History

Shortlisted for the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize'Part detective story, part Dickensian saga, part labour history. A thrilling and unnerving read' Observer 'Mesmeric and deeply moving' Daily Telegraph 'Remarkable, haunting, full...

No political concept is more used, and misused, than that of democracy. Nearly every regime today claims to be democratic, but not all 'democracies' allow free politics, and free politics...

'Highly readable, deeply informed.' Sunday TimesFrom Stalin's Soviet Union to Putin's Russia, this sweeping family memoir reveals what life is like for ordinary people in extraordinary times.The Soviet Union, 1962....

WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world's most repressive states - North Korea. 'A most perceptive and...

Here are some of the best of Churchill's letters, many of a more personal nature, written to a wide range of people, including his schoolmaster, his American grandmother and former...

History is written by the winners. It's the faithful servants, the insiders, the ones who stick around, who can adapt to almost any condition that get to write the official...

Is it possible to live in a nuclear exclusion zone? Return to Fukushima captures the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster, chronicling the resilience of people navigating life amid radioactivity.Fukushima...

A remarkable micro-history from the author of The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring'It takes a confident historian to write a short book... the story is distilled to its powerful essence; he...

No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful and most controversial military science R&D agency. In the first-ever history of the organization, New...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red, discover the incredible true story and page-turning account of the 18th century slave ship, often known as the Zong yet...

Celebrate 20 incredible years of OLOGY with this special edition of Egyptology - the journal of lost adventurer and Egyptologist, Emily Sands.With a stunning gold foiled cover featuring three "jewels"...

'Reads like something from a thriller...colourful, detailed and meticulously researched' Sunday Times'Gripping from start to finish' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads'Remarkable and brilliantly researched non-fiction thriller...focussing on one...

Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to "How Do We Look" and "The Eye of Faith," the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant...

Stylish and dark, the BBC series the 'Peaky Blinders' is set in the backstreets of Birmingham after the First World War and tells of the rise to power of Thomas...

Focusing on maritime disasters of the past half-century, this book includes the evidence of doctors, rescue and salvage workers, maritime engineers and designers, insurers and forensic experts. It discusses the...

By its evocation of a real or imaged heroic age, its contrasts of character and its variety of adventure, above all by its sheer narrative power, the Odyssey has won...

History has portrayed Australia's First Peoples, the Aboriginals, as hunter-gatherers who lived on an empty, uncultivated land. History is wrong.In this seminal book, Bruce Pascoe uncovers evidence that long before...

In his runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond brilliantly examined the circumstances that allowed Western civilizations to dominate much of the world. Now he probes the other side...

The stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947 liberated 400 million Indians from the British Empire. One of the defining moments of world history had been brought about by a...

Nineteenth-century France was one of the world's great cultural beacons, renowned for its dazzling literature, philosophy, art, poetry and technology. Yet this was also a tumultuous century of political anarchy...

This title offers a comprehensive and accessible survey of one of the world's richest mythological traditions. It covers the people, themes, concepts, places, and creatures of Celtic mythology, saga, legend,...

The chief sponsor of national revolutions at the beginning of the period was Napoleon III, who hoped to re-establish French ascendancy in Europe, but he was defeated by the forces...

This new edition of Norman Davies's classic study of the history of Poland has been revised and fully updated with two new chapters to bring the story to the end...

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. For more than forty years Achebe was silent on those terrible years,...

'TEN, NINE, EIGHT, SEVEN . . .' On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Union begins its countdown. From the steppes of Kazakhstan, the first human - Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin...

Known for its clear narrative voice, impeccable scholarship, and affordability, Alan Brinkley's The Unfinished Nation offers a concise but comprehensive examination of American History. Balancing social and cultural history with...

This is the compelling story of Pope Pius XI's secret relations with Benito Mussolini. A ground-breaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives by...

The author offers an overview of the 1930s, a story of the dark, dishonset decade that determined the course of the 20th century. Dealing individually with each of the period's...

'A remarkable and deeply moving book' Henry Marsh, bestselling author of Do No Harm'A breathtaking, extraordinary work of non-fiction' Times Literary SupplementOn 11 March 2011, a massive earthquake sent a...

This text covers not only political history, but also culture, society, economy and thought. A distillation of the late Albert Hourani's lifetime of scholarship, it was a bestseller when first...

Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-FictionFrom the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, the first insider expose of the awful dangers of America's hidden,...

From the bestselling author of FEMINA, a brilliant reappraisal of the medieval women whose lives have been exploited over centuries for political, nation-building ends.In LEGENDA, bestselling historian Professor Janina Ramirez...

'A superb account of the 1860 Damascus massacres-much neglected nowadays but central to the creation of the modern Middle East' - Simon Sebag Montefiore'A stunning portrait of the Ottoman Empire...