Secondhand History Books

Forget everything you think you know about the making of the most powerful man on the planet. President Barack Obama's triumph was not inevitable: it was the end product of...

President Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe IV on August 19, 1946, in Hope, Arkansas, three months after his father died in a traffic accident. When he was four years...

We are born with the instinct to create and invent. Indeed our ability to do so is what separates we humans from the rest of the animal world. The moment...

Terry Jones' Barbarians takes a completely fresh approach to Roman history. Not only does it offer us the chance to see the Romans from a non-Roman perspective, it also reveals...

The Times' Best History Books of 2017Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Prize for Military HistoryWinner of the 2017 Caroline Bancroft History PrizeShortlisted for the Military History Magazine Book of the...

Health, disease and society in Europe 1500-1800 considers how the body was viewed by the medical profession from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, and challenges established ideas in the field...

A hugely entertaining contemporaneous account of the Napoleonic Wars by a young officer who was eventually promoted to General on the eve of Waterloo. Abridged from the two-volume original of...

This book provides an account of the events preceding the Gulf War, with particular emphasis on the diplomatic background to the conflict. It includes detailed descriptions of meetings between Saddam...

Spawning the years from 1998 until the chaotic aftermath of the American led invasion in 2003, RTE reporter Richard Downes has witnessed first hand the incredible changes that have occurred...

A long-overdue and dramatic reinterpretation of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots by one of the leading historians at work today. She was crowned Queen of Scotland at nine...

From the bestselling author of Normandy '44 and Sicily '43, a brilliant new history of the last days of the war'Seldom is war so vividly described...An assault on the senses...Painful...

Theresa May has presided over the most dramatic and historic peacetime premiership for a century. May at 10 tells the compelling inside story of the most turbulent period in modern...

The account of the fateful bridge too far...'It was a bridge too far and perhaps the whole plan was doomed to failure from the start, but we had to try,...

From award-winning historian Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century retells the story of a century of division, charting the struggles of rival ideologies to create a new world order...

'A gripping investigation of Israel's assassination policy' Sunday Times'Remarkable' Observer'Riveting' Daily Mail'Compelling' John le CarreWinner of 2018 National Jewish Book AwardThe Talmud says: "If someone comes to kill you, rise...

The Nazis Knew My Name is one woman's story about the bravery and kindness shown by her mother in the Holocaust concentration camps. In the camps during the Second World...

"The Change We Choose: Speeches 2007-2009" brings together the key speeches made by Gordon Brown during the first two and a half years of his premiership. It reflects how the...

This title is a journalist's account, much of it as an eye-witness, of South Africa's history from Malan to Mbeki, deftly tracing South Africa's transition from apartheid to a constitutional...

The 1960 presidential election, won ultimately by John F. Kennedy, was one of the closest and most contentious in American history. The country had never elected a Roman Catholic president,...

The story of the Third Crusade, and the two men who dictated its outcome: Saladin, hero of the Islamic world and Richard the Lionheart. Richard and the King of France...

From New York Times bestseller Maureen Callahan, a fierce, character-driven expose of the real Kennedy Curse-the family's generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem-and the women who have paid the...

Glamorized, mythologized and demonized - the women of the 1920s prefigured the 1960s in their determination to reinvent the way they lived. Flappers is in part a biography of that...

During his long reign (1279-1213 BC), Ramesses II left his mark on ancient Egypt, bringing prosperity, justice and order in a golden age during which cultural life thrived. As a...

The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was simply awesome. What followed them was some...

This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the...