Social History

Orlando Figes' The Whisperers is a groundbreaking account of daily life in the chaotic and paranoid atmosphere of Stalinist Russia. Exploring the inner life of a Russia where everyone was afraid to talk and society spoke in whispers, whether to protect...

This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with Chips descending into poor health but still able to turn a pointed phrase about the...

In Letters of Note: Cats, Shaun Usher collects together the most engaging missives that celebrate, eulogise, rail against and analyse the idiosyncratic ways of our feline companions.Nikola Tesla, Elizabeth Taylor,Charles Dickens, Anne Frank,T.S. Eliot,...

Despite - or perhaps because of - the privations of war, the 1940s was one of the greatest decades for fashion in Britain. The designs and fashions of the 1930s would linger on through the early years of the Second World War but with shortages and...

Packed with surprising and fascinating information, London's Lost Rivers uncovers a very different side to London - showing how waterways shaped our principal city and exploring the legacy they leave today. With individual maps to show the course of...

A fully updated and revised edition of a gardening classic. From the cooling fountains of the Alhambra to the imposing palace grounds of Chinese emperors and the clean lines of the formal French parterre, this...

'A delicious trip through the geography, history and culture of the region' - Sunday Telegraph Ever since the days of the Grand Tour, Tuscany has cast its magic spell on foreign vistiors. Attracted by the perfect combination of history, art,...

From Emperors and empresses, poets and prostitutes, slaves and plebs, Ancient Rome was a wealth of different experiences and expectations. None more so than around the subject of sex and sexuality. The image of Ancient Rome that has come down to us is...

A "comprehensive...fascinating" (The New York Times Book Review) history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, by one of the nation's preeminent scholars on the subject, with a new afterword about the recent hate crimes against Asian...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2015SHORTLISTED FOR RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2016In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to a bloody end the stubborn and complicated civil war in Sri Lanka. For...

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a reaction to the brutality of working life and the sterility of industrial design in Victorian Britain. Although Arts and Crafts was initially a mediaeval revival, the movement was always about the artist craftsman and...

'An important book' Martin Wolf, Financial Times (BOOK OF THE YEAR)The clear-eyed, definitive history of the modern American economy and the decline of the American Dream, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist behind The New York Times's "The...

If you think that the English language stays still, carved in tablets of stone, think again. English is constantly on the move, enhancing its scope by gratefully accepting words from other languages. It tolerates changes to meanings, often with hilarious...

Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 'One of the most shamefully under-read great British authors of the past 100 years' Sarah Waters The poet Sylvia Townsend Warner rose to sudden fame with the publication of her classic feminist novel Lolly...

China Witness is the personal testimony of a generation whose stories have not yet been told. Here the grandparents and great-grandparents of today sum up in their own words - for the first and perhaps the last time - the vast changes that have overtaken...

In this follow-up to his bestselling A Force Like No Other, Colin Breen brings together more compelling insider stories from RUC officers who served during the Troubles. Includes stories about the IRA border campaign (1958-62), the Shankill Butchers...

The inspiring true story of Josephine Reynolds, Britain's first full-time female firefighter.When Josephine Reynolds signed up with the Norfolk Fire Service in July 1982 at just seventeen years old, there was no such thing as a firefighter - only fire...

Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined...

Whether it is the seaside postcard bubbly blondes of Barbara Windsor, the hysterically historical leading ladies of Joan Sims, the coquettish authoritarians of Hattie Jacques, or the statuesque confidence of Valerie Leon, the Carry On girls are stoic,...

A lonely ruined church, mysterious bumps in a field, or stone walls visible on the shoreline of a reservoir in high summer: all these are signs of settlements abandoned over the years. Over the centuries many villages in Britain have been abandoned...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.AwardsWinner of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 2011 and Anisfield-Wolf Book Award 2011 and Heartland Award 2011 and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award 2011 and Mark Lynton History Prize 2011...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781629638232Author Working Class HistorFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint PM PressPublisher PM Press

Why do we have so many dialects in England? Why do we not all speak in standard English? How has our history shaped and influenced the language we speak today? In a Manner of Speaking is a fun and fascinating exploration of spoken English that...

_______________ WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK _______________ 'A remarkable achievement' - Sunday Times 'A classic, to my mind, of the finest documentary...

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. In it, Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end...

A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 'One of the most important books to be written about the Tudors in a generation.' Tracy Borman In this groundbreaking history, Sarah Gristwood reveals the way courtly love made and marred the Tudor dynasty...

Henrietta Howard, later Countess of Suffolk, was the long-term mistress and confidante of King George II. She was also, as Tracy Borman's wonderfully readable biography reveals, a dedicated patron of the arts; a lively and talented intellectual in her...

THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ANYONE WHO ENJOYS A TIPPLE . . . OR TWO . . . OR TEN! Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there's drink there's drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. Tracing...

How did a venerable Indian spiritual discipline turn into a GBP20 billion-a-year mainstay of the wellness industry? What happened along yoga's winding path from the caves and forests of the sages to the gyms, hospitals and village halls of the modern...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780670091225Author Suraj Milind YengdeFormat HardbackPage Count 304Imprint Penguin VikingPublisher Penguin Random House India

'A marvel of storytelling and a masterclass in the history of the book' WALL STREET JOURNALThe Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiwork of the city's artists and architects. But equally...

Almost half the people displaced worldwide are under 18, yet their voices are rarely heard. This book records the experiences of children arriving in Britain from Hitler's Europe in the 1930s to those escaping war in Ukraine in 2022. It follows the...

This is the best-selling biography of the IRA resistance fighter and hunger-striker, Bobby Sands. In this updated, new edition, Denis O'Hearn draws from a wealth of interviews with friends, comrades, fellow prisoners and prison wardens, to provide a...

'A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything' Amitav GhoshThe Enlightenment...

Heiresses is a glorious book, endlessly entertaining and about much more than its stated subject. Thompson is a fabulous writer' Caroline O'Donoghue 'Witty, insightful, deliciously gossip-laden and slightly scandalous... Heiresses makes for an...

The changes that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 were particularly dramatic for East Germans. With the German Democratic Republic effectively taken over by West Germany in the reunification process, nothing in their lives was immune...

'A fascinating account...combining the rigour of the historian with the powerful emotions of someone who was a twenty-year-old student at the time' UncutIt was the year of sex and drugs and rock and roll. But what impact did it have on today's political...

Discover the truth behind the myth in The Complete Jack the Ripper by Paul Begg and John Bennett.Whitechapel, 1888: a spate of brutal murders becomes the most notorious criminal episode in London's history. The killer, chillingly nicknamed 'The...

101 chance meetings, juxtaposing the famous and the infamous, the artistic and the philistine, the pompous and the comical, the snobbish and the vulgar, told by Britain's funniest writer. Life is made up of humans meeting one another. They...

One Nation Under Blackmail is a damning indictment of the consequences resulting from the nearly century old relationship between both US and Israeli intelligence and the organized criminal network known as the National Crime Syndicate. This book...