Leading historians share the texts that have inspired and informed their work

By spring 1941, the Afrika Korps was advancing across eastern Libya towards Egypt and the Suez Canal. But a dusty port town lay in their path

I was a teenager during the Second World War, although the term teenager was not in use in those days. You were just a lad. What’s more, one often left school and became a worker at age 14, as I did i

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

The grisly fate of more than 16,000 soldiers and civilians during the First Anglo-Afghan War serves as a timeless lesson in hubris and bad leadership

In 1939, at the start of the Second World War, the government planned to evacuate 1.5 million civilians, mostly school children, mothers and other vulnerable people, from cities at risk of bombing to