History

'Reads like something from a thriller...colourful, detailed and meticulously researched' Sunday Times'Gripping from start to finish' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads'Remarkable and brilliantly researched non-fiction thriller...focussing on one...

Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to "How Do We Look" and "The Eye of Faith," the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant...

Stylish and dark, the BBC series the 'Peaky Blinders' is set in the backstreets of Birmingham after the First World War and tells of the rise to power of Thomas...

An outstanding dispatch from the frontline of war - unsparing, unsentimental, blackly comic and brutally beautiful - by and ordinary soldier who tells it like it is.Arkady Babchenko was still...

By its evocation of a real or imaged heroic age, its contrasts of character and its variety of adventure, above all by its sheer narrative power, the Odyssey has won...

History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before...

In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side...

The stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 liberated 400 million Indians from the British Empire. One of the defining moments of world history had been brought about by a...

Nineteenth-century France was one of the world's great cultural beacons, renowned for its dazzling literature, philosophy, art, poetry and technology. Yet this was also a tumultuous century of political anarchy...

This title offers a comprehensive and accessible survey of one of the world's richest mythological traditions. It covers the people, themes, concepts, places, and creatures of Celtic mythology, saga, legend,...

The chief sponsor of national revolutions at the beginning of the period was Napoleon III, who hoped to re-establish French ascendancy in Europe, but he was defeated by the forces...

ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLERThe final destruction of the Ottoman Empire - one of the great epics of the First World War, from bestselling historian...

This new edition of Norman Davies's classic study of the history of Poland has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end...

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. For more than forty years Achebe was silent on those terrible years,...

Known for its clear narrative voice, impeccable scholarship, and affordability, Alan Brinkley's The Unfinished Nation offers a concise but comprehensive examination of American History. Balancing social and cultural history with...

This is the compelling story of Pope Pius XI's secret relations with Benito Mussolini. A ground-breaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives by...

The author offers an overview of the 1930s, a story of the dark, dishonset decade that determined the course of the 20th century. Dealing individually with each of the period's...

'A remarkable and deeply moving book' Henry Marsh, bestselling author of Do No Harm'A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction' Times Literary SupplementOn 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a...

This text covers not only political history, but also culture, society, economy and thought. A distillation of the late Albert Hourani's lifetime of scholarship, it was a bestseller when first...

Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-FictionFrom the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, the first insider expose of the awful dangers of America's hidden,...

From the bestselling author of FEMINA, a brilliant reappraisal of the medieval women whose lives have been exploited over centuries for political, nation-building ends.In LEGENDA, bestselling historian Professor Janina Ramirez...

'A superb account of the 1860 Damascus massacres-much neglected nowadays but central to the creation of the modern Middle East' - Simon Sebag Montefiore'A stunning portrait of the Ottoman Empire...

In November 1519, Hernando Cortes walked along a causeway leading to the capital of the Aztec kingdom and came face to face with Moctezuma. That story--and the story of what...

FULLY UPDATED THIRD EDITION, NOW WITH NEW POSTSCRIPT BY ALI ANSARI'If you were to read only one book on present-day Iran you could not do better than this' Ervand Abrahamian,...

'Making Francisco Franco's long life and 38 years of dictatorship enjoyable reading is a daunting challenge ... Giles Tremlett nonetheless succeeds magnificently' PAUL PRESTON'An excellent biography - compelling, authoritative, even...

In July 1917, when the Provisional Government issued a warrant for his arrest, Lenin fled from Petrograd; later that year, the October Revolution swept him to supreme power. In the...

This compendious celebration of ineptitude includes some of history's most spectacularly ill-conceived expeditions and entirely useless pursuits, and features tales of black comedy, insane foolhardiness, breathtaking stupidity and relentless perseverance...

On August 9, ad 378, outside Adrianople in the Roman province of Thrace, the Roman Empire began to fall. Two years earlier, an unexpected flood of refugees from the tribe...

The Korean War is journalist and military historian Sir Max Hastings' compelling account of the forgotten war.'The best narrative history of the Korean conflict' - GuardianOn 25 June 1950 the...

A reappraisal of the tumultuous Partition and how it ignited long-standing animosities between India and Pakistan"Eloquently discusses the making of India and Pakistan after British rule on the subcontinent was...

The term "biography" seems insufficiently capacious to describe the singular achievement of Joseph Frank's five-volume study of the life of the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. One critic, writing upon...

'A Napoleonic triumph of a book, irresistibly galloping with the momentum of a cavalry charge' Simon Sebag Montefiore'Simply dynamite' Bernard CornwellFrom Andrew Roberts, author of the bestsellers The Storm of...

Sarah Bradford's Lucrezia Bogia: Life, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy is the first biography of Lucrezia Borgia for over sixty years.Lucrezia Borgia - an infamous murderess or simply the...