The Sunday Times history book of the year

Empires of the Sea; The Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 by Roger Crowley (Faber £20)

This rousing account of the 16th-century struggle between Islam and Christianity for mastery of the Mediterranean has everything - two mighty foes convinced of their own destiny; a struggle on whose outcome the world's future rests; larger-than-life figures such as the piratical Hayrettin Barbarossa, whom the Spanish dubbed ‘the king of evil'; and two astonishing set-piece battles, the siege of Malta and battle of Lepanto, that witnessed to the sort of savagery and sheer bloody-minded heroism that make one's hair stand on end. Crowley is a former publisher rather than a fully fledged academic, but his scholarship is sure-footed, and his narrative skills an old-fashioned delight.

POMPEII: The Life of a Roman Town by MARY BEARD
Profile £25
Much of what you think you know about Pompeii may turn out, on reading this eye-opening book, to be wrong. The town was not full of brothels (Beard counts only one), its water engineering, pace the novelist Robert Harris, was pretty substandard (there may have been aqueducts, but there were no sewers) anàd the site didn't lie undisturbed until the 18th century (many townspeople, for instance, came back soon afterwards to dig up their valuables). Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge, always wears her learning lightly, and in this outstanding book she has excelled herself, puncturing preconceptions and exposing a whole layer of myth about the world's best-preserved ancient town. The result is an often gripping piece of detective work that also offers a tantalising window into the reality of daily Roman life.

STONEHENGE by ROSEMARY HILL
Profile £15.99
“So many ideas to so few facts makes for an unstable compound.” So says Hill in the introduction to her intelligent and often witty history of the myriad theories that have grown up around Stonehenge. We actually know remarkably little about the world's most famous megalithic structure (Hill dispenses with most of what we do know within a few pages), but that hasn't stopped historians and archeologists since the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12th century coming up with often madcap theories. Roman temple, tomb of Boadicea, druidic religious site, giant observatory - all these ideas and more are examined this refreshingly unmocking book.

THE WHITE WAR: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 by MARK THOMPSON
Faber £25
It is astonishing to think that the Italians lost more infantry in the mountains in the first world war than the British did on the western front. On at least six occasions, the Austrian troops facing them, sick of the slaughter, simply stopped shooting and pleaded with their opponents to turn back. This remarkable and often heart-rending book is the first proper narrative account in English of this forgotten corner of the conflict. The arrogance and incompetence of the generals, and the suffering of their men, make for bracing reading.

UNIVERSE OF STONE: Chartres Cathedral and theTriumph of the Medieval Mind by PHILIP BALL
Bodley Head £20
The ultimate expression of the 12th-century European Renaissance, the embodiment of the high-gothic style, deposit of the secret codes and lost secrets of the Freemasons, druids and Knights Templars - Chartres cathedral has been hailed as all these things and more. Ball's fascinating history of this iconic 13th-century building deconstructs the edifice stone by stone, theory by theory, he goes in search of the people and ideas that produced it. As much a primer about the general nostrums behind the gothic style as a specific exploration of the building itself, Ball's book is particularly instructive on the practical realities of cathedral-building: it's no use searching for an architect for this extraordinary edifice, he informs us, as the medieval world didn't generally have them.

ANYTHING GOES: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties by LUCY MOORE
Atlantic £19.99
One could, if one wished, complain about the lack of notes in Moore's latest book, or the lack of original research or, indeed, real argument. But that would be to ignore the great strength of this delightful canter through the history of America in the 1920s - the author's zestful way with a story. Made considerably more relevant by the recent credit crunch, Anything Goes skips over the decade's most famous emblems, from Al Capone and Charlie Chaplin to the Ku Klux Klan and the Scopes trial in Tennessee, with all the spirit of a Prohibition party.

RESISTANCE: Memoirs of Occupied France by AGNES HUMBERT
Bloomsbury £14.99
The second world war continues to produce truckloads of academic works, most of them worthy but often rather laborious for the general reader. How much more rewarding is this spirited first-hand account of the war, written in 1946 by an art historian who was one of the first to join the resistance against Hitler, was betrayed to the Gestapo in 1941 and then spent much of the rest of the conflict scrabbling for survival as a slave worker in Germany? Humbert's book quickly became a classic in France, but has never previously been published in Britain. It is an astonishingly vivid testament to one woman's bravery, humanity and sheer dogged resilience, and, more than any number of academic tomes, it allows us to understand the visceral reality of life in this torrid period of history.

WARSAW 1920: Lenin's Failed Conquest of Europe by ADAM ZAMOYSKI
HarperPress£14.99
The battle of Warsaw in August 1920 is one of the great forgotten turning points of modern European history. Fighting a greatly superior force, Poland's ragtag army stopped and beat back a Soviet force bent on exporting communism to Germany and much of central Europe. In this fine piece of historical resurrection, Zamoyski writes with thrilling immediacy and dramatic effect about a conflict of huge import that has been overlooked by almost everyone but the Poles themselves.

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