History

Pub Date:28/02/2015 - Napoleon Bonaparte is often credited with saying that 'an army marches on its stomach'. A hundred years after (read more)

Pub Date:28/02/2015 - Napoleon Bonaparte is often credited with saying that 'an army marches on its stomach'. A hundred years after his time, the soldiers of the Great War would do little marching. Instead, they would fight their battles from cold, muddy trenches, looking out across No Man's Land towards another set of trenches that housed the enemy.

It is one of the remarkable successes of the war that they rarely went hungry. During the war, the army grew from its peace-time numbers of 250,000 to well over 3 million. They needed three meals a day and, using the men's own letters and diaries, John Hartley tells the story of the food they ate, how it got to them in those trenches and what they thought of it. (hide)

Pub Date:28/01/2016 - 'One of the great love stories of history, in a league with Napoleon and Josephine, and Antony and Cleopatra (read more)

Pub Date:28/01/2016 - 'One of the great love stories of history, in a league with Napoleon and Josephine, and Antony and Cleopatra ...Excellent, with dazzling mastery of detail and literary flair' Economist It was history's most successful political partnership - as sensual and fiery as it was creative and visionary. Catherine the Great was a woman of notorious passion and imperial ambition. Prince Potemkin - wildly flamboyant and sublimely talented - was the love of her life and her co-ruler.

Together they seized Ukraine and Crimea, defining the Russian empire to this day. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangement to share power, leaving Potemkin free to love his beautiful nieces, and Catherine her young male favourites. But these 'twin souls' never stopped loving each other. (hide)

A brand new history of the Dambusters raid from best-selling and critically acclaimed military historian, Max Hastings. Operation (read more)

A brand new history of the Dambusters raid from best-selling and critically acclaimed military historian, Max Hastings. Operation Chastise, the destruction of the Mohne and Eder dams in north-west Germany by the RAF's 617 Squadron on the night of 16/17 May 1943, was an epic that has passed into Britain's national legend. Max Hastings grew up embracing the story, the classic 1955 movie and the memory of Guy Gibson, the 24-year-old wing-commander who led the raid.

In the 21st Century, however, he urges that we should see the dambusters in much more complex shades. The aircrew's heroism was entirely real, as was the brilliance of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the `bouncing bombs'. But commanders who promised their young fliers that success could shorten the war fantasised as ruthlessly as they did about the entire bomber offensive.
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On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled (read more)

On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefighters and those living in the area were abandoned to their fate. The blast put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, contaminating over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.

In Chernobyl, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy draws on recently opened archives to recreate these events in all their drama. A moment by moment account of the heroes, perpetrators and victims of a tragedy, Chernobyl is the first full account of a gripping, unforgettable Cold War story. (hide)

The modern Christmas was made by the Victorians and rooted in their belief in commerce, family and religion. Their rituals and traditions (read more)

The modern Christmas was made by the Victorians and rooted in their belief in commerce, family and religion. Their rituals and traditions persist to the present day but the festival has also been changed by growing affluence, shifting family structures, greater expectations of happiness and material comfort, technological developments and falling religious belief. Christmas became a battleground for arguments over consumerism, holiday entitlements, social obligations, communal behaviour and the influence of church, state and media.

Even in private, it encouraged reflection on social change and the march of time. Amongst those unhappy at the state of the world or their own lives, Christmas could induce much cynicism and even loathing but for a quieter majority it was a happy time, a moment of a joy in a sometimes difficult world that made the festival more than just an integral feature of the calendar: Christmas was one of British culture's emotional high points. Moreover, it was also a testimony to the enduring importance of family, shared values and a common culture in the UK. (hide)

Combining the latest scholarship with a highly readable style, Kathryn Tempest looks at Cicero the politician and orator, and the (read more)

Combining the latest scholarship with a highly readable style, Kathryn Tempest looks at Cicero the politician and orator, and the private man. On the back of his natural talent for oratory, Cicero set out on the path to a glorious reputation - his earliest speeches brought the name of Cicero out of the shadows and hurled him into the spotlight. Cicero was the first 'new man' in thirty years to reach the consulship; the fact that he managed to do so without bribery or violence makes his success even more remarkable.

His year of office witnessed events of such a scale that he was granted the extraordinary honour of the title 'pater patriae' - he was the father of his fatherland. Following the Civil War, and with renewed hopes for the restoration of the Roman Republic, Cicero launched a fierce attack on Mark Antony by delivering a series of speeches that cannot be matched for their vigour. It was these speeches that would be the cause of Cicero's death, and his death was to be as dramatic as his life. (hide)

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word (read more)

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 400-year transformation into an everyday necessity.

The story is one that few coffee drinkers know. Coffeeland centres on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester, founded one of the world's great coffee dynasties. Adapting the innovations of the industrial revolution to plantation agriculture, Hill helped to turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history, a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality and violence. (hide)

The term the Cold War has had many meanings and interpretations since it was originally coined and has been used to analyse everything (read more)

The term the Cold War has had many meanings and interpretations since it was originally coined and has been used to analyse everything from comics to pro-natalist policies, and science fiction to gender politics. This range has great value, but also poses problems, notably by diluting the focus on war of a certain type, and by exacerbating a lack of precision in definition and analysis. The Cold War: A Military History is the first survey of the period to focus on the diplomatic and military confrontation and conflict.

Jeremy Black begins his overview in 1917 and covers the 'long Cold War', from the 7th November Revolution to the ongoing repercussions and reverberations of the conflict today. The book is forward-looking as well as retrospective, not least in encouraging us to reflect on how much the character of the present world owes to the Cold War. The result is a detailed survey that will be invaluable to students and scholars of military and international history. (hide)

Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. (read more)

Among the magnificent gems and jewels left behind by the great Islamic empires, emeralds stand out for their size and prominence. For the Mughals, Ottomans, and Safavids green was-as it remains for all Muslims-the color of Paradise, reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and his descendants. Tapping a wide range of sources, Kris Lane traces the complex web of global trading networks that funneled emeralds from backland South America to populous Asian capitals between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

Lane reveals the bloody conquest wars and forced labor regimes that accompanied their production. It is a story of trade, but also of transformations-how members of profoundly different societies at opposite ends of the globe assigned value to a few thousand pounds of imperfectly shiny green rocks. (hide)

The Colour of Time spans more than a hundred years of world history from the reign of Queen Victoria and the US Civil War to the (read more)

The Colour of Time spans more than a hundred years of world history from the reign of Queen Victoria and the US Civil War to the Cuban Missile Crisis and beginning of the Space Age. It charts the rise and fall of empires, the achievements of science, industry and the arts, the tragedies of war and the politics of peace, and the lives of men and women who made history. The book is a collaboration between a gifted Brazilian artist and a leading British historian. (hide)