Historical

'A multiple biography with overlapping chronology is a tricky feat and Buruma pulls it off magnificently.' Ben Macintyre, The TimesOn the face of it, the three characters here seem to have little in common - aside from the fact that each committed...

Ngugi wa Thiong'o was born the fifth child of his father's third wife, in a family that includes twenty-four children born to four different mothers. He spent his 1930s childhood as the apple of his mother's eye, before attending school to slake what is...

"I spent six decades learning how never to reveal my weakness to anyone - now it's time for change." When he was just two and a half, Barrington Sowden's mother left him and his older sister in the care of his grandparents in Jamaica, joining the...

Alfred, son of AEthelwulf, king of the West Saxons, ran. Behind him, the takers of his land and kingdom fanned out, searching for the fleeing king ... Buried in AD 899 as the king of the English at his capital city of Winchester, Alfred the Great's...

Tony Smith CBE spent his career managing our UK border controls, from junior immigration officer to Head of the UK Border Force. He spent more than four decades in the front line of the conflict between those who argue for open borders and free movement...

A fresh treatment of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, revealing the close ties between Mussolini and Hitler and their regimes From 1934 until 1944 Mussolini met Hitler numerous times, and the two developed a relationship that deeply affected both...

Born into what was one of the wealthiest families in the world, "Walter Rothschild" became the best known zoologist of his day - and one of Britain's great eccentrics. A benign and enigmatic figure with a boundless enthusiasm for nature, he amassed the...

When Winston Churchill was a boy of sixteen, he already had a vision for his purpose in life. "This country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion . . . I shall be in command of the defences of London . . . it will fall to me to save the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.About the AuthorAmanda Mitchison is the author of Alexander Selkirk: The Real Robinson Crusoe (Short Books). She is a star interviewer for The Sunday Telegraph. She lives in...

This is a political biography of William III (1650–1702): prince of Orange; stadhouder in the Netherlands from 1672; and (in a novel joint monarchy with his wife, Mary), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland after the revolution of 1688–9. William III...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780743270755Author Doris Kearns GoodwinFormat PaperbackPage Count 128Imprint Simon & Schuster AudioPublisher Simon & Schuster Ltd

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsShort-listed for Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2015. Long-listed for PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography 2015.Book InformationISBN 9780307742162Author Kirstin...

He was acknowledged to be a brilliant debater and parliamentarian, and is still England's first and only Jewish prime minister, but there was much more to Benjamin Disraeli than his career as a nineteenth-century politician. Dandy, novelist, social...

'A case more important than Profumo' Financial Times 'A riveting read' Literary Review He lived a double-life in the sixtiesFaked his own death in the seventiesAnd retained his cover in the eighties A period thriller with powerful political and...

A Glimpse Behind the Facade of Rich and Famous Women"...wild, witty, gossipy, and glamourous. A sheer delight." Becca Anderson, author of Badass Women Give the Best Advice#1 Best Seller in Women's Studies and Biographies of the Rich & Famous and...

Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of the era of hope and passion as Ali tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement.Through...

A dashing young orator during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony for life. But two years later he was "back from the dead" and in New...

Born in 1868 and executed by the British in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising, the work of Irish national hero James Connolly has long been misunderstood. From Fianna Fail and Sinn Fein, to conservative Irish nationalists and the Church, many groups...

How Hitler's spy chief sabotaged the German war effort.Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) 18 months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing...

A National Book Award finalist, the mesmerizing, landmark illustrated biography Radioactive is finally available in a stunning paperback edition. Through words and her own gorgeously crafted illustrations, artist and journalist Lauren Redniss tells the...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE 2020A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019A revelatory new biography of Adolf Hitler from the acclaimed historian Brendan SimmsAdolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679643258Author Maya AngelouFormat HardbackPage Count 1184Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 1168gDimensions(mm) 211mm *...

Following her death in September 2022, the outpouring of affection and admiration for the Queen was as touching as it was remarkable. She had been a matriarch to the nation for over seven decades, and tens of millions of people - in Britain and across...

Ernest Marples revolutionised three UK government departments. At Transport (1959-1964) he appointed Dr Beeching chairman of British Railways and commissioned him to produce his infamous report, inaugurated motorways and introduced significant...

"Her story is adapted to move the compassion of those she visits. She has bad nerves, and seems in great disorder of mind, which she pretends to be owing to the ill usage of her father [...] She attempts to borrow money of [sic] waiters, servants, and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781403983787Author Christopher HibbertFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint St Martin's PressPublisher St Martin's PressWeight(grams) 284gDimensions(mm)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781538716052Author Amy Shira TeitelFormat PaperbackPage Count 464Imprint Grand Central PublishingPublisher Grand Central PublishingWeight(grams)...

Through a collection of letters written to his best friend and to his father in England, and from his own personal diary entries, John Dodds memoir offers a fascinating, and amusing, glimpse of life as a colonial rubber planter. With true stories and...

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a vivid portrait of one of the most powerful leaders in Israel's first decades of statehood Instantly recognizable with his iconic eye patch, Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) was one of Israel's most charismatic-and...

Sean MacDiarmada moved in the shadows, ultra-cautious about what he committed to paper, aware that his letters could be intercepted by the police. Because of this, history has not allocated MacDiarmada the prominent role he deserves in the organisation...

As an interpreter in the German Foreign Ministry, Paul-Otto Schmidt (1899-1970) was in attendance at some of the most decisive moments of twentieth-century history. Fluent in both English and French, he served as Hitler's translator during negotiations...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Christopher Award 2015.Book InformationISBN 9781101904800Author Travis MillsFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint ConvergentPublisher Random House USA...

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the worshipper and frequenter of the great men of his time, the 'divine' Michelangelo, who came to his studio, the 'marvellous'...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780451223982Author Leslie CarrollFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint New American LibraryPublisher New American LibraryWeight(grams) 391g

'A heart-piercingly brilliant book about a woman whose personal life put her in the cross-hairs of history' HADLEY FREEMAN'Totally riveting. I couldn't put it down' VICTORIA HISLOP'Ethel sings out for all women who have been misunderstood and wronged,...

The chilling and little-known story of Adolf Hitler's eight-year march to the pinnacle of German politics. On the night of 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler leaned out of a spotlit window of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, bursting with joy. Even to Hitler...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780618446599Author Pumla Gobodo-MadikizelaFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Houghton Mifflin (Academic)Publisher Houghton MifflinWeight(grams)...

In this widely acclaimed biography, Bertram Wolffe challenges the traditional view of Henry VI as an unworldly, innocent, and saintly monarch and offers instead a finely drawn but critical portrait of an ineffectual ruler. Drawing on widespread...

The third, enlarged edition of Isaiah Berlin's remarkable series of character portraits, Personal ImpressionsWinston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova: Isaiah Berlin's...

Born in 1473, Margaret Pole was the daughter of George, duke of Clarence, niece of both Edward IV and Richard III, and the only woman, apart from Anne Boleyn, to hold a peerage title in her own right during the sixteenth century. She was restored by...