This comprehensive collection of personal correspondence between Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine has been authoritatively edited by their daughter Mary Soames. It is a hugely enjoyable volume as full of engaging family tittle-tattle as it is of monumental world events. Winston and Clementine married in 1908 and regularly corresponded until the year before Winston died in 1965. Reading these letters together they form what Mary Soames accurately calls "a lifelong dialogue". They were very different people-Clementine being far more earnest, morally inflexible and a greater worrier than her husband-but they both genuinely loved as well as respected each other. In a letter Winston sent from the Dardanelles in 1915-to be opened in the event of his seemingly likely death-he not only explains how "since I met you my darling one I have been happy", he also formally commends his wife for teaching him "how noble a woman's heart can be". These letters were mostly written for each other's eyes only and Winston is always candid even about secrets from the heart of World War II. Using the most feeble of code names-Colonel Warden and Mrs Warden at one time-he happily gossips about colleagues and strategy in the certain knowledge that his indiscretion will not be exposed by his wife. A remarkable testament to an exceptional political and personal partnership. -Nick Wroe.

The prolific Scottish historian Alison Weir, in her new book Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley, grapples painstakingly with a mystery that has dogged history for centuries. At midnight on February 9 1567, a violent explosion ripped apart Kirk o'Field, the Edinburgh residence of Lord Darnley, the 20-year-old King and second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. His unmarked body was found lying under a tree, together with that of his valet. The cause of his death and its perpetrators have remained obscured since that night, though Mary was a prime suspect in her husband's murder. Her apparent apathy regarding the murder investigation was regarded with deep suspicion but more incriminating were the infamous "Casket" letters, said to have been written by her to her lover Lord Bothwell, the supposed architect of Darnley's assassination. Yet if Mary had good reasons for wanting her (Catholic) husband dead, then so had much of Scottish nobility. Using contemporary evidence Weir argues exhaustively that the letters could have been the work of forgers employed by Protestant lords "laying snares for the queen". Sympathetic to Elizabeth I, intent on justifying Mary's subsequent imprisonment and forcing her abdication, the prospect of a young foreign Catholic queen, unversed in diplomacy, refusing a Protestant alliance through marriage was anathema to the Scottish lords. Weir's book claims that Mary's fate was sealed as much by the country of which she was monarch as by Elizabethan England. Alison Weir's carefully researched addition to the wealth of material on the myth and reality of Mary Queen of Scots is too long, at 600 pages, but nevertheless makes for a thoughtful, scholarly and compelling read. [+]

Archbishop Desmond Tutu stands alongside Nelson Mandela as one of the most iconic figures of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. As Archbishop of Cape Town throughout the 1980s, Tutu came to symbolise dignified, rational opposition to the iniquities of the apartheid regime, a faithful irreverence for unjust authority that led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984. In 1995 he took up his greatest challenge: he was appointed Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the remarkable yet harrowing attempt by South Africans to come to terms with the gross violations of human rights committed throughout the apartheid era by offering amnesty and forgiveness rather than punishment and dismissal. No Future without Forgiveness is Tutu's remarkable personal memoir of his time as Chair of the Commission. It records his insistence on the need to discover a "third way" in the healing of the national psyche, and his powerful belief that "we can indeed transcend the conflicts of the past, we can hold hands as we realise our common humanity". Yet what is so striking about this memoir is his appreciation of the personal cost that the painful testimony of the Commission caused. He grapples with the theological, political and ethical objections to the Commission, as well as offering an absorbing account of the fall of apartheid, the birth of the Commission, and his own lifelong fight for justice and equality. The book offers uncompromising, often horrific, accounts of atrocities and sickening human brutality, from the emotive cases of Steve Biko and Winnie Mandela to the cases of "the little people": those whose voices are so often drowned out or forgotten in the process of political transformation. Tutu's characteristic humour, resilience and compassion are evoked in this memoir in a way that demonstrates how essential they have been to his unique political style and his ability to get results where all others failed. He recalls during the darkest days of apartheid's "vicious awfulness" when preaching about God's authority being "frequently tempted to whisper in God's ear, 'For goodness sake, why don't You make it more obvious that You are in charge?'"No Future without Forgiveness could be profitably read alongside Antje Krog's equally compelling Country of My Skull, as it considers the emotional toll that such a process of national soul searching has had upon its participants. [+]

