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2025 has been an excellent year for political books, so the yPolitics team put together a collection of our favourites from this year.
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Hillary Clinton strikes me as a politician who continues to struggle with how she is being perceived. In Something Lost, Something Gained, she paints herself as a modern-day Cassandra, a woman harbouring visions of a dark future whose warnings and pleas were not taken seriously. It is abundantly clear that the 2016 Presidential Election was the ‘something lost’ which Clinton alludes to in the title of her book; but there is more pain in her writing than mere regret could conjure. Hillary Clinton firmly believes that the United States lost when it gained Donald Trump as their 45th President.
Something Lost, Something Gained is presented as a series of op-eds. Some are more personal (and often, by extension, more gripping) than others. ‘This Remarkable Sisterhood’ is a chapter which covers the relationship between the former First Ladies, centring on the 2023 funeral of Roselynn Carter. The presence of Melania Trump at the funeral had been a surprise to the Clintons, and she is described as having the demeanour of “the little kid at the birthday party who doesn’t know anyone and is waiting at the edge of the circle, hoping people are going to be nice.” The current First Lady is depicted in this chapter as far more human than the cold, robotic, and vacant person which Melania Trump can seem like. Yet Clinton’s writing here does not evoke a sense of sympathy towards the First Lady. Rather, it shows a reverence towards institutions and precedence which have shaped Clinton’s public life post-2016—not least her attendance at his 2017 inauguration.
‘White Scarves’ is another highlight of the memoir. In it, Clinton describes her efforts at helping “roughly one thousand” vulnerable Afghan women and their family members to be evacuated following the victory of the Taliban following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Clinton describes manning the phones in a makeshift situation room that was set-up to aid the rescue operation. Securing the safety of so many women amidst terrorist attacks and Taliban questioning is depicted as a nothing short of a military operation in and of itself. Though she doesn’t refer to him in this chapter, one wonders whether the 45th and 47th President of the United States would ever sacrifice so much of his time and energy to preserve the safety of anyone other than himself.
At its best, Something Lost, Something Gained offers not only insightful reflections, but a glimpse at what a Rodham Clinton Presidency (as Clinton speculates she wanted to refer to it as) would have looked like. At its worst, there is still the sense that Clinton is struggling to portray herself as anything other than “the woman who almost stopped Donald Trump”. It is true that many of Clinton’s warnings about him came true—indeed, there’s a whole section in the index dubbed “Trump, Donald … Hillary’s warnings about (2016)”. Yet this lingering resentment towards former FBI director James Comey (who famously re-opened the investigation of Clinton’s emails just before polling day), and the thinly-veiled disdain with which Clinton views many of Trump’s voters does little to rehabilitate her public knowledge. Something Lost, Something Gained shows the reader what could have been; and if Clinton makes one thing clear, it’s that it should have been her.
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2025 can easily be characterised as the year of AI. We've seen a significant roll out and the vast improvement in AI products, eye watering investments in AI companies and AI infrastructure like data centres, and headlines like chip company Nvidia reaching a $5tn valuation. In 2025 AI became integrated into everyday life, and it doesn't seem like this will slow down in 2026. That's why Empire of AI by Karen Hao, published in May, is such an authoritative book on the subject and essential reading for understanding how we got where we are and ultimately where this might lead us. Karen Hao started covering Sam Altman and his (then) nonprofit OpenAI all the way back in 2019 when it was an upbeat company who she thought were the 'good guys' of AI. What follows is a deep dive into the company and it's global impacts, from the slums of Nairobi to data labelling companies in Columbia.
The book is based on over 300 interviews with 260 people for the book, around half of the interviews were with 90 current or former OpenAI executives or employees, or people who had access to the company. With plenty more interviews with individuals from competing AI companies or people close to Sam Altman. This inside access provides for a fascinating read, there have been few books this year that I've raced through like Empire of AI.
