Tom Holland

In Who Dares Wins: Britain, 1979–1982 (Allen Lane), Dominic Sandbrook continues his brilliant history of modern Britain by taking us into the eighties, and the first years of Thatcher’s government. The political manoeuvrings of 1979–82 are traced with a novelistic verve that would have done credit to House of Cards, but Sandbrook’s interests range much further afield than Whitehall and Westminster. Ian Botham, Simon Le Bon and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy all have starring roles. The entry under ‘Bowie, David’ in the index is worth buying the book for alone.

Less entertaining, perhaps, is the index to Richard Stoneman’s The Greek Experience of India (Princeton) – but the book itself has no need of racy indexes to enthral the reader. The question of what influences Greeks and Indians might have had on each other in the centuries that followed Alexander the Great is one that has always simultaneously fascinated and frustrated historians – so huge gratitude is due to Stoneman for shedding as much light on the issue as anyone is ever likely to.

Equally adept at illuminating reaches of the past long lost to darkness is Mike Pitts’ Digging Up Britain (Thames & Hudson), which gives us 10 eye-opening portraits of recent archaeological discoveries. Yet the illumination is always flickering, and what we have learnt invariably tantalising. As Pitts puts it: “If we know anything, it is that there is so much more we don’t know.”

Tom Holland’s most recent book is Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Little, Brown)