Brilliant Books for Christmas Stockings PART 2

Welcome back to History Book Buffs for Part 2 of our 21 Days of Christmas Books series — a bumper festive episode packed with brilliant history (and a couple of cracking novels). I’m Antonia Senior — writer and journalist — joined by my fellow book buff Roger Moorhouse, and together we’re sharing some of the very best titles we’ve read this year.

In this episode we range from the Battle of Britain and the Blitz seen through German eyes, to the birth of modern British party politics, to spies getting uncomfortably close to Hitler’s inner circle — plus Baltic geopolitics, terrorism and revolution in the 1970s, and two brilliantly atmospheric works of fiction.

Books featured in this episode:

• Eagle Days — Victoria Taylor

• The Rage of Party — George Owers

• The Spy and the Devil — Tim Willasey-Wilsey

• The Artist — Lucy Steeds

• Baltic — Oliver Moody

• Appointment in Paris — Jane Thynne

• The Revolutionists — Jason Burke

• Inside the Nazi Mind — Laurence Rees

• The Holocaust (The Hitler Years series) — Frank McDonough

• The Spy in the Archives — Gordon Corera

• 1945: The Reckoning — Phil Craig

Thank you for listening (and reading along) with us through 2025 — this is our last episode until January. We’ll be back in 2026 with more history books and more recommendations.