2024 non-fiction. How can theme be effectively built into the design of a board game, rather than pasted on at the end?
2005 non-fiction. Using mostly primary sources, the author attempts to determine just what pirates, privateers, and other ne'er-do-wells of the sea got up to in the Golden Age of Piracy.
1978 autobiography. Keith Simpson was one of the successors of Spilsbury, and one of the first people in England to turn forensic pathology from an act of drama into a science.
1954 non-fiction. Molly Lefebure was a junior reporter who took a job as secretary to Keith Simpson, the Supervisor of Medico-Legal Post-Mortems and the forensic pathologist most often consulted by the Metropolitan Police. Reissued in 1990 as Murder on the Home Front.
1995 non-fiction, an informal look at money-laundering.
2018 non-fiction. Kassia St Clair, a design journalist, looks at the history of fabric and how it has influenced, and been influenced by, the history of civilisation.
2003 non-fiction, a study of six British post-war technological projects.
1998 non-fiction. A Pan Am Boeing 314 Clipper was en route from Noumea to Auckland when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. They were instructed to make their way back to the USA as best they could.
2018 non-fiction, Charlotte Higgins explores the maze and labyrinth in fiction and their influence on the world.
1991 non-fiction. Simon spent 1988 looking over the shoulders of the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Division and writing articles about them for the Baltimore Sun.
2019 non-fiction. On 17 April 2018, the Boeing 737-7H4 registered N772SW suffered a catastrophic engine failure at 32,000 feet over Pennsylvania. Only one person died. This is the story of the captain's life.
2019 non-fiction, popular science; short treatments of scientific aspects of human existence.
2020 non-fiction. In 2004, Libertarians started moving to Grafton, New Hampshire, in an effort to "free the town". The bears soon followed.
2020 non-fiction. In 2019, Facebook announced that it was planning to revolutionise money. How did it fail?
2013 non-fiction; Houston looks into the history and evolution of a variety of punctuation marks.
2019 non-fiction, Stephanie Land's description of raising a child without a partner while working as a cleaner.
2019 non-fiction. Nott is a general and vascular surgeon who uses his leave to volunteer with MSF in combat and disaster zones.
2019 non-fiction, examining the life and work of Letitia Landon.
2008 non-fiction, an informal history of English science in the age of Joseph Banks, William Herschel and Humphry Davy.
2018 non-fiction, a layperson's introduction to the way in which algorithms are allowed to affect life. (Another Book of the Week condensation.)
2019 non-fiction. Honoré looks at the practicalities and possibilities of ageing.
1942 autobiography of the first person to fly the Atlantic solo non-stop from east to west.
Guendelsberger worked as a reporter at a local newspaper; it was closed down. Through a combination of poverty and journalistic curiosity, she took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon warehouse ("fulfillment center"), then later worked at a call centre and in a fast-food outlet.
2016 non-fiction. Doyle examines the history and the anatomy of the celebrity trainwreck, the (female) figure who is deemed to have fallen from grace and behaved badly.
2019 non-fiction. Morton considers the history of human interaction with the Moon.
2019 non-fiction. Macfarlane explores natural and man-made underground spaces.
The author of the webcomic xkcd gives desperately impractical but scientifically rigorous advice on how to solve common problems.
2019 non-fiction, examining the life and work of Gropius.
2019 non-fiction. A history of sewing and embroidery, trying to recover the stories of the people who did it.
2018 non-fiction, Michael Caine's (third) autobiography, shading into advice for aspiring actors.
1934 non-fiction, a short look at the writing mindset and how to set oneself to work.
2012 non-fiction, following the life and death of Marie Colvin.
2018 non-fiction. HMS Erebus had already travelled to the Ross Ice Shelf; in 1845, she was sent to search for the Northwest Passage, and never came back.
2018 non-fiction, an informal look at the history, particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, of fraud.
1899 non-fiction; Dr Thompson, a medical historian, examines the history and practice of poisoning.
2017 non-fiction. What is bitcoin, and why should any sensible person have absolutely nothing to do with it?
