Secondhand History Books

Part of a series of often controversial biographies of statesmen and women who have shaped the modern world, this book features Franklin Delano Roosevelt who served 12 years in the...

What was the tallest building of the ancient world? Or the average life expectancy in medieval Byzantium? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ritual human sacrifice...

Readers of Dan Brown's extraordinary bestseller The Da Vinci Code are fascinated by the questions raised in the novel. Was Jesus actually married to Mary Magdalene? Was she one of...

From the makers of the award-winning BBC series and Dr Nick Barratt, the UK's leading authority on family history, comes the definitive, must-have guide to researching your family's roots and...

Madresfield Court is an arrestingly romantic stately home in the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. It has been continuously owned and lived in by the same family, the Lygons, back to...

Written by two leading social and cultural historians, the first two editions of A Social History of the Media became classic textbooks, providing a masterful overview of communication media and...

In On Royalty Jeremy Paxman delves deep into Britain's royal past. What is the point of Kings and Queens? What do they do all day? And what does it mean...

The four centuries between the composition of the Homeric epics and the conquests of Alexander the Great witnessed an immensely creative period in Greek art, one full of experimentation and...

The greatest 'unsolved mystery' of the American Southwest relates to the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the 11th century converged on Chaco Canyon (now New Mexico) and built a...

The Origins of the Final Solution is the most detailed, careful, and comprehensive analysis to date of the descent of the Nazi persecution of the Jews into mass murder: the...

This is a survey of a seminal and intensely controversial period in British history, from the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in 1603 to the union of...

The life of William Shakespeare, Britain's greatest dramatist, was inextricably linked with the history of London. Together, the great writer and the great city came of age and confronted triumph...

Designed as a city dwelling for the modern age, Dolphin Square opened in London's Pimlico in 1936. Boasting 1,250 hi-tech flats, a swimming pool, restaurant, gardens and shopping arcade, the...

'On the outside, [the foreigners] seem intractable, but inside they are cowardly...Although there have been a few ups-and-downs, the situation as a whole is under control.' In October 1839, a...

Behind the Throne is, above all, a history of family life.They ate, entertained their friends and worried about money. Henry VIII kept tripping over his dogs. George II threw his...

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...

The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world's surface. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world's greatest empire?...

The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the beginning of a transport revolution. Blood, Iron and Gold reveals the huge impact of the railways as they...

What is the Holocaust? Were Hitlet and his executioners sadistic psychopaths? Were ordinary Germans morally culpable for murdering millions of innocent victims? This volume seeks to explore these and other...

The Macdonald sisters -- Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa -- started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers...

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...

The imprisonment and execution of Queen Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, in May 1536 was unprecedented in English history. It was sensational in its day, and has exerted endless...

For those that survive, the traumas of military conflict can be long lasting. It might seem astonishing that archaeology, with its uncovering of the traces of the long-dead, of battlefields,...

It's the stuff myths are made of: the story of a celebrated artefact - the 1933 twenty-dollar gold piece - and its incredible journey from the deathbed of a famous...

The Lindisfarne Gospels, written and illuminated in the northeast of England at the beginning of the 8th century, is one of the outstanding masterpieces of early medieval European book painting....

Death Before Glory! is a highly readable, thoroughly researched and comprehensive study of the British army's campaigns in the West Indies during the Napoleonic period and of the extraordinary experiences...

'Probably the best "buy" among recent works for one who comes to medieval history for the first time.'History (about the second edition)Consisting of two parts, this book successfully conveys the...

This intriguing book tells the story of England's great medieval Angevin dynasty in an entirely new way. Departing from the usual king-centric narrative, Richard Huscroft instead centers each of his...

Among the ethnic gangs that rule America's inner cities, none has had the impact of the Jamaican posses. Spawned in the ghettos of Kingston as mercenary street-fighters for the island's...

For this study of the heir to the throne, Jonathan Dimbleby was given unprecedented access to his subject. As well as spending many hours in wide-ranging and candid conversation with...

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Hums with living history, human warmth and indignation' New York Times Less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept The mystery has haunted generations since the...

Art imitates life. Or does it? One sleepy Sunday morning in Buenos Aires, the protagonist of Martinez's brilliant new mystery finds himself unexpectedly tangled up in the story of Luciana,...

A burgeoning new city is built on the dreams of the American gold rush. It is also built upon a landscape that has been stretching, sliding and breaking apart for...

This two-part book provides first information about the political, social, economic and cultural developments of the Weimar Republic and then second analyzes research in the field which sheds light onto...

Over the last ten years, journalist and al-Qa'ida expert Abdel Bari Atwan has cultivated uniquely well-placed sources and amassed a wealth of information about al-Qa'ida's origins, masterminds and plans for...

Following the illuminating first-hand revelations about the war in Europe and the Middle East compiled in "Witness to War", Richard Aldrich now taps into another huge variety of diarists to...

A New York Times BestsellerThe international best-selling author explores the revolutions, past and present, that define the chaotic, polarized and unstable age in which we live.Fareed Zakaria first warned of...