History

In 1654, England's Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell conceived a plan of breathtaking ambition: the conquest of Spain's vast American empire. As the first phase of his Western Design, a large...

Convened following Napoleon's defeat in 1814, the Congress of Vienna is remembered as much for the pageantry of the royals and elites who gathered there as for the landmark diplomatic...

From the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century, vying armies have clashed over the territory stretching from the Upper Nile to modern-day Iraq and Iran. Crossroads of War captures five...

Spartacus (109?-71 bce), the slave who rebelled against Rome, has been a source of endless fascination, the subject of myth-making in his own time, and of movie-making in ours. Hard...

Frederick Douglass's fluid, changeable sense of his own life story is reflected in the many conflicting accounts he gave of key events and relationships during his journey from slavery to...

In Germany, the years immediately following World War II call forward images of obliterated cities, hungry refugees, and ghostly monuments to Nazi crimes. The temptation of despair was hard to...

"A vast cabinet of curiosities."-Stephen Greenblatt"Eclectic rather than exhaustive, less an encyclopedia than a buffet."-Frederic Raphael, Literary ReviewHow do we get from the polis to the police? Or from Odysseus's...

On December 26, 2004, giant tsunami waves destroyed communities around the Indian Ocean, from Indonesia to Kenya. Beyond the horrific death toll, this wall of water brought a telling reminder...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harry S. Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War,...

The bestselling, prize-winning author explores the impact of the Second World War - for nations, cities and families around the world. The Second World War was one of the most...

Survivor on the River Kwai is the heartbreaking story of Reg Twigg, one of the last men standing from a forgotten war. Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be...

Nick Lloyd's Hundred Days: The End of the Great War explores the brutal, heroic and extraordinary final days of the First World War.On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day...

From the bestselling author of The English comes Empire, Jeremy Paxman's history of the British Empire accompanied by a flagship 5-part BBC TV series, for readers of Simon Schama and...

From Keith Lowe, author of the criticall acclaimed Inferno comes an 'extraordinary, disturbing and powerful' (Daily Mail) new history, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II.The Second...

In the Second World War, Great Britain, the United States and Germany each produced one land force commander who stood out from the rest: Bernard Montgomery, George Patton and Erwin...

Learn about the origins of our species and all things revolution in The History Book.Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a...

Lady Constance Lytton (1869-1923) was the most unlikely of suffragettes. One of the elite, she was the daughter of a Viceroy of India and a lady in waiting to the...

This volume provides an in-depth look at the experience of the ordinary US marine 'grunt' in Vietnam. Organisation of the corps, weaponry, equipment, uniforms, training and medical arrangements are all...

The kingdom of Scotland has had a turbulent history, at points the site of a tribal contest and of a far-reaching political controversy. This guide traces the history of the...

*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017*In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria...

A fascinating insight into the complexity, history and unpredictability of Iraq from Rory Stewart, bestselling author of Politics on the Edge and host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics.By...

In 1981, while working as New Mexico State Historian, Stanley M. Hordes began to hear stories of Hispanos who lit candles on Friday night and abstained from eating pork. Puzzling...

Martin Walker's account of over forty years of global confrontation between the US and Russia is a masterly narrative of the Cold War's twists and turns by a journalist who...

In early 1942 the Germans opened a top-security prisoner-of-war camp in Lower Silesia for captured Allied airmen. Called Stalag Luft III, the camp soon came to contain some of the...

Are you ready for the truth about World War Two? The Second World War is the most cataclysmic and violent sequence of events in recent times. But for the past...

Throughout his six decades in the public eye, Winston Churchill understood and wielded the power of words. In his speeches, books and newspaper and magazine articles, he expressed his feelings...

WINNER OF THE SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2024 CYCLING BOOK OF THE YEARA WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023: SPORTNOMINATED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 'An absorbing...

The life of Gertrude Bell is now the subject of the major motion picture Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco and Damian LewisTurning away from privileged Victorian...

From the outbreak of war in September 1939 all the way to the smouldering ruins of Berlin in 1945, via Palestine, Tobruk, El Alamein, D-Day, Nijmegen and the crossing of...

When Britain declared war against Germany in September 1939, thousands of young men sailed across the English Channel to fight for their country. Among them were the seven soldiers who...

Fred Dibnah was a man born out of his time. His era should have been the 'magnificent age of British engineering' - the nineteenth century - and his heroes were...

In the early hours of the 27th of May, 1941, the German warship Bismarck - scourge of the Atlantic ocean - was sailing towards a fateful encounter. Two days previously,...

In the early hours of the 27th of May, 1941, the German warship Bismarck scourge of the Atlantic ocean was sailing towards a fateful encounter. Two days previously, Prime Minister...

In the years 1916-1918, the Wolf, an ordinary freighter fitted-out with a hidden arsenal of weapons, was sent by Germany on one of the most daring clandestine naval missions of...

Late on the afternoon of Sunday, August 20 1911, three men strolled through the Louvre. Disguising themselves as museum staff they hid until nightfall. Sixteen hours later the most famous...

Few relationships fire our imagination like that of Elizabeth I and her 'bonnie sweet Robin' - the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley. But it has been almost half a century...

The conventional narrative of the Second World War is well known: after six years of brutal fighting on land, sea and in the air, the Allied Powers prevailed and the...

The massive disorder and economic ruin following the Second World War inevitably predetermined the scope and intensity of the Cold War. But why did it last so long? And what...

In December 1937, in what was then the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred. The Japanese army swept into...