Every few weeks in British politics, a columnist will reach for the word ‘unprecedented’ as a cabinet minister resigns or yet another inquiry is called. In this magisterial history, respected broadcaster and journalist Steve Richards puts the c...
Throughout history, religious scholars, medical men and - occasionally - women themselves, have moulded thought on what 'makes' a woman. She has been called the weaker sex, the fairer sex, the purer sex, among many other monikers. Often, she has b...
A city drawn in sand. Inspired by the tales of Homer and his own ambitions of empire, Alexander the Great sketched the idea of a city onto the sparsely populated Egyptian coastline. He did not live to see Alexandria built, but his vision of a spar...
Have you heard of the Indian Workers' Association? The Grunwick Strike? The Brixton Black Women's Group? The Battle of Brick Lane? If the answer is no, you're not alone. The Shoulders We Stand On tells the stories of ten remarkable movements, camp...
The basic facts of the Titanic’s story are well known: in April 1912 the largest ship in the world, described as ‘practically unsinkable’, set off on her maiden trip to New York. She would never make it there. Instead she would strike an iceberg j...
Harriet Tubman, forced to labour outdoors on a Maryland plantation, learned from the land a terrain for escape. Louisa May Alcott ran wild, eluding gendered expectations in New England. The Indigenous women’s basketball team from Fort Shaw, Montan...
A uniquely data-rich analysis of the British elite from the Victorian era to today: who gets in, how they get there, what they like and look like, where they go to school, and what politics they perpetuate. Think of the British elite and familiar ...
This book is the essential guide to the extraordinarily complicated and developing situation in Israel/Palestine. Fully updated to reflect the tense and troubling changes in the region since 7 October 2023, this book puts the present situation int...
Beginning in the sixth millennium BCE, in the Indus Valley, Mesopotamia and along the Nile River, human civilization expanded to develop writing systems, farming methods, social organization and modes of government. Today, humans inhabit every par...
From the Iron Age to the High Middle Ages, the ancient Celts were an engine of change for the whole of Europe. Here, Simon Young travels back in time to the moments when this ancient people defined indelibly the ancient, medieval and modern world....
Why did so many Germans take part in the crimes of Nazi Germany? How did they come to support Hitler and follow him almost to the very end? For too long, the Nazis have been presented as little more than psychopaths or criminals.
At eighteen, your life is full of of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to – unless you've got the plague ... What happens if the First World War breaks out while you're at university? How does a young woman, born withou...
From the Sunday Times-bestselling Patrick Bishop comes a heart-stopping countdown narrative recreating the liberation of Paris in 1944, one of the great and most dramatic hinge moments of WW2. When the Germans marched in and the lamps went out in ...
This book traces the formation of the archaeological site of Carthage and how it re-emerged in the minds of European antiquarians and travellers in the early modern world. For almost 1,600 years the ancient city sat on the north coast of Africa, d...
A fascinating and richly full-colour illustrated memoir, from a Royal Air Force pilot detailing his personal experiences during a golden age of British military aviation from the Second World War to the 1970s. Ken Aedy joined the Royal Air Force i...
The first line of what was to become a major underground railway, with 272 stations, opened on 10 January 1863. London Transport, created by Act of Parliament, commenced operations on 1 July 1933. John Glover extensively photographed the London Un...
These are the women who ruled, the women who founded dynasties, the women who fought for religious freedom, their families and love. These are the women who made a difference, who influenced countries, kings and the Reformation. Heroines of the Tu...
Based on over 150 audio interviews with those who fought, this is a moving and powerful oral history that marks the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings and battle for Normandy. Published alongside a groundbreaking BBC2 documentary series D-Day:...
June 1944: In Operation Bagration, more than two million Red Army soldiers, facing 500,000 German soldiers, finally avenged their defeat in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The same month saw the Allies triumph on the beaches of Normandy, but, despit...
The nation’s favourite historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, take on the most curious moments in history, answering the questions we didn’t even think to ask…- What was the most disastrous party in history?- How did a hair appointment alm...
SAS Great Escapes Three recounts how warriors of the world's most famous fighting force, the SAS, carried out five of the most daring escapes of World War Two. Ranging from the very birth of the SAS, to the post D-Day battles for Nazi-occupied ...
Operation Biting was one of the most thrilling British commando raids of World War II, and probably the most successful. In February 1942 RAF intelligence was baffled by a newly-identified radar network on the coast of Nazi-occupied Europe, codena...
Dartington Hall was a social experiment of kaleidoscopic vitality, set up in Devon in 1925 by a fabulously wealthy American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst (née Whitney), and her Yorkshire-born husband, Leonard. It quickly achieved international fame wi...
From the natural geometry of the Giant's Causeway to the sarsen slabs used to build Stonehenge, we are surrounded by evidence for the extraordinary geological forces that shaped the British Isles. Running coast to coast through Devon is 'Sticklepa...
