Europe

A portrait of Jane Austen's England told through the career paths of younger sons-men of good family but small fortune In Regency England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had...

The dramatic and little-known story of how, in the summer of 1920, Lenin came within a hair's breadth of shattering the painstakingly constructed Versailles peace settlement and spreading Bolshevism to western Europe. In 1920 the new Soviet...

Have you ever hankered to dress like a Tudor lord or lady, or perhaps you prefer the status of goodwife, or costermonger, or even a bawd? For beginner historical reenactors, the path to authenticity can be bewildering and sometimes intimidating. Judith...

Winner of the Costa Biography AwardWhat makes a Stalin? Was he a Tsarist agent or Lenin's bandit? Was he to blame for his wife's death? When did the killing start? Based on revelatory research, here is the thrilling story of how a charismatic...

After outlining conventional accounts of Wales in the High Middle Ages, this book moves to more radical approaches to its subject. Rather than discussing the emergence of the March of Wales from the usual perspective of the `intrusive' marcher lords, for...

A brilliantly captivating children's novel from popular television historian Lucy Worsley, exploring the most famous divorce in history from the perspective of the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. By turns thrilling, dramatic and...

KING. POLITICIAN. WARRIOR. CONQUEROR.1189. Richard the Lionheart's long-awaited goal comes true as he is crowned King of England. Setting his own kingdom in order, he prepares to embark on a gruelling crusade to reclaim Jerusalem.With him on every step...

'Fascinating' 'Books of the Year', Financial Times'London's twelve great rail termini are the epic survivors of the Victorian age... Wolmar brings them to life with the knowledge of an expert and the panache of a connoisseur.' Simon Jenkins'A wonderful...

The most iconic planes of WWII, the Supermarine Spitfire, Hawker Hurricane, DeHavilland Mosquito and the Avro Lancaster, were all powered by one engine, the Rolls-Royce Merlin. The story of the Merlin is one of British ingenuity at its height, of...

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 violently changed the course of European History. Alarmed by Bismarck's territorial ambitions and the Prussian army's crushing defeats of Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866, French Emperor Napoleon III vowed to bring...

Exam Board: Pearson EdexcelLevel: GCSESubject: HistoryFirst teaching: September 2016First exams: Summer 2018Endorsed for EdexcelTarget success in Edexcel GCSE (9-1) History with this proven formula for effective, structured revision.Key content coverage...

He did not return to Morocco for another twenty-nine years, travelling instead through more than forty countries on the modern map, covering seventy-five thousand miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China and as far south as...

An expansive guide to the medieval world, with new attention to women, ordinary parishioners, attitudes toward Jews and Muslims, and more For many, the medieval world seems dark and foreign-an often brutal and seemingly irrational time of superstition,...

In 1811 John Williams was buried with a stake in his heart. Was he the notorious East End killer or his eighth victim in the bizarre and shocking Ratcliffe Highway Murders? In this vivid and gripping reconstruction P. D. James and police historian T. A...

In this delightful and engagingly eccentric treasury of life lessons, redoubtable Victorian Elspeth Marr (1871-1947) reflects on the fundamental topics of life as well as the nuts and bolts of everyday living. Part journal, part commonplace book, among...

Winner of the Orwell Prize The second part of Peter Hennessy's celebrated Post-War Trilogy, Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties captures Britain in an extraordinary decade, emerging from the shadow of war into growing affluence.'If the Gods gossip,...

This highly original, extremely enjoyable book tells the story of Britain's extraordinary scramble to world power in the 18th century and how, through hubris and incompetence, it lost almost everything it had gained. Whilst Britain was an important...

More than ever before, the Renaissance stands as one of the defining moments in world history. Between 1400 and 1600, European perceptions of society, culture, politics and even humanity itself emerged in ways that continue to affect not only Europe but...

Did You Know?Wales is the only nation in the United Kingdom not to be represented on the Union Jack. During the First World War, Cardiff was the largest coal port in the world. Guglielmo Marconi sent the first ever wireless communication over open sea -...