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The Labour government have made a mess and there are few better ways to understand this mess than by reading Get In. Based on insider access, extensive leaks of party documents and WhatsApp messages, Get In provides you with the all important inside track on the Labour government.
You would expect Keir Starmer to be the focus of the book (being the Labour leader and his face being plastered on the front cover) but instead the focus is Morgan McSweeney, the current Downing Street Chief of Staff who was instrumental in putting Starmer in Number 10 in the summer of 2024. The book recounts the enormous turnaround the party undertook under McSweeney's leadership, his subterfuge and efforts to repress the left wing of the party. The book takes you inside the rooms where pivotal decisions are made, like McSweeney's kitchen cabinet, a secret group of like minded senior Labour individuals who would meet in secret on Sunday evenings at the home of Roger Liddle the Labour peer. The book is a rollercoaster, from Starmer's failure at the Hartlepool byelection to his success in having the Labour Conference sing the national anthem after the death of Queen Elizabeth, and the tensions with senior individuals like Sue Gray (of Covid report fame) who was pushed out the door as Chief of Staff. Get In provides you with a far greater understanding of how and why the Labour government is where it is.
Honourable mention to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
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In On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization, political commentator and journalist Douglas Murray intricately reports on the barbaric atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, and the subsequent betrayal of democratic values that took place in the aftermath of the attack.
Murray reveals the perseverance of antisemitism and its masked identity as a plight against Israel, through uncovering ‘anti-Israel’ protests that were organised almost instantaneous of the attack, in which calls for Jews to be killed were prominent. His argument throughout is the clash civilisation is facing in the form of death cults, and inaction institutions (including U.S. Universities) are partaking in when faced with support for them.
Douglas Murray presents consistently justified arguments, and engages and deliberates with counterarguments such as the ‘proportionality argument’. Despite touching on previous conflicts in this region on occasion, Murray does not give an historic summary of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and focuses on Western resolve and solutions, as this is what the book aims to achieve.
In a political landscape were people make audacious claims about a significant conflict they are uninformed on, ‘On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilisation’ is Douglas Murray’s response, providing clarity to those that seek a substantive and well-informed understanding of the Israel-Hamas war, from its origins to its aftermath. Rating: 4.5/5.
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A collection of essays on Stewart’s encounters and introspections on life in Cumbria, his former constituency. His lessons are imbued with the rich historical roots of the area which changed hands so many times between the Anglo Saxons, Brittonic Celts, Scots and more. Above all, Stewart relays a powerful message about the functioning of democracy and political engagement in deeply rural areas, and reflections on his personal struggles when attempting to represent an electorate with diverse views and interests.
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Released in 2023, If We Burn asks the question of why we saw the most protests this decade but no corresponding revolutionary change? The author, Vincent Bevin is an international journalist and used his connections to travel from the Arab Spring to Hong Kong, and Chile to Brazil, along with six other countries that recently erupted with mass street movements, to investigate why there was a missing revolution to follow. I found it a compelling read as Bevins is less interested in the spectre of protest but instead puts emphasis on what needs to happen after a successful one occurs. When you take down a system, it is not guaranteed that a better one is going to take its place. He details many case studies that show this. Unclaimed political power exerts an opportunity for anyone that might want it and usually that’s the best funded, best organised or most ruthless option. It’s all good knocking central figures off the stage, but only if you have good understudies. I think this book is very relevant as he discusses the limitations of digitally organised, leaderless movements that defined much of the recent period. While these protests demonstrated extraordinary capacity for mass coordination, their horizontal structures often struggled to translate momentum into institutional power. This book does not romanticise protest, nor does it dismiss it. It delves deeper in what it actually takes to transform society. Resistance is often celebrated as an end in itself but we need to not be premature and focus on what comes next, and who is prepared to build it?
Thanks for reading what we've been reading! We'd love to hear what you think, drop me an email to jamie@ypolitics.co.uk
Jamie is a final year student at the Uni of Bath. He's most interested in the politics of tech & AI. Outside of politics he loves playing cricket and running.
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