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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Nik Cohn

There will always be an England, no doubt, but what sort of England will it be? Cohn takes a long wild ride through a country he calls the Republic - a nation within a nation, populated by the many millions who have either fallen out of the Britannic mainstream, or chosen to jump. He meets the rising stars of a new culture, and also the casualties. Their collected stories, both weird and wonderful, combine to form a tapestry quite unlike any notion of England that has ever existed before. It is a land made up, among others, of outlaws and insurgents, rampaging natives, second-generation immigrants, visionaries, born-agains, football fans, fetishists, New Age travellers, anarchists, DJs, street-fighters, graffiti artists, Rastas, Odinists, Elvis impersonators, fire-swallowers and even the Antichrist. Loud and angry, and charged with furious energy, their voices define a world cut loose from tradition and all certainty. Gone bananas, in fact. Nik Cohn's republic may not be the only England out there. But it's the most vivid.

Yes We Have No

Richard Hoggart

Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literary, established his reputation as a uniquely sensitive and observant chronicler of English working-class life. In this vivid first volume of autobiography he describes his origins in that milieu. Orphaned at an early age, Hoggart grew up in a working-class district of Leeds, in an intimate world of terraced back-to-backs, visits from the local Board of Guardians, clothing checks and potted-meat sandwiches. With affectionate insight he recreates the family circle - a loving grandmother, one domineering and on gentle aunt, and a bibulous, melancholy uncle - and recalls his early schooling, the friends he made and the mentors he admired. Hard-working and articulate, Hoggart did well enough at grammar school to go on to Leeds University. This volume ends as, having earned a higher degree and travelled in Nazi Germany, he prepares to leave Yorkshire, via the Army, for the world beyond. Wry, compassionate, exact, A Local Habitation is a classic recreation of working-class England between the wars.

A Local Habitation

Life and Times, Volume One 1918-40

Lee Miller

November 1587. A report reaches London that Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition, which has left England months before to land the first English settlers in America, has foundered. Something has gone very wrong and the colony - 116 men, women and children - are in trouble. 
 
There will be no rescue: before help can reach them, all will vanish without trace. 
 
Were the Lost Colonists the victims of accident or of deliberate sabotage? Did they starve to death for lack of supplies or were they murdered by Indians? Their Governor, John White, admitted that they had enemies - powerful enemies who might want them dead. 
 
This remarkable work of historical detection establishes beyond doubt that the tragedy of the Lost Colony did not begin in far away Roanoke, but within the walls of Westminster - in the inner circle of Queen Elizabeth's government. Burghley, Walsingham, Leicester, Hatton, Essex - all had reasons to want Raleigh's mission to fail. Lee Miller examines the evidence and tells an astonishing story. After 400 years, the riddle of England's Lost Colony is brilliantly solved.

Roanoke

Solving the Riddle of England's Lost Colony

Derek Wilson

The image of Charles II as a randy monarch who dragged the crown through the moral mire and irredeemably weakened its position has persisted throughout the three centuries since John Evelyn gave his judgement.  That judgement, Derek Wilson argues, is okay as far as it goes.  The Restoration court did set an example of cynical libertinism that provoked opposition not only from outraged preachers, but also satirical journalists and angry mobs who pelted royal mistresses and burned down brothels.  But Charles' bedroom antics are symptoms and not causes of social decadence.  Why did Pepys complain 'there is nothing almost but bawdry at court from top to bottom' or Bishop Burnet observe that throughout the three kingdoms people were 'throwing off the very professions of virtue and piety'? The answers must be sought in the traumatic upheaval of the Civil War and its aftermath in the life of Charles Stuart and his people.  In a society that was shaken loose by violent conflict the position of women changed radically.  Many experienced a new freedom and an enhanced power to influence men and events.  Charles grew up with and actually enjoyed the company of strong women.  Ministers complained of his 'effeminate conversation'.  As well as the notorious, grasping mistresses - the leach-like Lady Castlemaine, 'dearest Fubs' K-roualle, the outrageous Nell Gwynn - Charles was influenced by his domineering mother, Henrietta Maria, his 'pushy' nurse, Christabella Wyndham, his much-loved sisters, Mary and 'Minette', his only great love, Lucy Walter, his long-suffering wife, Catherine of Braganza and a cavalcade of devoted royalist ladies, actresses, whores, and ambitious gold-diggers who surrounded him throughout his exile and after his restoration.  It is this miscellany of relationships that Derek Wilson explores and helps us to understand in All the King's Women. These relationships helped to form Charles II's character, shape the course of political events and, ultimately, seal the fate of the dynasty.

