CONFRONTING SADDAM HUSSEIN: George W Bush and the invasion of Iraq, by Melvyn P Leffler (Oxford University Press, £21.99)
It is 30 years since Saddam Hussein’s relentlessly brutal reign came to an end. The Butcher of Baghdad got dug out of a hole, about the same time as the US dug itself into one.
US historian Melvyn Leffler is known as a meticulous, perhaps even nitpicking, scholar, not a fast writer by any means. Yet his books are all the more valuable because of it, and he writes is the go-to book on the early East-West confrontation. In it, he takes particular care to detail how president Harry Truman decided the Soviets were an adversary, rather than a wayward friend.