Social History

A fascinating portrait of gay men and women throughout time whose lives have influenced society at large, as well as what we recognize as today's varied gay culture. This book gives a voice to more than eighty people from every major continent and from...

"The clue to our future lies in our past and Toye has winkled it out with elegant and devastating precision." Chris Bryant, MP for Rhondda WAS THE ATTLEE GOVERNMENT OF 1945 REALLY THE GOLDEN PERIOD OF LABOUR POWER? 2024 marks the centenary of the...

James VI and I, the first monarch to reign over Scotland, England and Ireland, has long endured a mixed reputation. To many, he is simply the homosexual King, the inveterate witch-roaster, the smelly sovereign who never washed, the colourless man behind...

'This riveting behind-the-scenes story of the clothes on our backs is a must-read for clotheshorses everywhere' Harper's Bazaar 'Extraordinary . . . fascinating . . . a wonderful way into history, quite often through the voices of people who don't have...

The astonishing story of the Sassoons, one of the nineteenth century's preeminent commercial families and 'the Rothschilds of the East'The Sassoons were one of the great business dynasties of the nineteenth century, as eminent as traders as the...

'The perfect guide to the hidden history of London's streets.' BBC History MagazineIn Cruickshank's London, Britain's favourite architectural historian describes thirteen walks through one of the greatest cities on earth. From the mysterious Anglo-Saxon...

Bestseller & Winner of the Popular Non-Fiction Irish Book Award. 'Thought-provoking, irreverent and often laugh-out-loud hilarious' Irish Independent. "Motherfocloir" [focloir means 'dictionary' and is pronounced like a rather more vulgar English...

'Effervescent' New Yorker Best Books Of 2022 So Far 'Bursts with colour and incident' FT Best Books of Summer Read this prize-winning historian's "immersive" ( New York Times) account of the famous writers who, in the...

This comprehensive, beautiful book delves deep into the complex but fascinating story of our relationship with colour throughout human history. Colour is fundamental to our experience and understanding of the world. It crosses continents and cultures,...

'A thrilling celebration of lighthouses' i newspaperAn enthralling history of Britain's rock lighthouses, and the people who built and inhabited themLighthouses are enduring monuments to our relationship with the sea. They encapsulate a romantic vision...

The fascinating true history of ghosts - how we see them and why we believe in them, from Roger ClarkeWhat explains spectral sightings? Why do we fear the supernatural? What proof is there? Growing up in a haunted house, Roger Clarke spent much of his...

The 1960s saw car ownership take off in Britain, as the newly opened motorways created new opportunities for travel - on family holidays, to visit relatives, or for work. The kinds of cars the British drove also changed. Small economy cars in particular...

This first ever queer history of St Ives weaves together biography with art and social history to shine new light on a pivotal era in the development of British modernism. At its centre is the sculptor John Milne (1931-1978), who arrived in the town in...

Winner of The PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022Shortlisted for The Wolfson History Prize 2022A The Times Books of the Year 2022Three thousand years ago, in the Southwest Asian lands we now call Israel and Palestine, a group of people worshipped a complex...

*As heard on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour* *A Blackwell's and Waterstones Best Popular Science Book of 2022* 'Excellent ... one of those rare pop-science books that make you look at the whole world differently' The Daily Telegraph ***** 'Riveting' Mail...

The definitive history of the iconic football club: the glory, the scandal, the stars and its enduring influence on Italian life.Juventus utterly dominates the Italian game. Home to some of the biggest names in sport, it has won title after title, trophy...

Franz Goell was a thoroughly typical Berliner. He worked as a clerk, sometimes as a postal employee, night watchman, or publisher's assistant. He enjoyed the movies, ate spice cake, wore a fedora, tamed sparrows, and drank beer or schnapps. He lived his...

Suppose that everything we think we know about 'The Victorians' is wrong? That we have persistently misrepresented the culture of the Victorian era, perhaps to make ourselves feel more satisfyingly liberal and sophisticated? What if they were much more...

Millions of us suffer from addiction, including psychiatrist and recovering alcoholic Carl Erik Fisher. But where does this centuries-old behaviour come from and how should we treat it? As a young doctor, Carl Erik Fisher came face to face with his own...

