History

The sweeping story of the city of Rome, told through twenty-two moments that shaped its history. ***A Times History Book of the Year*** 'Vivid, pacey ... Superb' The Times. 'Grand...

POWER, SCANDAL, GLAMOUR, FAME On 6 November 1895 Consuelo Vanderbilt married Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. Though the preceding months had included spurned loves, unexpected deaths, scandal and illicit...

This hardback edition is now out of print and a new paperback edition with a new title ETTA LEMON: The Woman who Saved the Birds is being published on 1...

For hundreds of years the Bactrian camel ploughed a lonely furrow across the vast wilderness of Asia. This bizarre-looking, temperamental yet hardy creature here came into its own as the...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'Riveting and original ... a work enriched by solid scholarship, vivid personal experience, and acute appreciation of the concerns and aspirations of the contending parties in...

The trial of the Knights Templar is one of the most infamous in history. Accused of heresy by the king of France, the Templars were arrested and imprisoned, had their...

The trial of the Knights Templar is one of the most infamous in history. Accused of heresy by the king of France, the Templars were arrested and imprisoned, had their...

In 1945, the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and warfare was never the same again. Armageddon and Paranoia relates how the power of the atom was harnessed to produce...

In 1482, Abu Abdallah Muhammad XI became the twenty-third Muslim King of Granada. He would be the last. This is the first history of the ruler, known as Boabdil, whose...

During a single winter, between November 1932 and April 1933, so much went wrong: Hitler came to power; Japan invaded Jehol and left the league of Nations; Mussolini looked towards...

The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was the most devastating event of the First World War for the British army. In Zero Hour, 14...

For centuries, Rome was one of the world's largest imperial powers, its influence spread across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle-East, its military force successfully fighting off attacks by the...

Winner of the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award 2019By August 1918, the outcome of the Great War was not in doubt: the Allies would win. But what...

Berlin 1941. Marie Jalowicz Simon, a nineteen-year-old Jewish woman, makes an extraordinary decision. All around her, Jews are being rounded up for deportation, forced labour and extermination. Marie takes off...

Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like...

Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like...

Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists - a brilliant academic, with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience both though her TV presenting and her...

More than three thousand years ago a sculptor working in the royal city of Amarna carved a limestone bust of an Egyptian queen. The queen was Nefertiti, consort of the...

More than three thousand years ago a sculptor working in the royal city of Amarna carved a limestone bust of an Egyptian queen. The queen was Nefertiti, consort of the...

Famous for his successful leadership of non-violent Nationalist resistance to British Imperial rule in India, Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most iconic figures of the 20th century. All...

Legend has it that, in a few busy weeks in July 1789, a despotic king, his freeloading wife, and a horde of over-privileged aristocrats, were displaced and then humanely dispatched.In...

To many, medieval castles are the essence of Britain and Ireland's fascinating past. Immersed in history and centuries old, each one tells a story of Kings, Queens and feuding lords;...

21 February 1989. Three men fly into Moscow, representing software giants from Britain, America, and Japan. Each of them is determined to undercut the others in order to secure a...

Cities, scripts, literature, the rule of law - all were born in Iraq. That so many see this ancient land as nothing more than a violent backwater steeped in chaos...

Russia and Britain were never natural bedfellows. But the marriage, in 1894, of Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter, Alicky, to the Tsarevich Nicholas marked the beginning of an uneasy Anglo-Russian entente...

Trading Territories tells the compelling story of maps and geographical knowledge in the early modern world from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. Examining how European geographers mapped the...

The Euromaidan uprising in Kiev, followed by radical regime change, the annexation of the Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, have shattered European security. The Western response to Russian...

Mirages have long astonished travellers and beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Chinese and Japanese poetry and images depicted mirages as the exhalations of clam-monsters. Indian sources related them to the `thirst...

In this riveting book Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley's monster cobbled from corpses to the...

Lesser Dragons is a timely introduction to the fascinating and complex world of China's `national minorities'. Based on detailed research, including the author's first-hand fieldwork in several minority areas, it...

In this robust new account of the Vikings, Tom Shippey explores their mindset, and in particular their fascination with scenes of heroic death. Laughing Shall I Die considers Viking psychology...

In 1600 the Catholic Inquisition condemned the philosopher Giordano Bruno for his heretical beliefs. He was then burned alive in a public place in Rome. Historians, scientists and teachers usually...

Mapping the Middle East explores the many perspectives from which people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus river valleys over the...

Tea has a rich and well-documented past. The beverage originated in Asia long before making its way to seventeenth-century London, where it became an exotic, highly sought after commodity. Over...

The dramatic life of the revolutionary hero Bolivar, who liberated South America - a sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic.Simon Bolivar's life makes for one of history's most dramatic...

'A wonderful idea, gloriously put into practice. Greg Jenner is as witty as he is knowledgeable' - Tom Holland'You will love Greg Jenner's jolly account of how we have more...

For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa's principal cities in the mid-1890s, the world's richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to...

A powerful account, by Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, of his transformation from a young man who'd grown up in the heart of Israel's elite and served proudly in its...

Napoleon is one of history's most fascinating figures. But his complex relationship with Rome-both with antiquity and his contemporary conflicts with the Pope and Holy See-have undergone little examination. In...

European history is deeply embedded in the global civilization that has emerged in the 21st century. More than two thirds of today's nations were once European colonies or protectorates. Europe's...

Mikhail Sholokhov is arguable one of the most contentious recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a young man, Sholokhov's epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success....

The war that broke out in the former Yugoslavia at the end of the twentieth century saw unspeakable acts of violence committed against defenceless civilians, including a macabre night of...

Elite-level Soviet politics, privileged access to state secrets, knowledge about machinations inside the Kremlin-such is the environment in which Andrei A. Kovalev lived and worked. In this memoir of his...

The late 1990s and early aughts were a time of hope-for democracy and free press. The Soviet Union had failed, leaving behind a number of independent countries where the Scorpions'...

During the Cold War, spy stories became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imaginations of readers and film goers alike as secret police outfits quietly engaged...

Late in life, former President Lyndon Johnson told a reporter that he didn't believe the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John Kennedy. Johnson...

This disturbing expose describes a secret alliance forged at the close of World War II by the CIA, the Sicilian and US mafias, and the Vatican to thwart the possibility...