HISTORY

Behind closed doors at No 10, brutalism pioneers, discussing free speech and the horrors of Gaza

- Pratinav Anil

We live in a hyperpolitical yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that's why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly held convictions still made waves in the real world.

In The Revolutionists, Jason Burke revisits the 1970s, when it seemed the future of the Middle East might end up red instead of green communist rather than Islamist. It's a geopolitical period piece: louche men with corduroy jackets and sideburns, women with submachine guns. Many were in it less for the Marxism than for the sheer mayhem.

Owen Hatherley turns to a gentler kind of insurgency in The Alienation Effect - a group biography of the architects, designers and directors from Mitteleuropa who washed up on Britain's shores in the middle of the last century. He gives us the forgotten radicals who put concrete into our skyline and shook us out of our complacency. Not everyone thanked them. Ian Fleming famously avenged brutalism by naming a Bond villain after one of its apostles, Ernő Goldfinger.

A brutalist edifice slightly further afield is the subject of Lyse Doucet's The Finest Hotel in Kabul. Here, the BBC correspondent offers an empathetic chronicle of Afghanistan's capital from the point of view of the Intercontinental - from its ballrooms and bikinis era in the 1970s to its function as a fortress staving off Taliban suicide bombers during the American occupation. It is, above all, a tribute to a people who, buffeted by invasion and civil war, remain cheerfully exuberant and fiercely resilient.

Richard Beck turns the lens inward in Homeland, adding the US itself to the roll call of nations ravaged by the reaction to 9/11. In baroque, Pynchonesque prose, he argues that the paranoia exported to Iraq and Afghanistan came home to roost in the homeland, ultimately mutating into authoritarian Trumpism.