Dating from the 1520's, Bolognese swordsmaster's Antonio Manciolino's Opera Nova is the earliest surviving printed book on Italian martial arts. This seminal and eclectic Renaissance work contains clear and systematic instruction on the use of the sword...

The Little Book of Edinburgh is a funny, fast-paced, fact-packed compendium of the sort of frivolous, fantastic or simply strange information which no-one will want to be without. Here we find out about the most unusual crimes and punishments, eccentric...

Late one evening in March 1924, a tipsy young nun was seen trying to slip into Balliol, an all-male Oxford college, just as the gates were about to close for the night. The nun - subsequently unmasked as the son of the college bursar - was returning...

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE 2020'Brilliant ... a historical masterpiece' The Times Literary SupplementFrom one of Britain's most distinguished historians and the bestselling author of Hitler, this is the definitive...

Wild Ruins B.C. reveals the extraordinary tale of Britain's human story before Christianity, from the first human footprints of 800,000 years ago, to ancient axe factories, rock art, stone circles, mountain burials, sunset hill forts, lost villages and...

The Nobel laureate Otto Warburg was widely regarded as one of the most important biochemists of the twentieth century. A Jewish homosexual living openly with his partner, he was also among the most despised figures in the Third Reich. Yet top Nazi...

As a person's religious convictions, especially in times past, can be considered fundamental to their character and behaviour, the nature of King Richard III's piety has been the subject of considerable debate. Much of this controversy has focused on the...

In rural Ireland in 1950, a respectable widow has an affair with a visiting stranger. To conceal her pregnancy, she travels to Belfast, where she gives birth to a baby girl called Marie Therese. She returns to her village life, leaving her daughter to...

In this follow-up to Lancashire Murders, Alan Hayhurst brings together more murderous tales that shocked not only the county but made headline news throughout the nation. They include the case of Oldham nurse Elizabeth Berry, who poisoned her own...

A Daily Telegraph book of the year. This is a landmark in science writing that resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century. Who is he? A gambler and blasphemer, inventor and chancer,...

The subject of numerous biographies and history books, Winston Churchill has been repeatedly voted as one of the greatest of Englishmen. Even today, Boris Johnson in his failing attempts to be magisterial, has adopted many of his hero's mannerism! And,...

'The Penguin History of Europe series ... is one of contemporary publishing's great projects' New StatesmanThe Pursuit of Glory brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods in European history - from the battered, introvert continent after the...

A bold reassessment of the major architectural monuments and urban forms of the world's first industrial city: Manchester From the mid-eighteenth century to the nineteen-twenties, from the birth of the Industrial Revolution to the height of Manchester's...

Once part of Lancashire, Droylsden and Audenshaw are now part of Tameside Metropolitan Borough of Manchester. The varied histories of both towns see the transition from farming to an industrial community. Droylsden is still home to the James Robertson's...

"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project...

The geology of the Cairngorms was created on a timeline that stretches back hundreds of millions of years. Much of the land is underlain by granite that formed deep within the Earth's crust and 'surfaced' as the overlying layers of rock were stripped...

'As British official records are still "going missing", the significance of Cobain's work only increases' David Olusoga, author of Black and British 'In an astonishing book, the writer Ian Cobain reveals the mass destruction of records and archives,...

More than 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe were driven from their homes in the wake of WWII, yet barely anyone noticed or remembers Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized and helped to carry out the forced...

Iby Knill is a simply remarkable woman. An Auschwitz holocaust survivor originally from Bratislava, she married a British army officer and set out to make a new life in England, arriving in Cornwall in 1947 to set up home. Dealing with the problems of...

The English see more ghosts than any other nation. From medieval times to the present day, stories have been told about ghosts who avenge injustice, souls who long for peace and spooks who just want to have fun. The English Ghost is a treasure trove of...

"A marvelous chronicle of Breton lives and life, seen largely through the eyes of a child grown old, remembering how it used to be, in the years between the two world wars. The memoirs are magnificent. . . . The affectionate and touching portraits...