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Kang Chol-Hwan is the first person to have documented his experiences in a North Korean gulag. In this memoir he recalls a happy childhood spent collecting tropical fish before, at nine years old, he and his family were arrested because of his grandfather’s ‘treason’. He describes the forced labour and near starvation he endured, and the executions he was forced to witness, before his release and flight to the South.

Mining the vast secret police archives of the German Democratic Republic (Stasi), Romania (Securitate) and Hungary (ÁVO, later ÁVH), this volume of eight scholarly essays unlocks the stories of love, crime, espionage, betrayal and revenge gathered and recorded by Soviet-style surveillance and its armies of collaborators and informants.

David Cameron’s former Director of Communications offers a day-by-day account the six months leading to the EU membership referendum in June 2016, the machinations of the Brexit campaigners, conflict within the Conservative party, and the aftermath of the shock result.

Aimen Dean was a bomb maker for al-Qaeda and was well respected in the organization, but grew sceptical of their philosophy and defected to become an MI6 agent. Recalling his life as a spy, which included meeting Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and many other key figures, his extraordinary memoir provides a deep insight into the terrorists’ world.

As the Cairo bureau chief of the New York Times from 2011 to 2015, Kirkpatrick arrived in Egypt shortly before the popular uprising against the Mubarak regime; he watched as a new president was elected and then deposed in a military coup that brought a ferocious crackdown on dissent. This eyewitness account of the turmoil combines analysis of Egyptian politics with the author’s experiences among ordinary people caught up in perplexing and heartbreaking events.

In 2018 Latvia’s politicians released KGB files seized when the Soviet Union collapsed almost three decades earlier. Alongside eyewitness interviews, they form the basis of this disturbing account of 50 years of tyranny that saw dissidents tortured and killed and 45,000 exiled to the gulags.

Formed in 1938, the ‘Propagandakompanien’ (Pk) comprised motorized units of reporters, film cameramen and photographers, all with military training and attached to Wehrmacht, Waffen SS or Luftwaffe forces. Reproducing many of the unit’s wartime photographs, this volume gives a full account of the organization of the Pk and describes their work in print, film and radio during campaigns in Poland, France and on the Eastern Front.

During the Second World War, the Ministry of Information (MOI) was created to issue ‘national propaganda’, including books, pamphlets, postcards and posters that would maintain morale at home and influence opinion abroad. In 2000, the Ministry’s archive of wartime publications was deposited in the British Library. Drawing on that material, and illustrating 139 examples, Welch’s book demonstrates the range and inventiveness of MOI’s output, whether mobilizing for war, promoting thrift and well-being, celebrating victories or rousing people against the enemy.

Conversation topics in this collection of wide-ranging interviews with broadcaster David Barsamian include American exceptionalism, the nature of activism, opposition to political orthodoxy and the need for solidarity.