relationship with Europe from the end of the Second World War to the events of 2016. Think Brexit was a break with this past? Reading McTague’s survey, it seems more like a continuation of something that was always unsteady and uncertain.
Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley is similarly a book of both the past and the present. Although its subject, William F Buckley—an urbane, writerly and clever frontman for 20th-century US conservatism—bears little resemblance to Donald Trump, this heavyweight biography makes it clear that the two aren’t entirely unrelated. As our reviewer, Tom Clark, put it, “[Buckley’s] achievement and legacy is the modern movement of American conservatism—with all of its truculence, its media megaphones, its purity tests and its tight yet sprawling networks.”
Speaking of tight networks, the tech company Apple is famously buttoned-up. So too is the Chinese state. Which makes Patrick McGee’s Apple in China a kind of miracle of investigation: here, laid out clearly and with more detail than ever before, is how Apple rode to success on the back of cheap Chinese labour, and how Beijing may now be getting even more in return. Pair it with Karen Hao’s Empire of AI to understand just how bad Big Tech can be.
Ideas
Some of the most exciting thinking in 2025 was about thought itself: our brains, our minds and how we come by the ideas and beliefs that define us. Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain used new neuroscientific research to explain how we are, in a very real sense, what we think. Our political ideologies are shaped by the contours of our brains, while the contours of our brains are shaped by the ideologies we’re steeped in. It’s a chilling landscape, though Zmigrod’s enjoyable prose is a source of warmth.
Meanwhile, Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates offers us not just a way of thinking—but a way of life. By her account, Socrates’s famous “method” is a way of grappling with some of most troubling why-am-I-here questions we may face, whether in lecture halls or outside of them, in our everyday lives. Not that this is a simple self-help book; consider it more a radical revitalisation of ancient Greek philosophy, demonstrating its eternal relevance.
Laura Spinney’s Proto goes back even further—to pre-history—to trace the origins of that great carrier of ideas, our shared language. Although it might read like a historical narrative, it’s really a brilliant—and well researched—argument: about the ways in which the spoken word has spread; about what we can and can’t know about the very distant past; about genetics, linguistics and science. Something similar could be said about Tiffany Jenkins’s Strangers and Intimates, which meticulously charts the rise and fall of the private life across centuries. Turns out, we’ve squandered lots of that privacy today—for reasons that aren’t entirely to do with TikTok and CCTV.
From people’s ideas to their beliefs: in Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, Lamorna Ash wonders why—and how—so many young people are converting to Christianity in Britain today. It’s no spoiler to say that Ash’s search for answers leads to some self-questioning too, but, crucially, she remains clear-eyed about her subject throughout. This is religion in the 21st century.
History
What about religion in the 19th century? Christopher Clark’s A Scandal in Königsberg has you covered. It’s noticeably slimmer than the historian’s previous doorstoppers, such as The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring, but might be even denser with scholarship and meaning. Its immediate subject is, as the title suggests, a religious scandal in a Prussian city—were society belles truly being corrupted by a pair of Lutheran pastors?—but Clark ranges much further, to explore everything from misogyny to liberal hypocrisy to the boundaries of reason itself.
Meanwhile, Justin Marozzi’s Captives and Companions belongs more in the doorstopper category—but we shouldn’t hold that against it. Its thickness is by necessity, as it tells the complicated (and often unspoken) history of slavery in the Islamic world. Marozzi puts his background in journalism to good use by digging up fresh details about those enslaved in centuries past, but especially by giving voice to people held in captivity today by Isis and other malign groups. The harrowing past, you come to realise, is also horrifyingly present.
Jason Burke, the Guardian’s international security correspondent, also deploys his journalistic skills, to investigate international terrorism in the 1970s, in his The Revolutionists. There is something strangely glamorous about his cast of characters and spread of locations—Carlos the Jackal, Leila Khaled, Iran, Germany, Japan—but Burke never allows us to lose sight of the nastiness, nor geopolitical significance, of the period. As for the preceding period, Frank Close’s Destroyer of Worlds gives us the history of nuclear science from the discovery of radiation in the 1890s to the detonation of thermonuclear bombs in the 1960s—when we truly gained the ability to destroy ourselves.
James Fox’s Craftland takes place in the modern day. But by travelling up and down the UK in search of people practising old forms of handicraft—from dry-stone wallers in Yorkshire to bell-makers in Leicestershire—Fox shows us the country as it once was, before screens and machines did their work. The result is an elegiac text, of course, but also a defiant, possibly hopeful, one. Couldn’t we pick up tools, too?
Lives
In truth, Lea Ypi’s Indignity could have been included in any of our categories. It is full of politics and reportage, as Ypi sifts through Albanian archives to find anything that might illuminate the mysterious life of her grandmother. It is full of ideas, as it uses different characters and situations to explore various philosophical concepts of dignity. It is full of history, as it moves from the last days of the Ottoman empire to the last days of the Soviet one. But more than anything, it is full of life—Ypi’s own, and that of her forebears.
There’s also a lot going on in Philip Hoare’s idiosyncratic William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Technically speaking, this is another book about Blake and his now centuries-long influence—but only technically speaking. It’s also about Derek Jarman and Paul Nash and whales and other worlds and Hoare’s almost overwhelming passion for his material.
As the cliché goes, the city is a character in Jonathan Mahler’s The Gods of New York—but, in this case, the cliché is true. This is New York in the latter half of the 1980s, and it’s absolutely alive with money, power, art and self-loathing. It happens to be stuffed with individual characters, too. Mahler gives us vivid portraits of Ed Koch, Jimmy Breslin, Spike Lee, Donald Trump and more, some at the height of their powers, some on their way to higher office…
And so to Warrington, where Eric Tucker lived and painted in a council house until his death in 2018. His art, which would only be exhibited posthumously, is no less intriguing than his life story, which is told in The Secret Painter by his nephew Joe Tucker. Forty miles away, in Liverpool, there are surely no more remaining secrets about the Beatles, the most analysed and adulated band in history—yet the free-roaming intelligence of Ian Leslie still, somehow, manages to shed new light on John & Paul.
