Social History

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...

A Tender Voyage is the first full-length study of the history of childhood and children's lives in late imperial China. The author draws on an extraordinary range of sources to analyze both the normative concept of childhood-literary and...

In Pop Goes the Weasel, Albert Jack explores the strange and fascinating histories behind the nursery rhymes we thought we knew, showing that their real meanings are far from innocent.Who were Mary Quite Contrary and Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle...

'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 brilliant display of fireworks, attacking the widespread and banal notion that "in the beginning" sexual activity was guilt-free and delicious, being repressed and blighted only by the gloom of Victorianism' Spectator We talk about sex more and...

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...

Churchyards are everywhere, numbered in their thousands. Some have ancient yew trees while others have intriguing structures like parish stocks, charnel houses and medieval crosses. And beneath the grass lie untold generations of past parishioners, lying...

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...

* Waitrose Weekend's 2024 Festive Books to Gift *AS SEEN ON CHANNEL 4'S SUNDAY BRUNCHOpen the bottle on this comprehensive tasting course to discover the variety, complex history, and distinct flavours that rum has to offer.From its origins in the West...

Starting with the dawn of what we would recognise as modern human thought, this book journeys through 35,000 years of our human past. It shows how our earliest ancestors learnt to enter trance states and the revolutionary effect this had on the way they...

In The Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldesar Castiglione, a diplomat and Papal Nuncio to Rome, sets out to define the essential virtues for those at Court. In a lively series of imaginary conversations between the real-life courtiers to the Duke of...

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? ...

Jennifer Worth's tales of being a midwife in 1950s London, now a major BBC TV series.Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a...

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...

With the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833, Britain seemed to wash its hands of slavery. Not so, according to Marika Sherwood, who sets the record straight in this provocative new book. In fact, Sherwood demonstrates...

A completely original history of one of the most extraordinary movements in the world - the Girl Guides - and how they helped win the war. Mention Girl Guides to any woman and the reaction will be strong. They either loved them or hated them;...

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...

Revealing a world of secret messages contained within a single petal.Floriography – the language of flowers – is the ancient art of encoding hidden messages in the type, colour and arrangement of plants, allowing individuals to express emotions and...

The lives of the three daughters of Lord Curzon: glamorous, rich, independent and wilful.Irene (born 1896), Cynthia (b.1898) and Alexandria (b.1904) were the three daughters of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898-1905 and probably the grandest and most...

Arriving at the great houses of 1920s London, fifteen-year-old Margaret's life in service was about to begin... As a kitchen maid - the lowest of the low - she entered an entirely new world; one of stoves to be blacked, vegetables to be scrubbed,...

'Remarkable.' THE TIMES'Wonderful.' GUARDIAN'Fascinating.' TELEGRAPH'As a portrait of a place, it's hard to better.' COUNTRY LIFE'A thrill akin to discovering buried treasure.' RICHARD MABEY'Humane, humorous and joyful.' RUTH SCURRWhen the celebrated...

Imagine you could eavesdrop on a dinner party with three of the most fascinating historical figures of all time. In this landmark book, a gifted Harvard historian puts you in the room with Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt as they meet at a climactic...

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,...

This volume concerns the missionary philanthropic movement which burst onto the social scene in early nineteenth century in England, becoming a popular provincial movement which sought no less than national and global reformation.About the AuthorALISON...

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...

One woman's investigation into the nature of memory, the past, and above all, love. All families have their myths and Juliet Nicolson's was no different: her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her...

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades...

'A wonderfully enjoyable history of the changing fortunes of the middle orders over the past 500 years. A magisterial survey of the entire British class system, filled with richly detailed observation of the social differences on which it has thrived'...

The Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREOscar Nominated For Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay Set amid the civil rights movement, the...

The acclaimed account of the English people, now updated with two new chapters'Masterful, an enormously readable narrative of the English people from the Anglo-Saxons to the present' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the YearIn The English and...

The full story of Frank Ramsey's extraordinary life. When he died in 1930 aged 26, Frank Ramsey had already invented one branch of mathematics and two branches of economics, laying the foundations for decision theory and game theory. Keynes deferred...

Why was the topic of women and reading so controversial for the Victorians and Edwardians? What was it assumed that women read, and what advice was given about where, when, and how to read? Kate Flint examines texts ranging from fiction, painting, and...

Lynsey Hanley was born and raised just outside of Birmingham on what was then the largest council estate in Europe, and she has lived for years on an estate in London's East End. Writing with passion, humour and a sense of history, she recounts the rise...

**DAILY MAIL'S 'BEST NON-FICTION BOOKS TO HELP YOU THROUGH LOCKDOWN'**'Beautifully written . . . very entertaining, very funny' RICHARD & JUDY'It's an astonishing story and narrated with a deceptive simplicity. There isn't a boring sentence in the entire...

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Award-winning writer Richard Williams tells the remarkable story of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, one of the world's most iconic motorsports events, which celebrates its centenary in 2023. The event was created by a group of Frenchmen in 1923 and remains...