Non-Fiction

The Shock Doctrine
by Naomi Klein

Her vigorous attack on globalisation - No Logo - plus her striking looks combined to make Naomi Klein the radicals' pin up of choice. This new book will buff her status further since her targets include some bona fide bugbears. America, she says, has turned terror and disaster to profit. War means opportunities for arms manufacturers and security suppliers (Dick Cheney's links with Halliburton in Iraq come under scrutiny, as do Rumsfeld's with a drugs company linked to the Pentagon). And disasters mean countries can be bribed with aid if they accept economic deregulation, which in turn lets in the corporations. Klein has a point, but in suggesting that a capitalist cabal fosters economic upheaval elsewhere in order to exploit it she surely goes too far. The book is a curious mixture of the convincing and the shrill - but she's right that a lot of people close to the White House have benefited rather too much from the misfortune they have brought about.

Allen Lane, £25
To buy this book

Fusiliers
by Mark Urban

Mark Urban's new book - the follow up to his successful Rifles - tells the story of the American War of Independence from the viewpoint of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, which was the only regiment to serve the full eight years of the campaign. They fought both in the defeats at Lexington and Concord where, says Urban, 'an entire brigade of the King's troops retreated back to Boston as fast as its legs would carry it', and in the victories at Long Island, Brandywine and Camden, where they acquitted themselves with distinction. It was all to end in failure, of course; dramatically so in the regiment's case when its full complement of fit men - a mere 67 - were captured at Yorktown. Urban describes this ebb and flow of fortunes clear-sightedly but with panache, using first-hand accounts liberally. The campaign may not have been a distinguished one but there were numerous individual reasons for pride.

Faber, £20
To buy this book

Summits
by David Reynolds

David Reynolds's book examines six of the summit meetings - those between heads of state - that shaped the 20th century: Munich 1938, Kennedy-Khruschev 1961, Reagan-Gorbachev 1985 among them. Summits are politics of the highest order, effectively arm-wrestling for the highest stakes - war or peace, no less, and not just between countries but between whole continents. Reynolds unpicks each historic meeting, pointing out that it was air travel that made them possible and that heads of state face to face could achieve things that even the most senior diplomats couldn't. Reynolds paints a vivid portrait of each encounter - Kennedy awash with drugs for a bad back confronting Khruschev before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the mutual trust between Reagan and Gorbachev, Roosevelt at Yalta exhausted by hours of travel. The book also doubles as a history of the second half of the 20th century. It is a sharp reminder that politicians' talk sometimes carries weight.
Allen Lane, £25
To buy this book

Sir Francis Walsingham
by Derek Wilson

Sir Francis Walsingham was a man for a crisis. It was he who stood at the heart of Elizabeth I's efforts to consolidate and protect her throne. He was in Paris during the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre when thousands of Huguenots were hacked to death, so he knew at first hand that the Catholic threat was real. He spent his life as Elizabeth's spymaster rooting out conspiracies - from the Babbington Plot which sought to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne to early intelligence of the Spanish Armada, garnered by his formidable network of agents across Europe. Derek Wilson's biography describes both the man and an age when, as one contemporary put it, 'Satan is roaring like a lion, the world is going mad', and he's fascinating on both. Drake and Raleigh may have been Elizabeth's glamour boys but it was her dedicated, indefatigable eminence grise who did most to make her reign a golden one.

Constable, £18.99
To buy this book