Colm Toibin's Homage to Barcelona celebrates one of Europe's greatest cities - a cosmopolitan hub of vibrant architecture, art, culture and nightlife. It moves from the story of the city's founding and its huge expansion in the nineteenth century to the...

Samuel Pepys is popularly known as the founder of the modern navy, a member of the Royal Society and most of all, as a unique and frank diarist. Less well known is the fact that he was a serial sexual offender by modern standards; a voyeur, a groper and...

Bang up to date with fresh cover-ups relating to Barack Obama, Michael Jackson and Afghanistan The 100 military, medical, religious, alien, intelligence, banking and historical cover-ups 'they' really don't want you to know about: The...

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising...

Kathleen Clifford was born in 1909. Her family lived in a tiny flat near Paddington Station and her earliest memories were of the smell of horses and the shrill whistle of steam trains. For a girl from the slums there was really only one option once...

Christmas in Tudor times was a period of feasting, revelry and merrymaking 'to drive the cold winter away'. A carnival atmosphere presided at court, with a twelve-day-long festival of entertainments, pageants, theatre productions and 'disguisings', when...

Alethea Hawthorne will not allow Measham Hall to fall into the hands of lesser men... 1665. It is five years since King Charles II returned from exile, the scars of the English Civil Wars are yet to heal and now the Great Plague engulfs the land...

Sixty diverse cars, sixty fascinating stories, sixty contrasting specifications, just one uniting factor: they're all forgotten, neglected or misunderstood classics.Motoring in the 1940s and '50s spanned from post-war austerity to the...

At a time when that 1960s notion of air travel as decadent and exceptional is experiencing an unexpected revival, this book ... could be the G&T in a plastic glass you need.' The SpectatorTravel writer Julia Cooke's exhilarating portrait of Pan Am...

'I read the book with enormous appreciation. Tessa Boase brings all these long-ago housekeepers so movingly to life and her excitement in the research is palpable.' Fay Weldon: Novelist, playwright - and housekeeper's daughter Revelatory, gripping and...

Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year Award A fascinating, lyrical account of an east-west walk across Britain's westernmost and most mysterious region. A distant and exotic Celtic land, domain of tin-miners, pirates,...

L T C Rolt was an engineer and pioneer of industrial history; in this book he combined these two passions to give us a fascinating account of the men who 'made' Britain. From Brunel to Telford, he takes us on a journey from the first railway tracks being...

In Letters of Note: Dogs, Shaun Usher brings together a delightful collection of correspondence about our canine friends, featuring affectionate accounts of pups' playful misdemeanours, heartfelt tributes to loyal fidos and shared tales of remarkable...

'The latest in the series of powerful books on the divisions in modern Britain, and will take its place on many bookshelves beside Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Owen Jones's Chavs.' -Andrew Marr, Sunday...

A Financial Times Best Summer Book 2023 A Waterstones Best True Crime Book Nagyrev, Hungary, 1929. Over 160 mysterious deaths. A group of local wives conspiring together, and one woman at the centre of it all... ...

Shortlisted for the Military History Matters Book of the Year Award Few causes have given rise to such dramatic tales of loyalty, passion and betrayal as the Jacobite dream of restoring the Stuarts to the British throne. Although its failure brought...

Human progress and prosperity depend on a peaceful environment, and most people have always sought to live in peace, yet our perception of the past is dominated too often not by stories of peace but by tales of war. In this path-breaking study, former...

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge, and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives...

FOREWORD BY ADAM KAY, AUTHOR OF THIS IS GOING TO HURTPortion of proceeds go to NHS Charities Together.A beautiful and heart-warming collection of stories, this landmark publication tells, for the first time ever, the rich history of the NHS through the...

In this poignant and personal tribute, Roger Scruton gives an account of England which is both an illuminating analysis of its institutions and culture, and a celebration of its virtues. Covering all aspects of the English inheritance, and informed by...

Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle throughout millennia to regulate the most powerful engine of human behaviour: sex. From the savage impalement of an Ancient Mesopotamian adulteress to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde for `gross...