Social History

Twenty years on from her critically acclaimed book, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People, Susan McKay talks again to the people she 'uneasily' called 'her own', those from a Protestant background in Northern Ireland. Against the backdrop of...

'An absorbing and eye-opening account of what the Plantagenets did for us.' - HELEN CASTOR'Burt and Partington show precisely and engagingly why the Middle Ages matter.' - DAN JONESBetween 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two...

Now fully updated to 2009, this acclaimed history of Latin America tells its turbulent story from Columbus to Chavez. Beginning with the Spanish and Portugese conquests of the New World, it takes in centuries of upheaval, revolution and modernization up...

When one defines "order" as a sorting of priorities, it becomes beautifully clear as to what Foucault is doing here. With virtuoso showmanship, he weaves an intensely complex history of thought. He dips into literature, art, economics and even biology in...

Full of pop, punk and personalities, The 1970s Scrapbook sways through this energetic era on platform shoes to the beat of glam rock and disco mania. Teenyboppers screamed for their idols, whether David Cassidy, David Essex, The Osmonds, Bay City Rollers...

*A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week* 'Carefully observed, rich in detail, imaginative, compassionate and angry. A raw, unexpected portrait of Britain's grandeur, wealth, energy, cruelty and hypocrisy in the age of liberalism' RORY STEWART 'A shocking story...

'Turner's seductive blend of political analysis, social reportage and cultural immersion puts him wonderfully at ease with his readers' David Kynaston 'Reading Alwyn Turner's account of life in the first two decades of the 21st century is a bit like...

'Insightful and breathtaking.' Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens'Bold and sweeping.' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads'Profoundly thought-provoking.' Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut EconomicsHow our evolved psychology has shaped the past,...

'Football is a pleasure that hurts'This unashamedly emotional history of football is a homage to the romance and drama, spectacle and passion of a 'great pagan mass'. Through stories of superstition, heartbreak, tragedy, luck, heroes and villains, those...

Why is the Victoria Line so hot? What is an Electrical Multiple Unit? Is it really possible to ride from King's Cross to King's Cross on the Circle line? The London Underground is the oldest, most sprawling and illogical metropolitan transport system...

'Pain and pleasure are simple ideas, incapable of definition.' In 1757 the 27-year-old Edmund Burke argued that our aesthetic responses are experienced as pure emotional arousal, unencumbered by intellectual considerations. In so doing he overturned...

Beyond the booze and the bratwurst: what football really tells us about Germany Germany is one of the world's great footballing powers. Four-time World Cup winners, Euro 2024 hosts and home to clubs like Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund, the...

'A compelling literary journey through the social history of wool in the British Isles' Karen Lloyd, author of The Gathering Tide Travel the length of the British Isles with Esther Rutter, as she tells the story of wool's long and tangled history...

David Toop's extraordinary work of sonic history travels from the rainforests of Amazonas to the megalopolis of Tokyo via the work of artists as diverse as Brian Eno, Sun Ra, Erik Satie, Kate Bush, Kraftwerk and Brian Wilson. Beginning in 1889 at the...

From the bestselling author of The Long Weekend: a wild, sad and sometimes hilarious tour of the English country house after the Second World War, when Swinging London collided with aristocratic values.'Preposterously entertaining' Observer'Brilliant'...

"When I went to medical school, I never dreamt, that as a doctor, one day the biggest contribution I would make to people's health, would be to hand out plastic sheets and blankets under armed guard." Moved by the devastating media coverage of the...

First published in 1999, Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks and the coffee crisis of the 21st century. Mark Pendergrast uses coffee production, trade, and consumption as...

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and...

A Sunday Times, Times Literary Supplement, and The Times Book of the YearA brilliant account of the coming of the French Revolution, and the culminating work of this most distinguished historian 'Events do not come naked into the world. They come clothed...

From a foremost expert on the science of emotions, a ground-breaking exploration into the history, psychology and meaning of aweSocial psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent his career speaking to different groups of people, from schoolchildren to...

London during the Blitz was a time of hardship, heroism and hope.For Gillian Lynne - a budding ballerina - it was also a time of great change as she was evacuated from war-torn London to a crumbling mansion, where dance classes took place in the faded...

WINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world's most repressive states - North Korea. 'A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea'...

'Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains'These are the famous opening words of a treatise that has not ceased to stir debate since its publication in 1762. Rejecting the view that anyone has a natural right to wield authority over others,...

"Espinoza's book stands out as a beacon for future queer writers, thinkers, and activists. Reading these accounts, I felt myself drawn into a past both wonderful and strange, a world I hope we will continue to celebrate and preserve." -Garrard Conley ...

A beautifully illustrated introduction to mudlarking which tells the incredible, forgotten history of London through objects found on the foreshore of the River Thames. Often seen combing the shoreline of the River Thames at low tide, groups of...

'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...

2024 Jon Gjerde Prize Winner for best book in Midwestern History After the War of 1812 and the removal of the region's Indigenous peoples, the American Midwest became a paradoxical land for settlers. Even as many settlers found that the region provided...

This unique and brilliant book is a history of human knowledge. Before the invention of printing, a trained memory was of vital importance. Based on a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on the mind, the ancient Greeks created an elaborate...

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism, this book delves into the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Surveying two hundred years of history and English literature - from George Eliot to George Orwell - Williams provides...

A Sunday Times Book of the Week and Top 10 Bestseller A Waterstones Travel Book of the Year 2023 A Spectator Book of the Year 2023 What kind of country is England today? ...

A passionate history of Judaism; a world unfolding across many continents and five centuries by one of our greatest and internationally bestselling historians.Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour...

Discover the rich history of Britain's millennia-old network of pathways, and it will be impossible to take an unremarkable walk again . . .'A nostalgic amble through the history of travel in England and Wales, and an examination of the routes that make...

A WATERSTONES, TIMES, TELEGRAPH, NEW STATESMAN, SPECTATOR AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR The early sixties in Britain told as only David Kynaston ('the most entertaining historian alive' Spectator) can. Running from 1962 to 1965, A Northern...

WELCOME TO UHTRED'S FEAST . . . Over the course of writing the Last Kingdom series, Bernard Cornwell discovered an increasing fascination for the Anglo-Saxon world: its people, their culture, and their domestic lives...

This lively and accessible introduction to Plato focuses on the philosophy and argument of his writings, drawing the reader into Plato's way of doing philosophy, and the general themes of his thinking. This is not a book to leave the reader standing in...

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. This edition also includes an extra chapter charting the course from Blair to Brexit.It tells the story of how the great political visions of New...

On a hillside near Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in May 1752 a rider is assassinated by a gunman. The murdered man is Colin Campbell, a government agent travelling to nearby Duror where he's evicting farm tenants to make way for his relatives...

'Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders' - Douglas Robert-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis and The Turning PointIn Rites of Passage, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating,...

'We're not Christians, Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.' Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carlo Levi entered a world cut off from history and the state, hedged in by custom and sorrow, without comfort...

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of...