Can anyone see a pattern emerging?

There’s rarely been a more urgent time to get a grip on global politics. Here’s one easy way to do it

With the United States in racial turmoil and Covid19 bringing life to a halt, 2020 was the year when the world really did look in danger of coming apart. Yet for those who could resist the temptation to retreat into comfort reading and Netflix binges, lockdown offered plenty of time to mug up on the globe’s more worrying fault lines – such as the schism between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and why it threatens to plunge the Middle East into war.

This was a prospect that loomed frighteningly large in January, when a US drone strike killed General Qassem Soleimani, the mastermind behind Iran’s bid to create a “Shia crescent” from Syria to Yemen. To understand why the Sunni monarchs of Saudi Arabia feel so threatened by Iran, try Black Wave by Kim Ghattas ( Wildfire, £ 20), which charts the two nations’ ever-intensifying hostility since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 Islamic revolution. The titular “Black Wave” refers to the pernicious tide of extremism that Saudi Arabia has promoted across the Middle East over the past 40 years, motivated largely by its holierthan- thou rivalry with Shia Iran. Filled with the testimony of everyone from liberal intellectuals to grizzled ex- militants, Ghattas’s book is also a fine overview of the modern Middle East, which itself is no mean feat.

Should that Sunni-Shia war ever erupt, the man likely to be in charge at the Saudi end is its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, aka MBS. Given that he’s only 35, he could be in power until around 2060 – which means that Ben Hubbard’s MBS ( William Collins, £20) is unlikely to be wasted reading. Biographies of Saudi rulers used to be somewhat dull, unless you had an interest in conservative gerontocrats who upheld the status quo. But MBS has changed all that, boldly reforming while also allegedly ordering the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Hubbard is a diligent guide to MBS’s 21st- century court, including his intrigues with the Trump White House.

The Black Wave described by Ghattas has had a huge impact on Pakistan, where imported Saudi conservatism fuelled the rise of the Taliban. Today, the country is an uneasy mix of bloodthirsty militants, whisky-sipping liberals and unruly rural tribes, ruled over – sort of – by an all-powerful military with a formidable spy network, the ISI. It is a network that ex-New York Times Pakistan correspondent Declan Walsh knows well, because in 2013 the ISI tailed him for months and then kicked him out, citing his “undesirable” reporting in Pakistan’s more restive corners.

That nosiness now reaps rich rewards in The Nine Lives of Pakistan ( Bloomsbury, £20), in which one of the spooks who tailed him even gets in touch after claiming asylum abroad. This, though, is not a journo-centric account: the “nine lives” of the title are the cast of heroes, martyrs and likeable rogues through which Walsh tells the often bloody story of modern Pakistan. Indeed, by the time Walsh had finished the book, five of his subjects had died violently.

In The Cubans ( Bodley Head, £ 20), Anthony DePalma tells the stories of long-suffering residents to reveal the downsides of Castro’s socialist paradise. Unlike many who write about Cuba, DePalma is not misty-eyed, and his tales of disillusioned insiders are particularly poignant. One apparatchik, after a life spent rising through the Communist hierarchy, realises the revolution is “lost” when she is given a private hospital room reserved for party officials, complete with television.

Corruption on a grander scale is to be found in Cuba’s old sponsor Russia. In Putin’s People ( William Collins, £ 25), Catherine Belton reveals the staggering extent of post-Soviet graft. The ex-Financial Times Moscow correspondent reveals how a combination of venal apparatchiks, City of London lawyers and money-laundering scams like the “Moldovan laundromat” have salted away untold billions.

Finally, in a year where so much of life moved online, global politics are being shaped ever more by social media. And just like the real world, it has some nasty corners. In Going Dark ( Bloomsbury, £16.99),

Julia Ebner engineers encounters with everyone from Islamic State brides to far-Right loons of the conspiracy website QAnon, whose wilder ideas make David Icke seem reasonable. If you want to know why 5G masts are being vandalised on suspicion of spreading Covid-19, and why so many Americans insist the election was rigged, this is the book for you.