Collection with many original and fascinating essays represents a useful step towards understanding how Ireland is perhaps finally emerging from the shadow of the Famine

Roger Crowley explores how ‘restless Europeans’ such as Spain and Portugal created a global ‘maritime belt’ of trade and empire

Using archaeology and DNA analysis, Quinn shows how dividing lines mislead us about the ancient world

A radical, provocative and important book by one of the leading historians of international law

The author argues that instead of thinking that Britain ‘made’ the modern world we should think about how ‘Britain unmade the world’ by replacing many histories with its own

The writer’s explorations of the relationship between life and memory have captured decades of French history and women’s experience

Scott Reynolds Nelson on how trade routes shaped modern global power relations

Book review: Sally Hayden’s book is an indictment of a guilty continent

Book review: Emily Greble sees Muslims not as ‘relics of a non-European past’ but vital actors in Europe’s tortured modernisation

Wide ranging correspondence covers high-level rows and direct links with citizenry

Book review: Giles Tremlett offers a sweeping account of fascism and the Spanish civil war, with a vital warning

Tom Gallagher’s portrait of Portugal’s totalitarian leader illuminates 20th-century Europe

Christine Kinealy meticulously traces the travels of 10 abolitionists to Ireland

Book review: Snowden explains diseases are not random events triggered without warning

The Costa Book of the Year compellingly tells how Witold Pilecki infiltrated Auschwitz