Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (Allen Lane, £30) is a hugely impressive narrative of the making and breaking of the Nazi economy. The drama and recklessness with which the Germans managed their economic policy are powerfully conveyed.

Italy was in need of a comprehensive modern history to rank with Denis Mack Smith’s masterpiece of 50 years ago. Christopher Duggan has now provided it with The Force of Destiny (Allen Lane, £30), a brilliant work dealing equally with the successes of the national movement in the building of Italy and the long series of political failures that followed.

Digby Durrant

Fathers and Sons by Alexander Waugh (Headline, £8.99) about his extraordinary forebears starting with the Brute, his great-great-grandfather, who always carried a whip with an ivory handle with which he crushed a wasp on his wife’s cheek. His son Arthur was totally unlike his father, though siring a son, Evelyn, who was not entirely dissimilar, and whom he published, sometimes overruling his Board to do so. The author’s father, Auberon, described by Polly Toynbee as ‘effete, drunken, snobby, sneering, racist and sexist’, was to Alexander ‘a loyal, generous father ...I am honoured to be his pale shadow’.

James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, (Picador, £7.99). A doomed love between a Yale dropout and a French waitress and the irresistible car, the Delage, to drive them to those haunting small French hotels for the once-in-a-lifetime kind of love that’s always too hot to cool down. Bliss!

Marcus Berkmann

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