Iain Dale's Book Club Archives

Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War

Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership―territorial, economic, political, and cultural―provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic. […Learn More]

Prisoners of the Castle: An Epic Story of Survival and Escape from Colditz, the Nazis’ Fortress Prison

In this gripping narrative, Ben Macintyre tackles one of the most famous prison stories in history and makes it utterly his own. During World War II, the German army used the towering Colditz Castle to hold the most defiant Allied prisoners. For four years, these prisoners of the castle tested its walls and its guards with ingenious escape attempts that would become legend. […Learn More]

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Plane

For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.

Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever. […Learn More]

Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

An “absorbing, provocative, and far-reaching” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) look at what power is, who gets it, and what happens when they do, based on over 500 interviews with those who (temporarily, at least) have had the upper hand—from the creator of the Power Corrupts podcast and Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas. […Learn More]

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III

The last king of America, George III, has been ridiculed as a complete disaster who frittered away the colonies and went mad in his old age. The truth is much more nuanced and fascinating–and will completely change the way readers and historians view his reign and legacy. […Learn More]

Sand and Steel: The D-Day Invasion and the Liberation of France

Peter Caddick-Adams’s account of the Allied invasion of France in June 1944 matches the monumental achievement of his book on the Battle of the Bulge, Snow and Steel, which Richard Overy has called the “standard history of this climactic confrontation in the West.” Sand and Steel gives us D-Day, arguably the greatest and most consequential military operation of modern times, beginning with the years of painstaking and costly preparation, through to the pitched battles fought along France’s northern coast, from Omaha Beach to the Falaise and the push east to Strasbourg. […Learn More]

Orwell: A Man Of Our Time

A vivid portrait of the man behind the writings.

One of the most popular and controversial writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell’s work is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime. Possibly, in the age of Brexit, Trump, and populism, even more so. Doublethink features in Nineteen Eighty-Four and is the forerunner to Fake News. Orwell foresaw the creation of the EU and more significantly he predicted that post-Imperial xenophobia would cause Britain to leave it. […Learn More]

Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War

“An eye-opening narrative that makes for exciting but at times uncomfortable reading as one reflects on possible lessons for the present.”—Antonia Fraser, author of Mary Queen of Scots

On a wet afternoon in September 1938, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stepped off an airplane and announced that his visit to Hitler had averted the greatest crisis in recent memory. It was, he later assured the crowd in Downing Street, “peace for our time.” Less than a year later, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. […Learn More]

Operation Barbarossa: The History of a Cataclysm

Author of an acclaimed history of the Battle of the Atlantic during World War Two (OUP 2016), Jonathan Dimbleby now offers a compelling account of the largest military operation not only of World War Two but of all time–the invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany in 1941. Often seen as the turning
point of the war in Europe, Operation Barbarossa turned allies into mortal enemies, triggering the atrocities that would characterize the Holocaust. […Learn More]