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Peter Gatrell’s The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present is a tour de force, bringing together personal accounts of the fears, suffering and hopes of those on the move across postwar Europe. It also provides an incisive analysis of the factors that drove mass migration to and within Europe.

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of the British Underclass, by Darren McGarvey, won this year’s Orwell prize for political books.

It has quite a backstory. McGarvey, aka Loki, a rapper and columnist, grew up in extreme poverty in Pollok on the outskirts of Glasgow. He battled addiction and homelessness in his teens and early adulthood. It was only because he crowdfunded Poverty Safari that he was able to write it at all. But such was the power of its argument that it quickly rose up bestseller lists and has been praised by many liberals. This is no mean feat for a book that is not only hard-hitting, but that also shows the negative consequences of the ‘well-meaning but privileged assumptions’ of a rather paternalistic left-leaning elite.

There is a common misconception today that fascist rule in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s was an outcome of the ‘will of the people’ and that ‘too much democracy’ led to the meteoric rise of Hitler. Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, published in 1988, shows that, on the contrary, the Nazis only succeeded because the ruling class was all too ready to turn its back on a fragile democracy.

The political journey of Jerry Barnett, the author of Porn Panic! Sex and Censorship in the UK, has been a fascinating if rather unusual one. His grandfather, Albert, was among the thousands of Jews, locals and Communists who fought off Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts when they tried to march through the Jewish East End in 1936. The Battle of Cable Street, as it became known, was an inspiring example of people taking matters into their own hands. ‘Women threw heavy pots out of the windows on to the fascists’ heads. The police deployed their truncheons against the protesters, but were beaten back, along with the fascists’, writes Barnett. Albert’s daughter, Jerry Barnett’s mother, was also politically active – in the Women’s Lib movement in the 1960s, campaigning for equal rights and sexual liberation. He himself joined the socialist Militant Tendency in the 1970s. But after Margaret Thatcher’s historic defeat of the miners in 1985, Barnett, like many on the left, dropped out of politics.