Non-Fiction

Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-5
By Max Hastings

Having dealt with the war in the West in 1944-5 in Armageddon, Max Hastings has now trained his guns on the war in the East during the same period. Ultimately, it makes for a more interesting book because the story is less familiar. We are used to the scale of the slaughter on the Russian front but a no less staggering 15 million Chinese died fighting the Japanese; we know about Dresden but 100,000 citizens died in the firebombing of Tokyo. Hastings lays out the campaigns with admirable clarity, correcting received wisdom along the way: Pearl Harbour, for example, was a disaster for the Japanese, not the Americans, because not only did it bring the US into the war but damaged beyond repair hardly any American ships. And Hastings comes down firmly on the need for the atomic bomb. This is magisterial history that leaves you in little doubt that if the soldiers could have picked their enemy, they would have plumped for the Nazis every time.

Harper Press, £25
To buy this book

Blood Sport: The History of Hunting in Britain Since 1066
By Emma Griffin

In a nod to the good old days - or at least those days before hunting quarry with hounds was declared illegal - Emma Griffin calls her history of the chase Blood Sport; the preferred usage nowadays is 'field sports'. The anti-hunting lobby and the resulting pro-hunting marches were not, she points out, the first time hunting and politics had clashed; William I's enclosures and strict policing of his hunting domains caused visceral resentment nearly a millennium earlier. Griffin takes the reader through this and every other major development in an efficient and detailed manner. It's not all stags and foxes being chased down: hare, wolf and bear have to run for their lives, too – though for some reason she omits otters and angling. Her treatment of the cruelty issues is even-handed, though there are hints that her sympathies lie with a time when our relations with nature were a little redder in tooth and claw.

Yale, £19.99
To buy this book

Lucia in the Age of Napoleon
By Andrea di Robilant

Andrea di Robilant is a biographical cliche. He's the man who really did find a previously unknown cache of letters in his attic, resulting in A Venetian Affair, an account of an ancestral love affair. The same palazzo roof space has now yielded up material for a second book, recounting the life of another relative, Lucia Mocenigo. She married at 17 into an even richer Venetian family than her own, only to find that her husband had a wandering eye. She eventually decided to match him, bearing a child by her lover that her husband adopted. Husband and wife then fell under the spell of Napoleon, following him around Europe before returning home where the widowed Lucia became Byron's landlady and turned into a Venetian Miss Havisham. It was a rich, full life which di Robilant tells with aplomb. He's been fortunate with his relatives – and his attic.
Faber, £20
To buy this book

Taste: The Story of Britain Through its Cooking
By Kate Colquhoun

For a nation reviled for its cooking, we have a long culinary history. In her survey of our eating habits, Kate Colquhoun goes right back into the deep past – from the ox-drawn ploughs of our Neolithic ancestors which enabled new ways of agriculture via the spices introduced by the Anglo-Saxons, to the Roman invaders, with their vinegar and elaborate dishes. In fact, says Colquhoun, our cuisine is the story of culinary invasions, as the world's products arrived gradually on our shores in the baggage of returning crusaders or merchants. The most welcome new foodstuff was sugar – it seems we've always had a sweet tooth. But it is a story too of pottage, root vegetables and offal, the staples of the poor who couldn't afford to titivate their fare with foreign imports. Colquhoun has served up a toothsome book, even though many of the dishes our ancestors relished are enough to turn the modern stomach.

Bloomsbury, £20
To buy this book