History

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but...

'ENORMOUS FUN' GUARDIAN'SO ENTERTAINING' THE TIMES'GOSSIPY, LIGHT AND FUN' TLSQueen Bees looks at the lives of six remarkable women who made careers out of being society hostesses, including Lady Astor,...

The first comprehensive biography in three decades of Margaret Beaufort, the mother of the Tudor Dynasty.During the bloody and uncertain days of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret Beaufort was...

After the catastrophe of dictatorship and World War, the idea of liberal democracy, of property rights, and of Europe in the broader international order all needed to be remade. In...

The Battle of Agincourt on 25 October, 1415, remains one of the most glorious victories in British history, with a legacy that endures today. A pivotal moment in the Hundred...

Tutu: The Authorised Portrait is a celebration of eighty years of the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an icon whose humanity and compassion have touched the lives of millions around...

In The Assassination of the Archduke, Greg King and Sue Woolmans offer readers a vivid account of the lives - and cruel deaths - of Franz Ferdinand and his beloved...

The collapse of Western colonial empires after the Second World War led to any number of vicious struggles for power whose bloody consequences haunt us still. Acclaimed historian Michael Burleigh's...

The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the spread of Perestroika throughout the former Soviet bloc was a sea change in world history and two years later resulted...

During the six long years of the Second World War the British psyche was changed irrevocably. British men and women on both the war front and at home were forced...

Nuremberg, 1946. As the trials of Nazi war criminals begin, some of the world's most famous writers and reporters gather in the ruined German city. Among them are Rebecca West,...

What if Chernobyl was just the beginning?The acclaimed winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize returns to Chernobyl to tell the gripping story of thirty-five days of warOn 24 February 2022,...

In 476 AD the last of Rome's emperors was deposed by a barbarian general, the son of one of Attila the Hun's henchmen, and the imperial vestments were despatched to...

The story of legendary American journalist William L. Shirer and how his first-hand reporting on the rise of the Nazis and on World War II brought the devastation alive for...

In this sweeping, definitive work, historian David Crowe offers an unflinching account of the long and troubled history of genocide and war crimes. From ancient atrocities to more recent horrors,...

Alexander the Great is considered one of the most successful commanders of all time and was known to be undefeated in battle. He is mentioned in the Bible as well...

A hero to the German people of the Third Reich and widely respected by his opponents, Rommel proved himself highly adept at Blitzkrieg warfare. Both in France and North Africa...

Bassam Abu Sharif was one of the most notorious and dangerous terrorists in the sixties and seventies, acting as "minister of propaganda" for the Popular Front for the Liberation of...

In 1941, Theo Coster was a student at the Amsterdam Jewish Lyceum,1 in a class of 28 Jewish children that the Nazis had segregated from the rest of the Dutch...

Inspiring, outrageous...A thundering paradox of a man. Douglas MacArthur, one of only five men in history to have achieved the rank of General of the United States Army. He served...

China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was launched by the Chinese Communist Party in May 1966 and it ended with the death of Mao in 1976. The ten years of upheaval...

Anyone who has seen 'The Lion in Winter' will remember the vicious, compelling world of the Plantagenets: the towering, almost psychopathic Henry II, commander of the slaughter of Thomas a'...

The dramatic opening weeks of the Great War passed into legend long before the conflict ended. The British Expeditionary Force fought a mesmerizing campaign, outnumbered and outflanked but courageous and...

The 1820s marked a revolutionary moment in European history. Uprisings during this decade marked the last horseback-mounted epics where officers led their men from provincial towns in the hopes of...

In the dramatic period leading to the American Revolution, no event did more to foment patriotic sentiment among colonists than the armed occupation of Boston by British soldiers. As If...

In an incendiary 1892 sermon given at the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Charles Parkhurst declared New York's municipal life to be deplorable and corrupt, controlled by "polluted harpies...

The Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE is one of world history's unjustly neglected events. It decisively ended the threat of a Persian conquest of Greece. It involved tens of...

This is a story lost to history for over two hundred years; a dirty secret of failure, fatal misjudgement and desperate measures which the British Empire chose to forget almost...

By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean is nothing less than the story of how humans first started building the globalized world we know today. Set on a huge continental stage, from...

The monarchs of the Tudor period are among some of the most well-known figures in British history. John Guy presents a compelling and fascinating exploration of the Tudors in the...

On 4 July 1187 the legendary Muslim leader Saladin destroyed the Crusader army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem with a terrible slaughter at the battle of Hattin - and...

Human progress and prosperity depend on a peaceful environment, and most people have always sought to live in peace, yet our perception of the past is dominated too often by...

In the nineteenth century, European states conquered vast stretches of territory across the periphery of the international system. This book challenges the conventional wisdom that these conquests were the product...

The Russian Revolution of 1917 transformed the face of the Russian empire, politically, economically, socially, and culturally, and also profoundly affected the course of world history for the rest of...

Assyria was one of the most influential kingdoms of the Ancient Near East. In this Very Short Introduction, Karen Radner sketches the history of Assyria from city state to empire,...

A kleptomaniac, the nephew of a French Emperor, the creator of an imaginary land inhabited by small hairy creatures, a homicidal lunatic, an Esperanto enthusiast, the man who introduced the...

The word 'athletics' is derived from the Greek verb 'to struggle/suffer for a prize'. After reading this book, no one will see the Olympics as a graceful display of Greek...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, a powerful new reckoning with Jefferson Davis as military commander of the Confederacy"The best concise book we have on the...

Imagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post and NPR"We come to see in FDR the magisterial, central figure in the greatest and richest political tapestry of...

One of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2016One of NPR's 10 Best Books of 2016"Heartachingly relevant...the Eleanor Roosevelt who inhabits these meticulously crafted pages transcends both first-lady...

"[A] reminder of just how horrible nuclear weapons are."-The Wall Street Journal"A devastating read that highlights man's capacity to wreak destruction, but in which one also catches a glimpse of...

"The story of the Cherokee removal has been told many times, but never before has a single book given us such a sense of how it happened and what it...