A darkening future will always cast shadows over the past. Now that the global economy has hit an iceberg, the ship described by the Onion as "the world's largest metaphor" is bound to loom even larger in next year's centenary of its sinking than it would otherwise have done. I will be surprised, though, if anything is published on the theme better than Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic, or the Sinking of J Bruce Ismay (Bloomsbury, £18.99). Hauntingly original, it tells the story of the Titanic's owner, who rather than stay on board his sinking ship chose instead to jump into a lifeboat  and suffered a lifetime of obloquy as a result. At once a biography, a social history and a work of literary criticism, it is also, in its own subtle way, an evisceration of today's captains of finance, as they bob about in their state-funded lifeboats, while behind them the abandoned steerage passengers wait to plunge into the icy depths.

When the Carpathia arrived on the scene of the disaster, there was nothing to see but "boxes and coats and what looked like oil on the water". Norman Davies, in his immense  and immensely rewarding  new book Vanished Kingdoms (Allen Lane, £30) trawls for flotsam left by the shipwrecked states of Europe. Some, like the Byzantine empire or the Soviet Union, were once of a vast size; others were never remotely titanic. All, though, have found the perfect mourner in Davies: a man who has only to hear of a forgotten language to rush off and learn it. The inimitable qualities that have always made him so readable  extraordinary learning, a quixotic relish for the underdog, and an abiding conviction that the United Kingdom is about to break up any minute  have found their perfect showcase in this book. It is undoubtedly his best.

Isaiah would certainly have enjoyed it. "The nations," so the Old Testament prophet declared, "are like a drop from the bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales." Only Jerusalem would endure: a prophecy that hints at just what a challenge Simon Sebag Montefiore had to overcome in writing his triumphant biography of the city (Jerusalem, Weidenfeld, £25). Jerusalem has always been strategically and economically marginal  and yet somehow, over the course of its millennia-long history, it became enshrined as the capital of the world's imaginings. "House of the one God," as Sebag Montefiore puts it, "the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions." It is the mark of his achievement that a fast-paced and relentlessly entertaining book should also be so true to the yearnings of those who have seen, shimmering beyond the earthly city of rock and dust, a celestial Jerusalem.

Slaves too, transported from Africa to the New World, wept when they remembered Zion. Matthew Parker's The Sugar Barons (Hutchinson, £25) describes what happened to them in the plantations and factories of the Caribbean: a story brutal even by the standards of exploitation elsewhere in the Americas, and one fit to give anyone in this country with a sweet tooth pause. Alternately excoriating and scintillating, Parker's account blends an analysis of how slavery deformed Britain's early empire with narratives worthy of Conrad. It is a tale peopled by terrifying grotesques: captains of industry whose initiative, swagger and fortitude were more than matched by the monstrous scale of their crimes.

Another chiller is served up by Thomas Penn, who achieves the remarkable feat of making the reign of Henry VII seem more interesting than that of his son. Winter King (Allen Lane, £20) is well titled: the fingers of the first Tudor king, in Penn's account of his final years, are icy to the touch, and probe into every nook and cranny of the kingdom. Imagine Wolf Hall rewritten by John le Carré, and you will have some sense of just how gripping and unexpected this debut work of biography is: the portrait of England's first experience of a surveillance society.

If it is a rare achievement to find something new to say about the Tudors, then it is even more of one to write a genuinely revelatory book about the second world war. David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine (Allen Lane, £25) is an astounding work of myth-busting: a portrait of Britain, not as the plucky little David standing alone against the Nazi Goliath, but as a deadly technocracy that ranked, even in 1940, as a first-class global power. Armed to the teeth as she was with bombers, battleships and boffins, Edgerton argues that Britain  with or without the Americans  was always likely to emerge victorious in her death-struggle with Germany. Inspiring and unsettling in equal measure, it is a book that will serve as the perfect counterweight to any festive showings of Dad's Army, as well as providing food for thought in the no doubt grim year to come.

 Tom Holland's The Forge of Christendom is published by Anchor.

 Which history book would you give this Christmas?

In April 1912, on its maiden voyage, the supposedly unsinkable Titanic struck an iceberg and went down in the north Atlantic; of its 2,223 passengers, 1,500 perished. On board was the chairman of the White Star Line, J Bruce Ismay, who got into a lifeboat, saving himself and leaving to drown some two-thirds of the passengers on the ship he owned and had helped to design. As half-filled lifeboats floated near the stricken leviathan, their passengers listened to the screams and groans of the dying, Ismay refused to turn and look at the sinking ship. His hair was said to have turned white overnight, and except for his reluctant testimony at subsequent inquiries, he hardly ever spoke of the disaster again. He insisted that he had helped all the visible passengers into lifeboats, and only got into one himself when the decks were cleared, but the dishonour would hound him for the rest of his life. Conflicting accounts rapidly emerged, as survivors' memories were inevitably shaped by trauma, terror, indignation, blame or self-exculpation. The public was left to decide whether Ismay was a rat deserting his sinking ship, or an ordinary man who simply chose not to die.

