| 2025 | Winner | Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler | Tim Bouverie | Unknown |
| 2024 | Winner | Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin | Sue Prideaux | W. W. Norton |
| 2023 | Winner | France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain | Julian Jackson | Harvard University Press |
| 2022 | Winner | The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown | Anna Keay | HarperCollins |
| 2021 | Winner | The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe | Mark Mazower | Penguin Press |
| 2020 | Winner | Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe | Judith Herrin | Princeton University Press |
| 2019 | Winner | A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths | John Barton | Allen Lane |
| 2018 | Winner | A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles De Gaulle | Julian Jackson | Allen Lane |
| 2017 | Winner | Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2016 | Winner | Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts | Christopher de Hamel | Allen Lane |
| 2015 | Winner | Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession | Ian Bostridge | Vintage Books |
| 2014 | Winner | Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory | Patrick McGuinness | Random House |
| 2013 | Winner | The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War | Lucy Hughes-Hallett | Fourth Estate |
| 2012 | Winner | Strindberg: A Life | Sue Prideaux | Yale University Press |
| 2011 | Winner | Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist | Robert Douglas-Fairhurst | Harvard University Press |
| 2010 | Winner | How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer | Sarah Bakewell | Vintage Books |
| 2009 | Winner | Trotsky: A Biography | Robert Service | Pan Macmillan |
| 2008 | Winner | American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer | Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin | Knopf |
| 2007 | Winner | The Discovery of France | Graham Robb | W. W. Norton |
| 2006 | Winner | The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 | William Dalrymple | Bloomsbury |
| 2005 | Winner | Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting on the Eastern Frontiers of the British Empire | Maya Jasanoff | Fourth Estate |
| 2004 | Winner | Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 | Mark Mazower | Vintage Books |
| 2003 | Winner | Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps | Anne Applebaum | Doubleday |
| 2002 | Winner | The Architect and His Wife | Jane Ridley | Unknown |
| 2001 | Winner | Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War | Margaret MacMillan | John Murray |
| 2000 | Winner | John Maynard Keynes, vol. 2: the Economist as Saviour 1920-1937 | Robert Skidelsky | Macmillan |
| 1999 | Winner | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism In Colonial Africa | Adam Hochschild | Mariner Books |
| 1998 | Winner | Coleridge: Darker Reflections | Richard Holmes | Hodder & Stoughton |
| 1997 | Winner | Frozen Desire: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money | James Buchan | Picador |
| 1996 | Winner | Thomas Cranmer: A Life | Diarmaid MacCulloch | Yale University Press |
| 1995 | Winner | Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth | Gitta Sereny | Knopf |
| 1994 | Winner | Curzon: Imperial Statesman | David Gilmour | John Murray |
| 1993 | Winner | A History of Warfare | John Keegan | Key Porter Books |
| 1992 | Winner | Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 | Peter Hennessy | Jonathan Cape |
| 1991 | Winner | Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius | Ray Monk | Random House |
| 1990 | Winner | Clever Hearts: Desmond and Molly Maccarthy: A Biography | Hugh Cecil, Mirabel Cecil | Orion |
| 1989 | Winner | Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life | Ian Gibson | Faber & Faber |
| 1988 | Winner | A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound | Humphrey Carpenter | Unknown |
| 1987 | Winner | The Fatal Shore | Robert Hughes | Knopf |
| 1986 | Winner | C. R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer, and Romantic Socialist | Alan Crawford | Yale University Press |
| 1985 | Winner | Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape,1849,1928 | Ann Thwaite | Oxford University Press |
| 1984 | Winner | Ivy When Young: The Early Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884-1919 | Hilary Spurling | Unknown |
| 1983 | Winner | Collected Poems | Peter Porter | Oxford University Press |
| 1982 | Winner | James Joyce | Richard Ellmann | Unknown |
| 1981 | Winner | Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among the Lions | Victoria Glendinning | Unknown |
| 1980 | Winner | Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart | Robert Bernard Martin | Oxford University Press |
| 1979 | Winner | Tenebrae | Geoffrey Hill | Unknown |
| 1978 | Winner | Life in the English Country House | Mark Girouard | Yale University Press |
| 1977 | Winner | Missing Persons | E. R. Dodds | Oxford University Press |
| 1976 | Winner | Mussolini's Roman Empire | Denis Mack Smith | Longman |
| 1975 | Winner | North | Seamus Heaney | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| 1974 | Winner | Wilfred Owen | Jon Stallworthy | Random House |
| 1973 | Winner | Alexander The Great | Robin Lane Fox | Penguin Books |
| 1972 | Winner | Virginia Woolf | Quentin Bell | Unknown |
| 1971 | Winner | Discoveries of Bones and Stones | Geoffrey Grigson | Macmillan |
| 1970 | Winner | Charles of Orleans: Prince & Poet | Enid McLeod | Viking |
| 1969 | Winner | The Man of Letters | John Gross | Unknown |
| 1968 | Winner | New Poems | Roy Fuller | Unknown |
| 1967 | Winner | The Peregrine | J. A. Baker | New York Review Books |
| 1966 | Winner | The Continent of Circe | Nirad C. Chaudhuri | Unknown |
| 1965 | Winner | Marcel Proust | George Painter | Chatto & Windus |
| 1964 | Winner | The World of the Shining Prince | Ivan Morris | Unknown |
| 1963 | Winner | John Keats: The Making of a Poet | Aileen Ward | Secker & Warburg |
| 1962 | Winner | The Franco-Prussian War | Michael Howard | Routledge |
| 1961 | Winner | Joseph Conrad | Jocelyn Baines | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| 1960 | Winner | Collected Poems | Andrew Young | Unknown |
| 1959 | Winner | Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese | Patrick Leigh Fermor | John Murray |
| 1958 | Winner | Collected Poems | John Betjeman | Macmillan |
| 1957 | Winner | Bitter Lemons | Lawrence Durrell | Unknown |
| 1956 | Winner | Gallipoli | Alan Moorehead | Unknown |