The End of Byzantium John Harris (Yale, £25) The assault on the bastions of Constantinople in 1453, with its attendant rape and slaughter, is one of the pillars of East-West conflict that never fails to attract historians. Harris is fully in command of this Islamic conquest and records a saga seething with treachery and avarice with rich political overtones and giant cannonades. Christendom is at flashpoint in this scholarly journey into a barbaric age.

Mission to China Mary Laven (Faber, £17.99) Praised for her study of nuns in medieval Venice, Laven now follows in the footsteps of the Italian priest Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits who bravely pioneered Christianity in China. Laven enters this new world, like the missionaries themselves, with a passion for the unknown and the challenges that lie ahead. She writes with powerful lyricism about culture in the Ming dynasty.

A World on Fire Amanda Foreman (Allen Lane, £30) The British were engaged in two American wars — that led by Washington in the Revolution of 1775-81 and when the White House was burned in 1812. When two Confederate commissioners are seized from a British frigate off the Bahamas during the American Civil War, there is an immense clamour for a third. In this magisterial book, the famed author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire looks at the deadly game played across the Atlantic as Lincoln’s Union forces fought the south under General Lee. A fresh British-American outbreak might have been a close-run thing, as Foreman lavishly portrays.