2017 non-fiction, popular science; short treatments of scientific aspects of farming, food transport and cooking.
2016 non-fiction. Sandifer writes about the alt-right, starting with the writings of three luminaries of neoreaction and in demolishing them wanders through a variety of strange places.
Note: this is the title both of the collection and of the first essay, which seems also to have been published separately.
2017 non-fiction, popular science. A biologist and a cartoonist look at ten fields of technology that seem likely to produce large changes in human life.
2002 non-fiction: an experienced foreign reporter gives his views on the fundamental psychological brokenness of war.
2003 non-fiction; the story of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and of Herman Mudgett or H. H. Holmes, America's first serial killer.
This short book is a survey of histories of the Second World War.
For over a hundred years, the Royal Navy had been expecting to win the next Trafalgar. On 31 May 1916 off the Danish coast they got their chance, and it didn't go as well as might have been hoped.
1998 non-fiction, an informal history of the age of the telegraph.
2011 non-fiction. Orenstein breaks down various elements of the pink-princess culture as marketed to young girls.
1991 autobiography. Hamper writes about his life working on the GM factory floor in Flint, Michigan.
2002 non-fiction: George Dyson, son of Freeman, recounts what can be told of the history of Project Orion, a plan to propel spacecraft with nuclear explosions.
2009 non-fiction. Oates recounts the twenty cases in London during these two decades which were treated as murder, but never solved.
1861 non-fiction, popular science, transcriptions of early Royal Institution Christmas Lectures; Faraday starts from the basics of combustion and goes on to the frontiers of nineteenth-century chemistry.
2015 non-fiction, popular science; short pieces introduce the scientific explanations for commonplace oddities.
1998, short pieces on the effects of Disney on Florida and other places.
1999 collected newspaper columns, written from 1985 onwards. Hiaasen gets his teeth into issues of local politics, corruption, finance and wildlife preservation, often all at once.
2013 non-fiction, an informal history of the rise and fall (sorry) of the man-carrying balloon.
2008 non-fiction, an informal history of the shipping container. Until the Second World War, almost all non-bulk freight was breakbulk, loaded one piece at a time into a ship's hold. Fifty years later, pretty much everything long-distance was going in containers. How did the change come about?
2000 non-fiction, a collection of anecdotes by officers of the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm.
1994 non-fiction, volume 10 of the Brassey's New Battlefield Weapons Systems and Technology series. A practical primer on the design and operation of nuclear weapons, their effects, and their simulation.
1995 non-fiction. In October 1957, the core of Windscale's Pile 1 caught fire, burned for three days, and spread radioactive contamination across what was then Cumberland. This is the official history of the incident and its aftermath.
1978, popular history. Tuchman recounts the history of France and some nearby countries in the latter part of the Fourteenth Century, with particular focus on the nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy.
2014; a collection of Ben Goldacre's short writing, mostly for the Guardian.
2009: Okrent examines the history of invented languages, and in particular the rare instances that weren't immediately forgotten.
Ben Goldacre explains at length how pretty much everything about drug research and selection is rotten.
The author of the webcomic xkcd works out back-of-the-envelope answers to odd scientific questions.
This highly influential book on screenwriting lays out a standard structure to which all saleable scripts should conform.
Robert Mason flew Hueys for a year in Vietnam. This is his story.
In 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands; a Royal Navy task group was sent to take them back. This is the memoir of the task group's commander.
In September 1944, then-Brigadier John Hackett commanded the 4th Parachute Brigade during Operation Market Garden. He was wounded at Arnhem and captured, and spent several months hiding with members of the Dutch underground.
In 1945, Britain had a large and often hastily-constructed fleet which was clearly close to obsolete, and very little money with which to update it. This is the story of what happened next.
Kershaw examines ten choices made during the years 1940-1941 that, in his opinion, substantially affected the course of the Second World War.
This is the story of the well-known deception operation in the Second World War: dropping a dead fake courier into the sea near Spain, in the hope that his deceptive paperwork would be taken seriously by the Germans and misdirect them as to the location of Allied landings in the Mediterranean.