Frances Wilson, the author of Literary Seductions and The Courtesan's Revenge, has returned to the story of the Titanic in order to understand the emotionally doomed man who both created the ship and was partly responsible for its calamitous end. Using the Ismay family archives  including correspondence between the married Ismay and a first-class passenger named Marian Thayer, whose husband drowned in the disaster and with whom Ismay seems to have fallen in love during the voyage  Wilson reimagines the competing versions of the epoch-making event. What makes How to Survive the Titanic such an unusual and creative book, however, is her decision to bring Ismay's moral failure into convergence with a novel that uncannily anticipated it some 12 years earlier, one of the great literary masterpieces of the early 20th century, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.

Like Ismay, Jim jumped ship, leaving innocent people to drown, and lived with ignominy for the rest of his life. But the parallels are not only on the surface: both men aspire to greatness, and both are left trying to reconcile themselves with their own inglorious actions, their failures not just of nerve, but of grandeur. Hemingway's famous definition of grace under pressure is precisely what both men signally lack. Far from rising to the occasion, both leapt into their own state of disgrace.

The analogies are so compelling that, if anything, I wish Wilson had pursued them more thoroughly and explicitly, leaving less to the imagination. But in terms of both psychology and moral philosophy, the similarities are extraordinary: Lord Jim  like so many of Conrad's novels  is about what it means to be a pariah, a permanent outcast from the social meanings of the self. He is at the story's centre, and yet his motives are inaccessible, because they are a mystery to him as well. He betrays a basic obligation to others, and discovers painfully that this is an act of self-betrayal as well. All of these ideas accord with Wilson's portrait of Ismay.

Born in Liverpool on 12 December 1862, Joseph Bruce Ismay was the son of a self-made industrialist, who bought the White Star Line and became one of the defining figures of the 19th-century transatlantic shipping trade. Determined, as so many self-made rich people are, to give his children access to the prerogatives of the wealth he'd acquired, Ismay sent his son to Harrow, and prepared him to enter the family firm. The senior Ismay routinely bullied and humiliated his son, who unsurprisingly grew up to be rather a bully himself, but also isolated and withdrawn, a taciturn man who seems to have found intimacy difficult.

Bruce Ismay was handsome, well-educated and well-dressed, and enjoyed cosmopolitan pleasures, but he had few close friendships and his marriage quickly grew estranged. His closest relationship seems to have been with the ships he grew to love. In 1899  the year Lord Jim was published  he sold the White Star Line to JP Morgan, but maintained a managerial role. To compete with Cunard, Ismay focused the new fleet not on speed, but on luxury: his ships would be Gilded Age extravaganzas. His colossal ambitions were signalled by the names he chose for his vessels: the Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic. The Titanic was the largest mobile object ever created: 883ft long, 93ft across, with a tonnage of 46,000 GRT. The boat featured among its amenities a post office, handball court, gymnasium, swimming pool, Turkish bath, barber shops, libraries, a restaurant and cafe in addition to the dining saloons, and four elevators. The kitchen staff alone included "butchers, bakers, night bakers, Vienna bakers, passenger cooks, grill cooks, fish cooks, sauce cooks, vegetable cooks, soup cooks, larder cooks, roast cooks, Hebrew cooks, pastry cooks, entrée cooks, confectioners, plate-warmers, scullions, carvers, kitchen porters, pantry stewards and wine butlers."

The only thing the Titanic lacked, as it turned out, were sufficient lifeboats. Ismay decided not to fill the davits to their capacity of 48 boats, limiting them instead to just 16 lifeboats for 2,223 passengers  which, astonishingly, exceeded the British Board of Trade's requirements. He is said to have justified this decision by declaring that there was no reason to litter the ship's deck: the ship was itself a lifeboat. He would be left to live with the consequences of that error for the rest of his long and lonely life.

In the end, the subject of this fascinating book is not just historical or biographical uncertainty, but psychological and moral ambiguity. Ismay became a kind of modern ancient mariner, endlessly trying to explain himself, but his solipsism meant that the 1,500 people who died on the Titanic collapsed into the intractable problem of his disappointment in himself. As Conrad's narrator Marlow finally realises at the end of Lord Jim's story: "Nobody, nobody is good enough."