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Even now, after more than 15 years, it is hard to see the invasion of Iraq through the cool, considered gaze of history. For too many people, the damage is still too palpable, and still unfolding. Most of the major players in that decision are still with us, and few of them are not haunted by it, in one way or another. Perhaps it's that combination, the passage of the years and the still unresolved trauma, that explains why so many protagonists opened up so fully for the first time to Robert Draper.

Five hundred years after Luther's now famous 95 Theses appeared, Eric Metaxas, acclaimed biographer of the best-selling Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, paints a startling portrait of the wild figure whose adamantine faith cracked the edifice of Western Christendom and dragged medieval Europe into the future.

From Citizens United to its momentous rulings regarding Obamacare and gay marriage, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts has profoundly affected American life. Yet the court remains a mysterious institution, and the motivations of the nine men and women who serve for life are often obscure. Now, in Uncertain Justice, Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show the surprising extent to which the Roberts Court is revising the meaning of our Constitution.

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessors, Restoration London and Dr Johnson's London, this fascinating evocation of Elizabethan London is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of everyday life and the conditions in which most people lived, which most history books ignore: the streets, houses and gardens; cooking, housework and shopping; clothes, jewellery and make-up; medicine and sex; education, etiquette and hobbies; religion, law and crime.

On a sunny morning in May 1939, a phalanx of 867 women - housewives, doctors, opera singers, politicians, prostitutes - was marched through the woods 50 miles north of Berlin, driven on past a shining lake, then herded in through giant gates. Whipping and kicking them were scores of German women guards. Their destination was Ravensbrück, a concentration camp designed specifically for women by Heinrich Himmler, prime architect of the Holocaust.

A journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, John Reed gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks finally seized power. Containing verbatim reports both of speeches by leaders and the chance comments of bystanders, set against an idealized backcloth of the proletariat, soldiers, sailors, and peasants uniting to throw off oppression, Reed's account is the product of passionate involvement and remains a classic of reporting.

Da Nang Diary is the story of how, in Vietnam, an elite group of Air Force pilots fought a secret air war in Cessna 0-2 and OV-10 Bronco prop planes - flying as low as they could get. The eyes and ears of the fast-moving jets who rained death and destruction down on enemy positions, the forward air controller made an art form out of an air strike - knowing the targets, knowing where friendly troops were, and reacting with split-second, life-and-death decisions as a battle unfolded.

Humans are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most - the ones that people will kill and die for - are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles - capitalism vs. communism, democracy vs. authoritarianism, the "free world" vs. the "axis of evil" - we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics. Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy.

At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the Axis powers could still win the Second World War; at the end of that month, it was just a matter of time before they would lose. In between was El Alamein, Guadalcanal, the French North Africa landings, the Japanese retreat in New Guinea, and the Soviet encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad. It may have been the most important month of the twentieth century. In this hugely innovative and riveting historical marvel, Peter Englund has reduced an epoch-making event to its basic component: the individual experience.

In the tradition of Antony Beevor's Stalingrad, Nelson's Trafalgar presents the definitive blow-by-blow account of the world's most famous naval battle, when the British Royal Navy, under Lord Horatio Nelson, dealt a decisive blow to the forces of Napoleon. The Battle of Trafalgar comes boldly to life in this definitive work that recreates those five momentous, earsplitting hours with unrivaled detail and intensity.

In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.

Near the end of the Apollo 15 mission, David Scott and fellow moonwalker James Irwin conducted a secret ceremony unsanctioned by NASA: they placed on the lunar soil a small tin figurine called The Fallen Astronaut, along with a plaque bearing a list of names. By telling the stories of those sixteen astronauts and cosmonauts who died in the quest to reach the moon between 1962 and 1972, this book enriches the saga of humankind's greatest scientific undertaking, Project Apollo, and conveys the human cost of the space race.

A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time. In Adam Smith, political philosopher Jesse Norman dispels the myths and caricatures, and provides a far more complex portrait of the man. Offering a highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, Norman explores his work as a whole and traces his influence over two centuries to the present day. Finally, he shows how a proper understanding of Smith can help us address the problems of modern capitalism.

For fans of the Netflix series The Crown, a meticulously researched historical tour de force about the secret ties among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Adolf Hitler before, during, and after World War II. Andrew Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, his American wife, Wallis Simpson, the bizarre wartime Nazi plot to make him a puppet king after the invasion of Britain, and the attempted cover-up by Churchill, General Eisenhower, and King George VI of the duke's relations with Hitler.

Más allá de vencedores y vencidos, con una mirada que permite al lector acercarse de una manera distinta al pasado reciente, Alejandro Rosas y Sandra Molina concluyen su apasionante y perturbadora revisión de la Historia de México. Su trabajo inicia con el recuento de una fallida democracia -la de Madero- y finaliza con una crónica no menos triste, el retorno del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) a los Pinos.

In Israel and the West, it is called the Six Day War. In the Arab world, it is known as the June War or, simply, as "the Setback". Never has a conflict so short, unforeseen, and largely unwanted by both sides so transformed the world. The Yom Kippur War, the war in Lebanon, the Camp David accords, the controversy over Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the intifada, and the rise of Palestinian terror are all part of the outcome of those six days.

In Enemies and Neighbors, Ian Black, who has spent over three decades covering events in the Middle East and is currently a fellow at the London School of Economics, offers a major new history of the Arab-Zionist conflict from 1917 to today. Laying the historical groundwork in the final decades of the Ottoman Era, when the first Zionist settlers arrived in the Holy Land, Black draws on a wide range of sources - from declassified documents to oral histories to his own vivid on-the-ground reporting - to recreate the major milestones in the most polarizing conflict of the modern age from both sides.

It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would officially end nearly five years later. Unofficially, however, it has never ended: Many of the horrors we live with today are rooted in the First World War. The Great War left millions of civilians and soldiers maimed or dead. It also saw the creation of new technologies of destruction: tanks, planes, and submarines; machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare.

The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science—and its practitioners—enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War?