Georgiana Spencer was, in a sense, an 18th-century "It Girl". She came from one of England's richest and most landed families, and married into another. She was, beautiful, sensitive, and extravagant. Acquainted fairly young with Charles James Fox, her move from parties to Parties led her to become the intimate of ministers and princes, and she canvassed assiduously for the Whig cause, most famously in the Westminster election of 1784. By turns she was caricatured and fawned on by the press, and she provided the inspiration for Lady Teazle in Sheridan's School For Scandal. But, luckily for her biographer, she also had weaknesses that were to taint her life. As gin gripped the masses, so gambling thralled the aristocracy. By 1784 Georgiana owed "many, many, many thousands", and the creditors she acquired dogged her until her death, but the sterility of her marriage meant that she never came close to disclosing the magnitude of her debts. Amanda Foreman describes astutely the mess that was personal relationships for the aristocratic subculture (Georgiana and the Duke engaged for many years in a ménage à trois with Lady Elizabeth Fraser, who inveigled her way into his bed and her heart). She is, by her own admission, a little in love with her subject, which can lead to occasional lapses of perspective, but generally it adds zest to a narrative built on, rather than burdened by, scholarship, that is at once accessible and learned. [+]

Carlos Eire's memoir of his childhood in Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy explodes off the page with the smells, sights, and sounds of the tropics. But the most interesting aspect of his story is the story of the Revolution from a boy too young to know exactly what's happening. Just nine-years-old when Castro and his fellow revolutionaries overthrew Batista, Eire watched as relatives were arrested, property confiscated, and rights lost. Naturally, it was a confusing time for the boy, as his whole world was turned upside-down by factors both visible, such as militiamen, and invisible. "I woke up to the fact that something had gone awfully wrong with the world that day," writes Eire. "We stood there for a while, all of us, asking questions, complaining. it was the sheer shock of encountering a stupid rule that kept us there, loitering under the marquee. " The rule? The movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was suddenly off-limits to minors. [+]

In the year following South Africa's first democratic elections, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to investigate human rights abuses committed under the apartheid regime. Presided over by God's own diplomat, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the first hearings of the commission were held in April 1996. During the following two years of hearings, South Africans were daily exposed to traumatic revelations and public testimony about their traumatic past, and-like the world that looked on-continued to discover that the relationship between truth and reconciliation is far more complex than they had ever imagined. Antjie Krog, a prominent South African poet and journalist, led the South African Broadcasting Corporation team that for two years reported daily on the hearings. Like the Truth Commission itself, Krog's Country of My Skull gives central prominence to the power of the testimony of the victims, combining the reportage skills of the journalist with the poet's ability to let previously unheard voices emerge with their stories. Extreme forms of torture, abuse and state violence were the daily fare of the Truth Commission. Many of those involved with its proceedings, including Krog herself, suffered personal stresses-ill health, mental breakdown, dissolution of relationships-in the face of both the relentless onslaught of the truth, and the continuing subterfuges of unrelenting perpetrators. Krog's painful but precise account captures the essential character of the Truth Commission; that it was not a court convened to expose and punish culpability, but a forum for the new, still deeply divided, nation to bare its soul. Many, including clinical psychologist Nomfundo Walaza have argued that the creation of guilt was not the real purpose of the commission: "In essence we are dealing here with a definition of humanity…whites with their self-centred, selfish, capitalistic character have never been able to fathom the essence of humanity. " Trying to fathom the essence of humanity, the depth of the voices of ordinary people, her country, and her self, is at the core of Krog's remarkable and uniquely challenging account. [+]