History

WINNER OF THE 2024 SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDIts name means 'centre of the world', and since the dawn of history the Mediterranean Sea has formed the shared horizon of innumerable cultures....

'Gripping history that also informs the present' Sunday Times'A spectacular achievement' Dominic Sandbrook'Fast-paced, absorbing, insightful' Simon Hall'Simply superb' Kathryn OlmstedA celebrated British historian of US intelligence explores how the CIA...

'Beautiful, moving, profoundly imaginative in itself - this book is as entertaining as it is relevant and practical' ALAIN DE BOTTON'Anyone who has an imagination - that is, everyone -...

'Deeply researched and written with verve... thoughtful as well as action packed' The Times'Gripping, moving and important' Simon Sebag Montefiore'Agent Zo is a triumph. Absolutely essential reading' Hallie RubenholdThis is...

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK'A great, thrusting codpiece of a book. It is big, bombastic and richly brocaded... A jewel in its own right' The Times'Evokes the...

A gripping account of the little-known plot that could have put end end to JFK's historic presidency - before it even began.From the New York Times bestselling authors of The...

'An acerbic, compelling and always accessible account of how opium corrupted the world' TLS'The writing is sublime, the research thorough, the eye for story superb' Sunday TelegraphWhen Amitav Ghosh began...

What happens when you reach the threshold of life and death - and come back? As long as humans have lived together on the planet, there have been wars, and...

What difference do individuals make to history? Are we all swept up in the great forces like industrialisation or globalisation that change the world? Clearly not: real people-leaders in particular-and...

Shortlisted for the Military History Monthly Book of the Year AwardBy August 1918, the outcome of the Great War was not in doubt: the Allies would win. But what was...

Every man who served in the Great War is now deceased, but they have left behind them an enormous collection of oral history, which captures the authentic voices of the...

Every man who served in the Great War is now deceased, but they have left behind them an enormous collection of oral history, which captures the authentic voices of the...

At last the Roman self-help book the world has been waiting for. Marcus Sidonius Falx sets out the characteristics that have made the Romans the most successful people in history...

Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big TopicsThis introduction to the ancient world, part of the Ideas in Profile series, covers all its different cultures, from the million people crammed...

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...

China's War of Resistance against Japan, as WWII is known in China, was never about the defeat of Japan alone. China was also at war with itself. Between 1937 and...

It is often the smallest details of daily life that tell us the most. And so it is under occupation in Palestine. What most of us take for granted has...

Senan Molony caused a worldwide media flurry in 2017 by revealing publicly there was an uncontrolled coal bunker fire aboard Titanic. Experts held the fire would have significantly weakened a...

Salamis tells the story of possibly the greatest naval battle of the ancient world. Involving hundreds of thousands of combatants and well over a thousand triremes - the ranking naval...

Sir Joseph Banks, botanist, explorer, President of the Royal Society and one of Australia's founding fathers, was among the most influential figures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a...

"Victory in Europe" is a graphic account of the storming and taking of Hitler's "Fortress Europe" by the Allies during the final eleven months of the Second World War. From...

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese offensive in the Far East seemed unstoppable. Allied forces engaged in a futile attempt to halt their rapid advance, culminating in the...

Africa is forever on our TV screens, but the bad-news stories (famine, genocide, corruption) massively outweigh the good (South Africa). Ever since the process of decolonialisation began in the mid-1950s,...

What was the life of an eighteenth-century British genteel woman like? In this lively and controversial book, Amanda Vickery invokes women's own accounts of their intimate and their public lives...

'I hope my passion for Rome's past has not impaired my judgement; for I do honestly believe that no country has ever been greater or purer than ours or richer...

Napoleon's 1807 campaign against the Russians came close to being his first defeat. At Eylau the Emperor was outnumbered by the army of the Russian commander Bennigsen, yet he accepted...

Siberia, to me, is a fairy-tale land.Fritz Doerries set out on his first trip to Eastern Siberia in 1877, when there were still blank spaces on maps of the world....

'A historically insightful read' Financial Times 'A wry, rollicking, and provocative history' Michael Taylor, author of The Interest 'A thought-provoking analysis of Africa's relationship with economic imperialism' Astrid Madimba and...

A bestseller in 2008, Remember Remember has continued to enlighten and entertain readers wanting to brush up on their history. Lively, exciting, full of great stories and humorous asides, this...

**WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING****WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY***Book of the year: The Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Evening Standard*'Outstanding . ....

Alice Keppel, lover of Queen Victoria's son Edward VII and great-grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, was the acceptable face of Edwardian adultery. She partnered the King for yachting at Cowes and...

A BBC History magazine Book of the Year and an amazon.com Best Book of the MonthAs religion divided sixteenth-century Europe, an extraordinary group of women rose to power. They governed...

A Guardian best history book of 2016Eccentric, shy aristocrat ... or mad, bad and dangerous to know?Neighbour Jane Austen found the 3rd earl of Portsmouth a model gentleman and Lord...

Joseph Stalin began life as a frail child, with an abusive father and an inferiority complex. This triggered an early desire for greatness and respect that would eventually turn the...

Moura Budberg: spy, adventurer, charismatic seductress and mistress of two of the century's greatest writers, the Russian aristocrat Baroness Moura Budberg was born in 1892 to indulgence, pleasure and selfishness....

When Paul Glaser discovered his Aunt Rosie's remarkable wartime diaries, photographs and letters he was shocked: he had been raised as a Catholic, and had no knowledge of his Jewish...

'By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.' - Samuel JohnsonIt is the people who make London what it is. The men and...

In 1933, Jews and, to a lesser extent, political opponents of the Nazis, suffered an unprecedented loss of positions and livelihood at Germany's universities. With few exceptions, the academic elite...

A king beheaded. A monarchy abolished. And a commoner leading a republic by military rule set in their place. The wars that tore through the country in the mid-seventeenth century...

2.20am on 15th April 1912, the Titanic is plunging 12,000 feet to the ocean floor.Machinery, coal, crystal goblets, pianos and jewellery all tumbled through the dark water. Hundreds of passengers...

Hitler's Last Day: Minute by Minute, is pure chronological narrative telling the story of the death of Adolf Hitler, as seen through the eyes of those who were with him...

WARTIME BERLIN: The Niemann family - Karl, Minna and their four children - live in a quiet, suburban enclave. Every day Karl commutes to work, a business manager travelling around...

This is the story of D-Day as seen through the eyes of the people who were there - from soldiers, French villagers and journalists, to schoolchildren and nurses, who found...

A biography of Renaissance poet and courtier, Thomas Wyatt.

In the winter of 1875, a young British officer set out across central Asia on an unofficial mission to investigate the latest Russian moves in the Great Game. His goal...