Book news
The latest history book news. Every story lists its sources and links to our review when we have one.
Latest story
Historian Timothy Snyder has given a wave of urgent interviews in October 2026, keeping On Tyranny firmly in the public conversation as democratic anxieties mount.
12 stories
Penguin Random House has announced The Laws of History by Yuval Noah Harari, set for global publication on 21 September 2027, promising six laws of historical change.
Sources: martincid.com, global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Mary Beard, author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, chairs the 2026 Booker Prize panel, with the winner announced 9 November 2026 at Old Billingsgate.
Sources: thebookerprizes.com, southbankcentre.co.uk
Francis Fukuyama's 2026 memoir In the Realm of the Last Man has sparked a wave of reviews revisiting his landmark theories on liberal democracy and political decay.
Sources: reason.com, nymag.com
Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu slams AI productivity hype and invokes the Why Nations Fail framework to argue for serious AI governance centered on workers.
Sources: fortune.com
F.A. Hayek's 1944 critique of central planning is being directly invoked by political commentators in 2026, with writers drawing explicit parallels between his warnings and current government interventions.
Sources: townhall.com, journals.uchicago.edu
Francis Fukuyama's forthcoming memoir In the Realm of the Last Man will arrive this fall, intertwining his personal history with fifty years of democratic crisis. The announcement revives interest in his landmark 2014 work Political Order and Political Decay.
Sources: news.wm.edu, fsi.stanford.edu
Profile Books has announced The Concise Laws of Human Nature, a condensed version of Robert Greene's 2018 behavioural psychology title, designed to reduce the barrier posed by the original volume's length.
Sources: profilebooks.com, penguinrandomhouse.com
A March 2026 Naked Capitalism analysis applied Sun Tzu's 2,500-year-old strategic framework to the ongoing Iran conflict, drawing fresh attention to the ancient text's use in contemporary geopolitical assessments.
Sources: nakedcapitalism.com, spencerguard.substack.com
Nassim Nicholas Taleb told Nikkei Asia that President Trump's unpredictable second administration fits the definition of a black swan — a rare, high-impact event that conventional forecasting fails to anticipate.
Sources: asia.nikkei.com, spectator.com
New research warning that American democracy has "settled into a diminished state" is prompting political scientists to revisit Alexis de Tocqueville's 19th-century classic for its analysis of civic life and democratic fragility.
Sources: theguardian.com, gutenberg.org
Vietnam War novelist Tim O'Brien has spoken publicly about the My Lai Massacre and its lasting moral weight in a new PBS interview, drawing on his own experience serving near the massacre site decades ago.
Sources: youtube.com, pbs.org
