Best book I’ve read this year: Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress, by James Morris. Has any book ever come with a less gripping title or a more unappealing cover? But it turns out what say is true, at least in this case. It’s fantastic.

This the first in Morris’s three-volume history of British imperialism, and no matter how much you thought you knew about the Sepoy Mutiny or the British Army’s horrifying retreat from Kabul in the winter of ’42, or the Jamaican rebellion of 1869, you’ll learn something interesting you didn’t know. I read the chapter on the Irish potato famine on a bumpy flight to Oregon and found it so ghoulishly compelling, I didn’t want to land. Morris spent years as a journalist and travel writer (before becoming in later life one of the world’s most famous transsexuals, changing his name to Jan), and has the rare ability to combine an historian’s rigor with a newspaperman’s eye for spine-tingling detail.