The time has come to return to our annual end-of-year tradition. Editors at History Workshop and History Workshop Journal share below their reflections on the radical books and films which have captivated them throughout 2025.
Sadiah Qureshi
I’d like to nominate Questions for Ada by Ijeoma Umebinyuo. The beautiful poems and insights of this book left me with a profound sense of connection to so many beloveds.
Joe Moran
I was deeply impressed by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, a genre-defying memoir which challenges the idea that ‘life is infinitely measurable, that all human wanting and torment and laughter, all hate and all love, can be reduced to that contemporary word metrics’. In part about Britain’s continuing refusal to acknowledge its colonial crimes, it reveals that Flanagan’s Oxford supervisor in the 1980s wrote at the bottom of one of his essays: ‘Go home to the colonies, convict.’
I also admired Clair Wills’s Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets, which addresses Ireland’s troubled history of institutionalizing unmarried mothers and their children through the story of her own family.
Anna Davin
Holly Smith, Up in the Air: a History of High-Rise Britain
Raphael Samuel ed. John Merrick, Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History
Mieka Erley, On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality
Clair Wills, Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets
Joanna Bourke, Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence
These are books which made a particular impact on me in 2025.
Alex White
This year, I’ve been drawn to stories about the people who hold public systems together. Emma Park’s Infrastructural Attachments: Austerity, Sovereignty, and Expertise in Kenya weaves together three fascinating case studies – road construction in the nineteenth century, radio development in the twentieth, and mobile money in the twenty-first – to show how successive Kenyan governments have tried to cut costs by partnering with powerful corporations. Beneath the surface, the book reveals, it has always fallen to ordinary Kenyans to fill the gaps in these flawed systems and provide sustainable public services.
Marissa Mika’s Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda, meanwhile, reconstructs the courageous efforts of Ugandan clinicians to provide socially conscious care amidst dictatorship, civil war, and institutional neglect. While the Uganda Cancer Institute has consistently struggled with limited resources, the creative work of staff members has allowed it to save countless lives.
These two books seem particularly resonant in the wake of this year’s drastic cuts to international aid across Africa. Both are honest about the heavy burdens of austerity, but they also show how people can navigate problematic institutions to provide public services in a time of crisis.
Barbara Taylor
Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her The God of Small Things. This year she published her extraordinary memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me.
I bought this as an audiobook. Night after night Roy spoke to me of her troubled childhood; her lovers and marriages; her political truth-telling and its fallout (multiple arrests and a brief imprisonment); her development into a world-famous writer and literary figure; and above all her relationship with her mother, the adored, admired, feared and hated Mary Roy, who died aged eighty-nine in 2022.
Her portrait of Mary – ‘my gangster…my shelter, my storm’ – is a masterpiece of evocation. As the daughter of a high-achieving, scary mother, I found Roy’s mother so disturbing that at times I had to stop listening. Mrs Roy, as Arundhati calls her, was a leading educator and women’s rights activist; founder of a school with a national reputation and winner of a 1986 Indian Supreme Court lawsuit which overturned a sexually discriminatory inheritance law. But she was also tyrannical, whimsical, violent. Her demotic radicalism was so sharply at odds with her personal behaviour that it is hard not to think of her as mad.
Perhaps every reader of this memoir feels that Roy is speaking directly to her/him. My life has been so unlike Roy’s that it feels presumptuous to claim this. (Although we did have the same literary agent for a time.) But her voice is so direct, so unsparing, so moving that I hear it still, many months after finishing this amazing book.
Leila Sellers
My radical read is actually a radical watch – the documentary series Once Upon A Time In Space which explores the history of space travel through the testimony of those involved. As someone with an avowed disinterest in Space I was surprised by how much this series moved me. At its heart is the story of the relationship that developed between America and Russia after the Cold War, via their shared space programme. This kind of cooperation between these two countries feels unimaginable now, giving this history a particular poignancy.
I (like Barbara Taylor) have also been enjoying Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me – an account of her life and her relationship with her mother set against a turbulent backdrop of Indian politics.
Next year I can’t wait to read Rebeccca Jane Morgan’s forthcoming book Deviants and Trailblazers which traces the history of trans activism in the UK from the 1970s to the early 2000s.
