History

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered,a death toll...

Martin Luther King Jr today is an uncontroversial figure, and we tend to see him as a saint whose legacy is entirely uncomplicated. But in 1968, King was a polarizing...

The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal but it took the Civil War and the adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as law. The...

By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully crafted history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. Thomas Jefferson shares centre stage with his family...

The death of a Chinese immigrant, Wong Chut King, in San Francisco in 1900 would have been unremarkable if a swollen black lymph node-a sign of bubonic plague-hadn't been noticed...

In the spring of 1978, as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Elaine Sciolino was seduced by a river. In The Seine, she builds the story of the river through memoir,...

The American experiment rests on three ideas-"these truths", Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless...

At a time when America's founding principles are being debated as never before, Russell Shorto looks back to the era in which those principles were forged. In Revolution Song, Shorto...

The Alps have seen the march of armies, the flow of pilgrims and Crusaders, the feats of mountaineers and the dreams of engineers-and some 14 million people live among their...

Factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, are celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" they have also fuelled our fears of...

The American experiment rests on three ideas-"these truths", Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless...

Acclaimed historians Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue forge the panoramic and the personal into an authoritative narrative history of America in the twentieth century. They give us insightful...

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the United States and NATO were losing the Cold War. The USSR had superiority in conventional weapons and manpower in Europe, and had...

Factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, are celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" they have also fuelled our fears of...

The Role of the Scroll answers the question of why scrolls were made when it was possible to produce books. Scrolls were the standard form of book in Western antiquity...

With a mighty roar the shell explodes spouting flame and phosphorous fumes everywhere. Mud is showered over everyone as pieces of shell fly over prone bodies. A man five feet...

In 1611, thirty-four-year-old Nur Jahan, daughter of a Persian noble and widow of a subversive official, became the twentieth and favourite wife of the Emperor Jahangir who ruled the Mughal...

In the middle of the 1970s, America entered a new era of doubt and division. Major political, economic and social crises-Watergate, Vietnam, the rights revolutions of the 1960s-had cracked the...

**The New York Times Bestseller****The book of the landmark documentary, The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick**The definitive work on the Vietnam War, the conflict that came to...

In 1880 the continent of Africa was largely unexplored by Europeans. Less than thirty years later, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained unconquered by them. The rest - 10 million square...

'A METICULOUS HISTORY THAT READS LIKE A THRILLER' BEN MACINTYRE, TEN BEST BOOKS TO READ ABOUT WORLD WAR II An astounding story of heroism, spycraft, resistance and personal triumph over...

Featuring previously unpublished sources, this 'enjoyable as well as massively impressive' bestseller is a definitive account of the Boer War (Financial Times)The war declared by the Boers on 11 October...

'Original and compelling, an untold story of rare and captivating power' Philippe Sands'A fascinating history about a little-known group who took on the Nazis . . . The individual tales...

The bestselling author of The Beauty Myth, Vagina and The End of America illuminates a dramatic history - how the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 led to reverberations lasting to...

The bestselling author of The Beauty Myth, Vagina and The End of America chronicles the struggles and eventual triumph of John Addington Symonds, a Victorian-era poet, biographer, and critic who...

Haunting stories from the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature - A new translation of Zinky Boys based on the revised text - From 1979...

'This book is dynamite' - ROBERT GILDEA, author of Empires of the MindA searing, landmark study of the British Empire that lays bare its pervasive use of violence throughout the...

Having written enthralling biographies of London and of its great river, the Thames, Peter Ackroyd now turns to England itself. This first volume of six takes us from the time...

Epic in scope, intimate in detail, heartbreaking in its human drama, this is the first book to recount the history of the nobility caught up the maelstrom of the Bolshevik...

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off -...

From the admiralty to the miner's strike, from the Battle of Britain to the Nobel Prize, Churchill oversaw some of the most important events the World has ever seen. Roy...