Well, I'm personally drawn to culture/technology/personality-oriented histories (especially if they involve transitional change or outright clash or differing outcomes for seemingly similar persons/situations) rather than event/political/philosophy-focused stuff.
So with that in mind, I really liked:
The Lunatic Express: the building of an impossible 600 mile railway across East Africa by
Charles Miller. This is really good stuff which doesn't just start with the building of the actual railway beginning in 1895, but goes back more than half a century before to examine competing powers and cultures in the surrounding area, the impact of the arrival of Europeans, relations between them and the locals, and the scramble for Africa that would influence the decisions that led to the building of the railway, as well as its usage for a couple of decades after.
Many local historical persons and events that are kind of tangentially related to the railway are covered in a fair amount of depth, and Miller incorporates not only footnote commentary and plenty of quotes from contemporary primary sources, but also includes chapter notes at the end of the book which go into further detail on stuff that he mentions and comments on what other people wrote about the same subject matter.
This was originally published by a UK company (and currently severely out of print), so maybe they'll have more used copies in England, which might be cheaper to ship to Norway than trying to get one from North America?
If you're interested in this area, you might want to read TLE in conjunction with
Nine Faces of Kenya, edited by
Elspeth Huxley (of
The Flame Trees of Thika fame, and an in-law of Aldous of
Brave New World fame). It's an anthology of selected excerpts from primary source documents (letters, journals, previously printed books, etc.) on many different subjects (farm life, politics, native encounters) related to British East Africa and pre/post-colonial Kenya. A little Euro-centric, due to being pulled from written documents, but I think there's a few selections from the writings of Jomo Kenyatta and Harry Thuku in there, too, and maybe one or two translations of Arabic texts for the Mombasa region.
(And you may or may not want to look up J. H. Patterson's
The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures, which is public domain at Project Gutenberg. He was one of the chief engineers on the railway project when it ran into
a man-eating lion problem, which has been turned into a couple of movies.)
On the biographical side for stuff you probably won't be able to easily find, I quite liked a few of
Marian Fowler's books. She's received a Canadian Biography Award, and does these sort of
thematically grouped mini-biographies of women in positions of influence who are just slightly too obscure to usually have mainstream works devoted to them beyond a couple of mentions in somebody else's biography (or some very in-depth exhaustive definitive thing which would be overkill for the casual reader).
Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj covers four Englishwomen who accompanied their Governor-General brothers or husbands to India and settled into official "hostess" duties. Some of them coped better than others, but Fowler explores the cultural shock and the changes in attitude towards the Indians and the assignment over time as Victorian notions of imperialism and women's capabilities changed over the decades (from relatively independent and not overly prejudiced to learned helplessness and paternalistic bigotry).
In a Gilded Cage: From Heiress to Duchess tracks five American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy at a time when there was beginning to be significant backlash about foreign women from those vulgar
nouveau riche families with working class ancestors marrying into the impoverished ancient lines (something that would come to a head with Edward the Whateverth and Wallis Simpson).
Fowler's a little on the pop-history side, but generally manages a good introduction to the subjects and the overall societal structure that they lived in, and some of the things which led to their bubble worlds being the way they were. There's just enough depth to satisfy without overwhelming for a first-timer and plenty of footnote cites that lead you to more info in the bibliography if you're interested.
It might be the easiest to find, but I'd probably skip
The Way She Looks Tonight: Five Women of Style. While the section on
Elinor Glyn (practically invented the "modern" pot-boiler bodice-ripper romance novel, and a major influence on early silent-film Hollywood) is quite good, Marlene Dietrich, Wallis Simpson, and Jackie Kennedy are all covered to a much better degree by other works, and this title is kind of superficial compared to Fowler's previous volumes, which are more scholarly. So it's not really worth it unless you want to read about Glyn.
I had a few more recs that I was going to type up, but this post has gotten really long when I preview, so I'll leave them for later.