The Guardian History 2025

In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with plane hijackings and hostage-takings. Among them were the beautiful young Leila Khaled with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking philanderer Carlos the Jackal sporting shades and open-neck shirts, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. They sought to liberate the Palestinians and overthrow western imperialism, orchestrating spectacularly violent attacks that held governments to ransom and the world gripped to their television screens.Drawing on decades of research, declassified archive material and original interviews with witnesses and participants, Jason Burke provides a masterful account of their exploits over the course of this dark decade. From Dawson's Field and the Munich Olympics to the Iranian Embassy Siege in London and the Beirut bombings of the early 1980s, he takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these attacks, as well as the government agents who sought to thwart and assassinate them. In the process, he shows how the extreme fringe of a secular, leftist, revolutionary movement ultimately birthed something altogether different and far more lethal: the violent expression of a fanatically conservative religious zealotry.Gripping, globe-spanning and pulsing with drama, The Revolutionaries is the definitive account of the decade when terrorism took to the skies and transformed the world.

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not merely arrived; they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better.In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Britain. Made in Europe. Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world.More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days—an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy—only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption.The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.

A groundbreaking argument on how the decades-long War on Terror changed virtually every aspect of American life, from the erosion of democracy down to what we watched on TV—by an acclaimed n+1 writerFor twenty years after September 11, the war on terror was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. With all of the military violence occurring overseas even as the threat of sudden mass death permeated life at home, Americans found themselves living in two worlds at the same time. In one of them, soldiers fought overseas so that nothing at home would have to change at all. In the other, life in the United States took on all kinds of unfamiliar shapes, changing people’s sense of themselves, their neighbors, and the strangers they sat next to on airplanes. In Homeland, Richard Beck delivers a gripping exploration of how much the war changed life in the United States and explains why there is no going back.Though much has been made of the damage that Donald Trump did to the American political system, Beck argues that it was the war on terror that made Trump’s presidency possible, fueling and exacerbating a series of crises that all came to a head with his rise to power. Homeland brilliantly isolates and explores four key issues: the militarism that swept through American politics and culture; the racism and xenophobia that boiled over in much of the country; an economic crisis that, Beck convincingly argues, connects the endurance of the war on terror to at least the end of the Second World War; and a lack of accountability that produced our “impunity culture”—the government-wide inability or refusal to face consequences that has transformed how the U.S. government relates to the people it governs.To see American life through the lens of Homeland’s sweeping argument is to understand the roots of our current condition. In its startling analysis of how the war on terror hollowed out the very idea of citizenship in the United States, Beck gives the most compelling explanation yet offered for the ongoing disintegration of America’s social, political, and cultural fabric.

‘The Gaza I knew, and whose length and breadth I’ve travelled, has ceased to exist.’Jean-Pierre Filiu, acclaimed historian of Gaza, is intimately familiar with the land’s people and places; he speaks the local dialect. But nothing prepared him for what he encountered there in December 2024. This is his unforgettable, unbearably intimate account of one month in a place shattered by Israel’s all-out war.When the historian returned to Gaza, he arrived under circumstances unimaginably different from his many past visits since 1980: only a limited number of convoys were allowed into the Strip, and he was one of the few humanitarians able to enter, this time by night. He remained inside for 33 days, and emerged determined to bear witness to the devastation—to the Gazans fighting simply to live, every single day.Filiu’s haunting portrait of a land betrayed is a grim work of war reportage, documented with the acuity of a historian; and a lyrical narrative of human suffering, and human dignity.

