History

'Breathtakingly entertaining, endlessly instructive, irresistibly enjoyable' THE TIMES'A tour de force ... breathtaking' SPECTATOR'A magnificent achievement' LITERARY REVIEWTERRIBLE BEAUTY presents a unique narrative of the twentieth century. Unlike more conventional...

Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on 9 August, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never...

Working with the image of the Indian shaman as Wild Man, Taussig reveals not the magic of the shaman but that of the politicizing fictions creating the effect of the...

'I love puzzles, and finding answers is the only truly enjoyable part of what I do.' Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, her days spent at crime scenes collecting...

A thought-provoking account of the scientific achievements and lives of cosmologists from Babylonians to Newton.

'You can't really argue with much that John Simpson says - there is no foreign correspondent left on TV who has a fraction of his recognition and his credibility, a...

THE MAN WHO BROKE INTO AUSCHWITZ is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into Buna-Monowitz, the concentration camp known as Auschwitz III. In the summer...

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize and the Wolfson History PrizeIn March of 1933, a disused factory surrounded by barbed wire held 223 prisoners in the town of...

He knew nothing of celestial navigation or of the existence of the Pacific Ocean. He was a self-promoting and ambitious entrepreneur. His maps were a hybrid of fantasy and delusion....

'Lovely... delivers the warmest of glows' - Telegraph'Who wouldn't love this chocolate-box delight of insights and snapshots of The Queen...A treasure chest' - Good HousekeepingA sparkling celebration of our much-loved...

At the beginning of each decade for 200 years the national census has presented a self-portrait of the British Isles.The census has surveyed Britain from the Napoleonic wars to the...

'The extraordinary story of one of the most audacious escape attempts of the Second World War' Dan SnowIn Northern Poland in 1940, at the Nazi war camp Stalag XX-A, two...

Bletchley Park was where one of the war's most famous - and crucial - achievements was made: the cracking of Germany's "Enigma" code in which its most important military communications...

One April morning in 1943, a sardine fisherman spotted the corpse of a British soldier floating in the sea off the coast of Spain and set in train a course...

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been...

Europe is, in world terms, a relatively minor peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass, yet it became one of the most innovative regions on the planet, bearing restless adventurers...

A SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY EDITION TO COMMEMORATE 80 YEARS SINCE THE EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS OF 1943Sophie Scholl and the White Rose tells the gripping true story of five Munich university students who...

This book contains over 50 momentous and thought-provoking speeches from a wide range of historical eras and nations. "Speeches That Changed The World" includes biographies of each speaker, the history...

A witty yet moving narrative worked up from sketched documentary traces and biographical fragments, 1913 is an intimate cultural portrait of a world that is about to change forever.The stuffy...

The Battle of Britain, 1940, was one of the most famous air battles in the history of warfare and it is a story of ruthless organisation, brilliant control and command....

Imagine spending thirteen years fighting and travelling in disguise in the deserts of Inner Asia, then another thirteen years as an officer in the Sikh army. Suppose, too, that while...

From the Mongol Invasion of Persia, through the Siege of Leningrad, to the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, in this brilliantly vivid, entertaining book, Derek Wilson picks the ten very worst...

In 1940, the defence of Great Britain rested with a handful of volunteer aircrew, Churchills few. Overshadowed in later folklore by the more famous Spitfire and Hurricane pilots, there were...

When Henry VII seized the throne after the Battle of Bosworth, his crown was far from secure. Yet for more than a hundred years his descendents ruled in England, surviving...

11:15 am, 3 September 1939. The nation gathers around their radios to hear Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain make the announcement they have feared for months: Britain is at war with...

On 6 June 1944, HMS Belfast supported troops in action on the beaches of Normandy in the campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. HMS Belfast at D-Day recounts this...

In this new and forward-looking edition of Fighting with Allies, former British Ambassador to the US Robin Renwick describes the roller-coaster history of the 'special relationship' between Britain and the...

As part of the infamous Double Cross operation, Jewish double agent Renato Levi proved to be one of the Allies' most devastating weapons in World War Two. ln 1941, with...

One of our finest contemporary historians and a hugely respected academic and author, Peter Hennessy has a wealth of knowledge and experience to draw on and uses it to illuminate...

Strong men were the pop stars of their day, topping the bill before packed houses with their bizarre and often dangerous stunts. Their photographs sold in the millions and the...

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy knew it would need vital information from the Pacific. After a meeting and a handshake agreement with Chiang Kai-shek, the Sino-American...

This follow-up to Tonight We Die As Men continues the story of the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division as they dropped into Holland as part of...

In September 1939, the tanks of Panzer-Regiment 5 swept into Poland, a devastating part of the German blitzkrieg that opened World War II with a terrifying display of military force....

Books on the history of fortifications are plentiful. Medieval castles, the defensive systems of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the trenches and bunkers of the First World War, the...

The assassination of political, religious and military leaders, often dictators, is frequently seen as the short cut to solving a particular problem. The author takes issue with this argument. Examining...

The story of two men destined to face each other on the battlefields of Normandy is told in this programme. Michael Wittmann was a knight of the Nazi empire, a...

T. E. Lawrence was one of the most charismatic characters of the First World War; a young archaeologist who fought with the Arabs and wrote an epic and very personal...