Within a climate of fear, Stalin set out to build a new political and social order. The origins and character of this order in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany are the subject of Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain.

Little America is the best single book now available on a crucial phase of the American war in Afghanistan.

The expulsions of between 12 and 14 million German-speaking civilians from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania at the end of the Second World War do not fit into the national narratives of the war created by either the winners or the losers: there is no place for German victims in the Americans’ “last good war,” the Soviets’ “great patriotic war,” or Polish and Czech accounts of their own suffering and redemption.

Tony Judt would have liked this book to be judged solely on its merits, but it is impossible to read it without being aware of the circumstances in which it was composed.

Europe in Crisis

Bloodlands offers meticulous description of mass murder in restrained, almost clinical prose whose power comes from the gradual, relentless accumulation of horrific detail.

Hint: It's not Islam

  How to rebuild it

Why the new Napoleon biography by Steven Englund deserves a place on your bookshelves. James J. Sheehan explains.