‘Free Speech!’ is a clarion call all over the world, yet what it means today is more contested than ever. In many cultures — in China, India, and across the Islamic world — unorthodox views about politics, sex, and religion are repressed and people are often punished for expressing them. Even in the Western world, where it is held up as a core value, there is widespread discord and disagreement about what freedom of expression means. Amid perennial imbalances of power, continually evolving cultural taboos, dramatic new technologies and a fast-changing global media landscape, where free speech comes from — and how we might think about it — are critical questions.Through the lens of history, What Is Free Speech? shows us that freedom of speech is not an absolute from which societies and regimes have drifted or dissented at different times, but something more complicated and interesting.Dabhoiwala shows that our modern conceptions of press and speech liberty were invented in Britain around 1700. The real history of freedom of expression is a story of countless fascinating men and women whose lives have shaped its principles and practices over the past 300 years — slaves and imperialists, poets and philosophers, plutocrats and revolutionaries. Ranging across Europe, North America and South Asia, and not neglecting other parts of the world, Dabhoiwala rejects celebratory platitudes about the past and present of free expression. Instead, his book explains how to think more deeply about free speech as a global as well as a local question — by tracing how we got into our current predicaments, showing that history complicates our contemporary presumptions, and suggesting fresh possibilities for the future.A fresh and exciting approach to one of the most controversial subjects of our timeEndorsements'Eye-opening, thought-provoking and deeply enjoyable, What Is Free Speech? is a work of great profundity and brilliance' — William Dalrymple

'An outstanding dual biography... Dinshaw’s book is profoundly entertaining, startling in its depth, and a necessary cautionary tale about the human cost of political division' Daily Telegraph Two old friends end up on opposite sides of the English Civil War, in this dazzling history from the acclaimed author of Outlandish KnightAt the Inns of Court, the intellectual, literary, and social heart of early 17th century London, many pivotal friendships were forged: few closer than that of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward (Ned) Hyde. Both young men were lively characters, industrious, well-connected, principled and optimistic. They dreamed of reforming the government of Charles I, a young court with age-old problems, by restoring the traditional harmony of Crown and Parliament. This is the story of how their hopes climbed, overreached, and fell into an abyss of relentless civil war.This highly original, vivid and engaging book recreates the atmosphere, drama, players and ideas of what is arguably England’s (and Britain’s) most crucial and traumatic formative period. Through the stories of his two protagonists, Minoo Dinshaw shows how subtle religious and political differences, careful personal judgments, and mere happenstance combined to place these two friends, most reluctantly, on opposite sides in the English Civil Wars. They would both survive, unlike many thousands of others, into old age; both would become influential historians, shaping how we still understand the conflicts of their age. But their friendship, like the once hopeful country in which it had first flourished, would be forever changed: permanently marred by what both men believed to be senseless and unnecessary civil strife.

Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it?'Minority rule' is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they'll have you believe, anti-racist campaigners aren't actually silencing the 'forgotten' working class, immigrants aren't eating your pets, trans-activists aren't corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn't crushing free speech.In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it's facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority?

'The women of the world are serving notice! We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!'Launched in the early 1970s in the United States, Italy and the UK, Wages for Housework was a political movement making the case that women who did all the care work at home deserved to be paid. Like many revolutionary ideas, it remained an unfulfilled promise. It is a feminist path not taken.Here historian Emily Callaci tells the enthralling story of this international campaign and its intellectual roots by exploring the lives of its key figures. We follow Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa as they lay the foundations of the movement, then explore how Silvia Federici reframed the campaign in the context of 1970s New York, while Wilmette Brown and Margaret Prescod brought the insights of Black feminism, expanding the movement even further with an anti-imperialist perspective.Uncovering fascinating stories and debates thanks to new archives and interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the campaign, reaching across Europe, America and Africa. She shows how these women imagined potential futures under capitalism — and beyond — as the questions they raised continue to resonate today.What would it be like to live in a society that rewarded caring for people as much as consumption? How would we relate to the natural world if, rather than emphasizing productivity and growth, we valued maintenance and repair? And what would the women of the world do with their lives if they had more time?