Laura Gowing
This autumn I was entranced by Sarah Hall’s Helm – a novel which puts a howling wind at its heart. It tells the history of a Cumbrian valley through the Helm wind that inhabits it, and the people at the mercy of the wind. A Neolithic woman who understands the stones and storms around her; a driven medieval Crusader and his captured boy; a troubled young girl who runs off to meet the teasing wind. I loved the idiom Hall creates for the power of nature: Helm gathers ‘trinkets’ as it whirls round the valley, a force of history. Like much of Hall’s work, it’s a book about humans in nature, the changes they wreak, the road to the Anthropocene and what comes next, but in its reimagining of the interdependence of people and climactic forces, it blows optimism as well as warning.
Sally Alexander
Christopher Clark’s thoughtful review of Angela Merkel’s Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021 (London Review of Books, 21 February 2025) casts light on one of the defining political figures of our terrifyingly precarious world.
Merkel belongs to two epochs. Her life broke in half when, aged 35 in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Filled with a practical wisdom instilled by her father – a Protestant minister in the GDR – and a ‘light-heartedness’, the legacy of her childhood freedom, she studied as a theoretical (not experimental) chemist, rose steadily in the Christian Social Democratic Party, was a pioneer of international recognition of climate change and succeeded Chancellor Kohl in 2005 with steely disregard for her former mentor.
Yet Merkel – a reserved, quiet woman – emerges as a principled, pragmatic decision maker holding together the 16 lander that make up the unified modern Germany, despite the ‘scandal’ of her young womanhood lived in the GDR about which little is known or acknowledged although its history and people is ‘part of our common life’. ‘It wasn’t money from the States that drew us into the peaceful revolution’ she explained to Putin in car journey in Russia, after his justification of the occupation of the Crimea in 2006; ‘we wanted it and it changed our lives for ever. That’s precisely what the people in Ukraine wanted’. The occupation of Crimea, global financial crash, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, mass migration into Europe (‘we will manage it’ Merkel’s statement still haunts the Eurozone), Brexit, pandemic, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, defined the ‘era of cascading, interlocking crises that transcend national and regional boundaries’ in which we still live.
Charles West
Georgios Varouxakis, The West: the History of an Idea (2025). There are lots of books deconstructing the modern idea of ‘the West’, but this one does it with superb historical sensitivity. It argues the concept was invented in mid-19th-c. France to exclude the Russian empire (which the concepts of ‘Europe’ or indeed ‘Christendom’ could not do), which at the time was seen as a great threat (plus ça change…).
Marral Shamshiri
My radical read of 2025 is London Recruits: The Secret War Against Apartheid, a collection of memoirs of young Londoners who carried out secret cross-border missions for the ANC in the struggle against apartheid. As the testimonies show, LSE was a core hub for the ‘London Recruits’ – often students who signed up to smuggle ANC leaflets and banned literature into apartheid South Africa.
While the book (compiled and edited by former activist Ken Keable) was published in 2012, I came across it last year after meeting with some of LSE’s 1960s student activists, who’d gotten in touch with us at LSE to support the 2024 encampment in solidarity with Palestine. It turned out that LSE’s 1960s generation not only led Britain’s first student sit-in in 1967, but several had carried out these cross-border missions. Their story is one of a militant and committed tradition of international solidarity, showing how these actions played a small part in bringing down the apartheid regime in South Africa.
A film on the London Recruits is also currently being screened – a brilliant twin radical watch, and a hopeful reminder that apartheid regimes will fall.
Beckie Rutherford
My Radical Read this year is a co-edited book by Alice Wong, a trail-blazing disability rights activist and writer who passed away on 14 November 2025. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century (2020) is an incredible collection overflowing with the warmth, passion, anger and wit that is characteristic of the disabled community.
Top of my list for next year is Alice’s personal memoir Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life (2022).
Marybeth Hamilton
My top radical read of the year (about twelve months later than almost everyone I know) was Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: a Trip into the Mirror World, an extraordinary reflection on doublings, paranoia, extremism, the internet, and the ‘mirror worlds’ of conspiratorial thinking, all born out of her sustained inquiry into the implications of finding herself continually confused with feminist-talking-head-turned-conspiracy-theorist Naomi Wolf. I read it slowly, as the richness of the ideas demanded, and haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
In a very different vein, I also loved Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s inventive, exhilarating vampire film set in 1932 in a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta, a film that packs in more insight and nuance about parallel patterns of exploitation and oppression in the history of the American South than many more ostensibly ‘serious’ historical dramas have even attempted. Plus, the musical numbers are extraordinary: the scenes of a blues guitarist whose transcendent intensity sends the juke joint up in flames, and a swamp full of blood-smeared vampires singing ‘A Rocky Road to Dublin’ will stay with me forever.