It is hot here in the UK and in Europe. That means that I am reading less as I prefer to cycle into work rather than get the (extremely hot) London underground, which is my most reliable free time for reading. It is hard to read from the back of a bike!
But I still get pleasure from looking at all the books I could be reading, and hopefully help others discover something new too. So here are the 14 books from last month (July 2026, published in hardback, in the UK).
The two that I have my eye on are:
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The People's Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III, by Edward Shawcross. I've always thought of Napoleon III as a farcical figure: this book looks like it will set me right.
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Children of the Third Reich: Three Pasts, Three Futures, by Catrine Clay. Postwar Germany is much less well known in the UK than Germany pre 1945, this could be an accessible way of understanding "what came next?".
Click the book covers to see a zoomed in image and links to Amazon if you like to buy your books there.
The full list:
- ๐ The Biggest Lie: The Prehistory of American Fascism, 1818-1915
- ๐ The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts
- ๐ In Search of Trade and Fortune: John Cabot, Christopher Columbus and the Opening of the Atlantic
- ๐ Empire Ablaze: The American Revolution and the Atlantic Working Class
- ๐ Collapse: A Global History of the Second World War, 1931-1941
- ๐ Conquest: The Roman Invasion of Britain
- ๐ The People's Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III
- ๐ Empress Matilda: Queen of the Romans, Ruler of the English
- ๐ Children of the Third Reich: Three Pasts, Three Futures
- ๐ Orator: The Life of Cicero and the End of the Roman Republic
- ๐ The Dark Side of France: Twelve Chapters in the History of the French Far Right
- ๐ Data Empire: How Information Shaped Human History
- ๐ Witchland: A Tale of Witch Hunting and War in Seventeenth-Century Britain
- ๐ The Fifth Crusade: A History of the Epic Campaign to Conquer Egypt
