It's a little tricky without the book in your hand. But there are still some common sense things you can check.

1. Is it used by respectable schools? If a upper level undergrad or grad history course at Yale or something lists it in the syllabus, it's probably not a terrible book. Check it's actually a specialized history class though, sometimes tangential history readings will get assigned for other classes and sometimes these readings aren't well thought out.

2. What do academics think about it? You can get a free account on, say, JSTOR to read reviews. Just about every book worth reading has a corresponding review.

3. Who is the author? Generally I prefer famous professors more than others, but there are obvious caveats here. Sometimes the professor in question is controversial (Ferguson / Landes?) or working outside their field (Diamond?). Of course you don't have to be a professor to do excellent work. But if the author is truly excellent, regardless of their credentials, you should be able to find widespread praise from academics.

4. How big is the scope? Beware of big history. Beware of books with outsized scope to length ratios. The bigger the subject matter the greater the risk of some terrible blanket generalization / oversimplification / outright falsehood. A book that purports to explain the entire history of homo sapiens is almost guaranteed to be bad. A book on early 80's Atari games less so.

5. When was it written? All else being equal, I will prefer more recent work.

If you actually have the book in your hands, then the first thing to do is to flip to the foreward / prologue and then to the bibliography.

1. Skim the introduction. If the book makes political claims of any sort, toss it immediately. If instead the book reviews prior work on the subject and places its own content in the context of broader research, keep reading. Bonus points if it acknowledges its own limitations up front.

2. Look at the length and quality of the bibliography. The longer the better. The drier the better.

3. Flip through the book. Does it critically and rigorously engage with primary sources and prior research? Does it throw out elaborations and caveats with every argument it makes? Or is it just breezy narrative?

Finally for some subjects I think it's absolutely necessary that the author have significant technical expertise in a relevant field. I would not bother reading a book on, say, 20th century globalization, written by anyone without an extensive background in economics. I would not bother reading a book on, say, the early quantum mechanics debate, written by anyone without an extensive background in physics.

as there is no "universal truth", you should take everything with a little grain of salt and think about the intentions the author/publisher might have had, that way even sensationalist media can give you a picture of the truth. if you try to get many different opinions/views on your topic, you should end up with an own solid opinion. at least thats what my history teacher always encouraged us to do.

If you have access to a college or university library see if they subscribe to Choice Reviews, either the physical magazine or the online version with back issues. It's geared towards academic librarians looking for books, reference sources and databases for the library collection, but the reviews are succinct and written by experts in their fields.

Could anyone recommend/critique the Cambridge Histories? I'm currently going through the Japanese histories ones and am looking forward to the Ancient History ones (2nd ed.).

I've leafed through a few others but some seem a bit dated (i.e. haven't been revised in 20 or so years). Still worth it or are older volumes not as trustworthy as newer research?

Has it won prizes? If a book has won the Wolfson prize for instance it is one of the two best history books published in the UK in that year. I'm not sure about other prizes but just look them up. Also read reviews, they are indispensable.

One thing I'd add with history on very recent events is that you should be skeptical about the author if they had any involvement in the events described, and whether their previous stance or version of those events stands up. I know the issue of bias seems obvious and I don't want to discredit every historical tome written by an involved party, like The Gathering Storm, but sometimes it is very obvious to anyone who is already familiar with a subject but not necessarily others.

For example, Ken Adelman was one of the "hawk" (ie. very anti-Soviet) advisors in the Reagan administration of the 1980's. In 2013 he published a book about the Reykjavik Summit between the USA and USSR in 1986, which has very little previous scholarship on it and is treated by most histories of the Cold War as a remarkable footnote but nevertheless a bit of a footnote, even though some participants (allegedly including Gorbachev) have attached great importance to it as part of a process. Adelman, with a clear agenda, takes this academic indecision or indifference to Reykjavik and uses it to justify his support of the widely discredited "triumphalist" view of the end of the Cold War.

From the very start his book is basically dismissive of historiography of the end of the Cold War that doesn't fulfill his own clearly politically motivated view and cherry picks the Reykjavik evidence while making anecdotal claims about what happened in the actual leader discussions beyond what we know from the scripts. For example he seems to portray Gorbachev as angsty or losing control early on, even though Reagan's account seems to contradict this and also Adelman wasn't in the room. I had to read the transcripts for my dissertation and while there is a grain of truth to some of the things he claims (like how Gorbachev did occasionally get frustrated and how he did seem to struggle on the brief moments that they talked about ideology) they are broadly claims made in the spirit of speculative revisionism with an agenda. Having sidestepped academic opinion and of course making such speculative claims, he also gives some claims that are just outright wrong, such as suggesting the Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze had zero impact on Gorbachev's foreign policy.

However, if you had little experience or understanding of the topic beforehand - the summit itself or the end of the Cold War - it might be difficult to anticipate the problems with this book, even if a cursory Google search or look at the author description will show that he was a US government member; it doesn't show his interest in displaying Reykjavik as a sort of American triumph. His criticism of existing narratives would be easy to take at face value for some I feel.

The way to avoid this is, as I said, investigating the authors background, but also what can help is to read some academic or even newspaper reviews of the book. Thankfully every review I could find of the book pointed out that as you get into it Adelman pulls no punches about his agenda and that this view shouldn't be treated anywhere near as gospel just because there isn't much historiography of Reykjavik.

I would also stick with looking at the books' bibliography. Does it cite works that are rigorously researched themselves? Does the book use a large number of primary source materials?