If the history of war is your thing, this book will blow you out of the water

Although China remains a tyranny, since the 1970s it has become a significantly less brutal one. Li Datong, a journalist who was sacked last year as a magazine editor for…

Mark Ellingham has made a sizeable fortune from the creation of the Rough Guides to almost everywhere. He is shortlisted for the Royal Society’s prize for science writing, for…

In Moscow shortly after 9/11 a clever Russian academic told me: "Don’t believe all that stuff Putin is dishing out about how sorry we all are about what has happened. A lot of…