Christmas Books 2014: best history books to read The sea voyages of the slave ships offer stories of illimitable horror. But Greg Grandin weaves in layers of psychological complexity in The Empire of Necessity: the Untold Story of a Slave Rebellion in the Age of Liberty (Oneworld, £25). He explores the story of Captain Delano who, seeing a slave ship called the Tyral in trouble, got aboard and spent the day with the Spanish captain who had a "vacant stare" and a west African servant who would never leave his side. He initially failed to see the truth: that the slaves had overpowered their kidnappers. When he did understand, the fate of the rebels was hideous and the aftershocks of the incident were complex and harrowing. This was a story that had inspired Herman Melville; Grandin examines the moral quagmire into which so many sank, and restores identities to men who, as slaves, had been stripped of even that. Several centuries on and what happens when a man willingly gives his service to a mighty, distant empire and embarks on a journey to a lethal land? The Second World War story of Isaac Fadoyebo - a young Nigerian frustrated by lack of educational opportunity who volunteered to join the British Army to do battle with the Japanese in Burma - is hypnotically told by Barnaby Philips in Another Man's War (Oneworld, £20). Fadoyebo's harrowing experiences not only give a new angle and depth to once-familiar war stories; they are also a poignant reminder how just how extensive the debt we all owe is. And the scale of that conflict is still, even now, impossible to really absorb; the millions of ordinary lives that were plunged into hell. The Devil's Alliance: Hitler's Pact with Stalin by Roger Moorhouse (Bodley Head, £25) chillingly details the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression deal and - among other horrors - the resulting nightmare visited upon the people of Poland as they were invaded by both Germany and Russia, and the Holocaust that was made possible by these manoeuvres. A terrifying account of cynical diplomacy, deceit, untrammelled power and the echoes that can be heard even now. The moat of poppies at Tower Hill also allowed echoes to be heard. The conflict that distorted the entire 20th century becomes the subject of a quest in The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher (Chatto, £14.99). In a brilliant and haunting journey through the Balkans, following the shade of Gavrilo Princip, assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Butcher finds corners of modern-day Europe that are pretty much the same as they would have been 100 years ago. He also recalls his days as a young war correspondent in the Balkans in the Nineties and has an eye-rubbing encounter in Bosnia with the band Franz Ferdinand. And does death cast shadows before it? In The Fateful Year: England 1914 (Penguin, £9.99), Mark Bostridge paints a poignant and highly detailed portrait of Britain - its culture, politics, poetry, crime, even the affair between Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and young Venetia Stanley - before the apocalypse began. On the August bank holiday just days before war's declaration, millions headed for the seaside and all the amusements; but a few, speculating about newspaper headlines, were starting to feel the chill of that shadow. But was the 20th century unique for bloody upheaval - or indeed, conversely, human progress? In Centuries of Change (Bodley Head. £20) Ian Mortimer delves into the continent-convulsing developments of each epoch - cultural, scientific, even culinary. What, for instance, did the 1100s do for us? Actually, they brought us an unsung renaissance. All right, then: the 1500s? Schools of painting that changed the way we view ourselves and an evolution in individual identity. The 18th century, of course, brought the French Revolution. In How to Ruin a Queen (John Murray, £20), Jonathan Beckman dazzlingly rehabilitates Marie Antoinette in an atmospheric and evocative account of diamonds, fraud, intrigue and a 1785 case that stoked antiroyalist feeling in France; in among the vivid and colourful cast is the creepy Cagliostro, a nobleman rumoured to be immortal. But this is also a serious examination of the sometimes unlikely synecdoches - here a chain of diamonds symbolising a corrupt aristocracy - that can colour an entire era. Revolution of a different kind caused spiritual torment. In God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (Bodley Head, £25) Jessie Childs shakes off a sense of Reformation familiarity by focusing on one family, the Vauxes, who will not forsake their Catholic faith; with this concentrated human dimension, the suffocating fear, the concealment, the imprisonment and torture, is given fresh life, and makes the dilemma even more acute: one could either obey the queen - and risk hell - or obey the Pope and risk hell on Earth. All the way through, you ask: just how far would I go to protect and express my faith? This intense close-up approach gives a stunning view of the past in Common People: the History of an English Family (Fig Tree, £20) by Alison Light, an exploration of her own family in time. More than just a genealogical quest, this turns all sorts of historical preconceptions on their head - from needle-makers in small country towns in the industrial revolution to the sinister absence of so much documentation for tyrannical 19th-century workhouses, to the prevalence of unmarked graves in the early 20th century. This is by turns mesmeric and deeply moving; a poetic excavation of the very meaning of history.