A new wave of history books on the second world war is as predictable, and generally as grim, as death and taxes. The spring promises an anatomy of Auschwitz, Architects of Annihilation by Gots Aly and Susanne Heim (Weidenfeld, January), as well as Andrew Roberts's comparison of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership (Weidenfeld, February), a companion volume to his study of Napoleon and Wellington, and one which returns to the ground where, with his biography of Halifax and evisceration of Eminent Churchillians, he first made his name. A new examination of The Fall of France by Julian Jackson (Oxford, March) may explain how the French, and latterly the British armies, seemed powerless to resist the lightning advance of the German forces in barely two months in 1940.
Perhaps the most keenly awaited book on the second world war is the translation of the late WG Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction (Hamish Hamilton, February), in which he details the havoc wreaked on German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden by Allied bombing, and asks why German writers have been so reluctant to confront it. To British readers, of course, that will not be a new debate, and many of the books on the war next spring seem unlikely to surprise, however much they inform or disturb, from Martin Allen's The Hitler/Hess Deception (HarperCollins, February) to Nicholas Farrell's biography of Mussolini (Weidenfeld, April). But there is always something new to say, and Simon Kuper's Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe During the Second World War (Orion, January) should appeal to a wider audience than fans of the great Amsterdam club, whose supporters still wave an Israeli flag as a symbol of Amsterdam's Jewish heritage.
The new year may bring new war, of course, and it will certainly bring new confrontation between Islam and the west. The historical background to the clash of civilisations will be examined by Richard Fletcher in The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation (Allen Lane, March), and by Andrew Wheatcroft in Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam, 638-2002 (Viking, May).
Histories of the faithful also abound. Three great scholars of Christendom are publishing books early next year. HEJ Cowdrey moves his attentions from Pope Gregory VII to Lanfranc (Oxford, January), archbishop to the first two Norman kings and pre-eminent Italian scholar. The historian of crusading (as against crusading historian) Bernard Hamilton gives an overview of The Christian World in the Middle Ages (Sutton, February), and Patrick Collinson will publish a distilled version of a lifetime of scholarship in a short history of The Reformation (Weidenfeld, April). The engine of the Reformation in England, a Bible in the vernacular, will be studied by Adam Nicolson in The Power and the Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins, April), and by David Daniell in The Bible in English (Yale, April).
Television continues to set much of the popular historical agenda. Niall Ferguson's tie-in Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane, January) suggests, if his subtitle is anything to go by, an unapologetic approach. The star of our televison firmament, Simon Schama, pops up only to give extravagant praise to a forthcoming book on Antarctica, The Ice by Stephen J Pyne (Weidenfeld, February), of which he says: "A masterpiece ... one of the very greatest things written on the cultural history of the earth ever." OK?
Historical fashions change as arbitrarily as any other, so it is pleasing to see that some old favourites have been revisited. Lauro Martines returns to the Pazzi conspiracy in Florence in April Blood (Cape, February), a book which may pull off the trick of combining classic storytelling with impeccable scholarship. Perhaps the most ambitious subtitle of forthcoming months is to Frances Harris's Nobody's Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History (Yale, February).
If the second world war can always be relied on to provide books, who would have expected two on the reign of Edward II to crop up within a month? First comes Paul Doherty's Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II (Constable, February), closely followed by The Greatest Traitor, a life of Sir Roger Mortimer by his namesake (no relation) Ian (Cape, March). Sir Roger, as schoolboys used to know, was Isabella's lover and Edward's nemesis. Finally, for those who like their history bloody, there is Ben Rogers's Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation (Chatto, March), which will follow the cultural fortunes of our most defining dish.
· David Horspool is history editor of the TLS.