In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—had seemingly been replaced with women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to the last bastion of conservative Christian values?In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, wife of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, she chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and documents how that failure paved the way to the revanche of Vladimir Putin.Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe shows what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and reveals how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the history of its women.Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.From bestselling authors and journalistic titans Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance is a once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to rethink big, entrenched problems that seem mired in scarcity, from climate change to housing, education to healthcare.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brexit negotiations and Liz Truss’s extraordinary forty-nine-day premiership — Simon Hart’s seen and heard it all. And starting in 2022, under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, he witnessed successive dramas unfold, all while holding down the (often misunderstood) position of chief whip.Astonishingly, during those whip years, Simon oversaw a near-record fifteen Conservative MPs fall by the wayside. Three of these were resignations, including Nadine Dorries and the scandal of her disappearing peerage; two were defections to Labour; and the remaining ten were suspended by Simon for offences ranging from Matt Hancock’s unauthorized appearance on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! to Lee Anderson’s comments about the London Mayor. Each one of these involved an extensive build-up, a complicated process and a noisy and vitriolic public commentary.None of this stopped him from becoming one of the few chief whips — of which there have been eleven since 2010 — to survive for an entire premiership.From Partygate to Brexit, over the course of five years, Simon Hart had a front-row seat to the most turbulent times in recent political history. Lifting the lid on the British Government, Ungovernable is the first insider account of life as chief whip. In a first-of-its-kind, extraordinary look at life as a chief whip, Ungovernable is a revealing, real-time, blow-by-blow account — offering a glimpse of what truly goes on in Westminster behind closed doors.Endorsements‘A remarkable insight into a critical moment. Hart’s wit and tolerance makes his record of a system in crisis all the more convincing and troubling’ — Rory Stewart, author of Politics On the EdgeThe instant Sunday Times bestseller.The Sunday Times Top 5 bestseller at No. 3, w/b 10/03/2025

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, Get In is the definitive behind-the-scenes account of Labour’s brutal reinvention and dramatic return to power.'The book about Keir Starmer we have all been waiting for' TIM SHIPMAN'Stuffed full of scoops . . . revealing who's really in charge' LAURA KUENSSBERG'A remarkable piece of journalism' RORY STEWARTFrom electoral wipeout in 2019 to landslide victory in 2024 and on into Labour’s first hundred days in government, Get In is a blistering exposé of the most significant and ruthless political transformation in a generation.At its heart is Morgan McSweeney, a mastermind of political subterfuge and author of a strategy to eviscerate the party, bury the left and rebuild it as a vote-winning machine. In Starmer he saw the perfect vessel for his vision: a man with no political identity but burning with ambition and a single all-consuming principle: to win.Drawing on unrivalled access throughout the party and extensive leaks of internal party documents and WhatsApp messages, Get In shows how together they betrayed and marginalised Corbyn and his followers, then forged a path in which promises, and at times principles, were readily discarded in pursuit of power.Richly peopled with the major figures of Labour present and past, this is the coming-of-age story of Britain's government. In an era in which faith in politics has plummeted, this is how to game your way to the ultimate prize. But what on earth do you do when you get there?‘A rattling tale terrifically well told . . . extremely well-sourced . . . dramatic detail’ Andrew Rawnsley, Observer‘Fast-paced . . . cutting one-liners . . . it reads as if the authors were alongside McSweeney and Starmer’ Jason Cowley, Sunday Times‘Fascinating . . . devastating . . . full of lively stories’ Andrew Marr, New Statesman‘Unsparing . . . brilliant . . . so many golden nuggets’ Michael Gove, Spectator‘Revealing . . . pacy . . . dispassionate but informed . . . a cracking read’ Financial Times‘A gripping story of raw politics and ruthless men’ Helen Lewis'Revealing . . . compelling' Anne McElvoy, Evening Standard'Extraordinarily detailed and sometimes bloodstained' Tom Baldwin, Guardian'As excruciating as it is insightful' Economist‘A superb work of contemporary history which defines the Starmer premiership’ Peter Oborne'If you have questions about Starmer’s budding reign . . . expect many of them to be answered' Kara Kennedy, Telegraph ****‘Compelling’ John Harris, Guardian‘Fascinating’ Andrew Grice, Independent

From two of America’s most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.In Greek tragedy, the protagonist’s effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024, American politics became a Greek tragedy.Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again that they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.The irony is that, in the name of defeating what they called an existential threat to democracy, Biden and his inner circle ensured it, tossing aside his implicit promise to serve for only one term, denying the existence of health issues the nation had been watching for years, and dooming the Democrats to defeat. The decision to run again, the Original Sin of this president, led to a campaign of denial and gaslighting, leading directly to Donald Trump’s return to power and all that has happened as a consequence. Rarely does hubris meet nemesis more explosively.Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, Original Sin is essential reading.