All The King's Women

Derek Wilson examines a set of relationships which illustrate just how dangerous life was in the court of the Tudor lion.  He tells the interlocking stories of six men - all, curiously, called Thomas - whose ambitions and principles brought them face to face with violent death. Thomas Wolsey was an accused traitor on his way to the block when a kinder death intervened.  Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell, whose convictions and policies could scarcely have been more different, both perished beneath the headman's axe.  Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, would have met the same end had the king's own death not brought him an eleventh-hour reprieve.  Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, though outliving the monarch, perished as a result of that war of ambitions and ideologies which rumbled on after 1547.  Wriothesley succumbed to poison of either body or mind in the aftermath of a failed coup.  Cranmer went to the stake as a heretic at the insistence of Mary Tudor, who was very much the daughter of the father she hated. In the Lion's Court is an illuminating examination of the careers of the six Thomases, whose lives are described in parallel - their family and social origins, their pathways to the royal Council chamber, their occupancy of the siege perilous, and the tragedies which, one by one, overwhelmed them.  By showing how events shaped and were shaped by relationships and personal destinies, Derek Wilson offers a fresh approach to the political narrative of a tumultuous reign.

In The Lion's Court

Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII

The greatest of medieval monarchs, Charles the Great (742-814) towers over every notion we have of national heroes and semi-mythical champions. His military conquests exceeded those of Julius Caesar. He had the sagacity and dedication to public service of a Marcus Aurelius. In ruthlessness, as in dedication to personal culture, he was reminiscent of Augustus. But that is only the beginning. 
 
Charlemagne was a phenomenon and phenomena do not die. Later European leaders from Frederick Barbarossa and Charles V to Louis XIV, Napoleon I and Hitler took Charlemagne as their model. His growing mythology inspired the Crusades, fed the concept of chivalry, bolstered absolutist regimes, excited nineteenth-century liberals and emerges today among those who claim Charles the Great as the founder of European unity. 
 
Charlemagne is one of the most remarkable figures in European history: only by understanding him in all his complexity can we begin to understand Europe today. Derek Wilson's biography provides such an opportunity.

Charlemagne

Barbarian and Emperor

Raymond Williams

In Modern Tragedy, Williams bridges the gap between literary and socio-economic study, tracing the notion of tragedy from its philosophical and dramatic origins with Aristotle. In addition, Williams discusses tragedy in Chaucher, Nietzche, Brecht, Sartre and other leading figures in the history of thought, as well as elements of tragic experience – both political and personal - in socialist revolutions of the 20th century.

Modern Tragedy

Kazimierz Brandys

Over the past few years innumerable books have been written about contemporary Poland; yet even the best of them have been essentially journalistic works, written by sympathetic outsiders and doomed to be quickly overtaken by events. A Warsaw Diary is a very different kind of book: subtle, profound, a work of outstanding – and permanent – literary merit by one of Poland’s foremost writers. Denounced on Polish television after the imposition of martial law as a subversive document – possession of which carried an automatic prison sentence of up to ten years – it is at once a powerful, wide-ranging personal memoir, and the first eye-witness account of the momentous events of 1978-81 to set them in their historical and political context, subtly alternating between present-day Poland and her melancholy, overshadowed history and literary or philosophical reflections on the Polish character and temperament. Whether he is discussing the role of the Church, continuing anti-Semitism, the German occupation or the Stalinist years, or describing with a novelist’s eye the drab, interminable queues in a Warsaw street or thugs breaking up the dissident ‘Flying University’, Brandys’s Diary is a unique, compelling account of the Polish spirit and the Polish dilemma.

A Warsaw Diary. 1978-1981

Roger Osborne

Spell-binding, horrific, poetic, apocalyptic, heart-rending, disturbing, prophetic, seditious, compelling and utterly fascinating - the dreams of Lucrecia de Leon have lain virtually undisturbed in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition for more than four hundred years. Lucrecia was a nineteen-year-old Madrilena when, in 1587, her dreams began to be recorded and published by a disaffected group of clerics. Over the next three years they transcribed four hundred of Lucrecia's dreams which they considered to be messages from God. The dreams warned of the defeat of the Armada, of the death of King Philip II, of the fall of Spain and of a new beginning under a new king - all told in bold and highly original visions. As some of her prophecies came true and as the Spanish court grew more discontented, she fell foul of the authorities and was arrested by the Holy Order. The Dreamer of the Calle de San Salvador produces thirty-five of Lucrecia's most captivating dreams. The imagery and inventiveness of her visions are astonishing, while the stories that they tell are compelling and of immense historical significance. Roger Osborne weaves a commentary around each dream, which allows us to see the world through the eyes of Lucrecia and helps us to understand the nature of her visions and the time and place she inhabited. This pioneering work shows us what history is like seen from the inside out.

The Dreamer Of Calle San Salvador

Marsha Keith Schuchard

Much has been written about the work of William Blake and some of the religious beliefs that influenced him, but there is a secret history which, until now, has been kept deep beneath the surface in the mystical underground of England in the eighteenth-century. Here, leading Blake scholar Marsha Keith Schuchard reveals an altogether more intriguing and controversial picture of the poet and artist. 
 
The discovery of Blake family documents took Schuchard on a journey of detection that led her to a cast of radical characters including Cagliostro, Zinzendorf and the mystic Swedenborg, and to a world of waking visions, sexual-spiritual experimentation, kabbalistic magic, tantric sex and free love. 
 
Why Mrs Blake Cried offers a new insight into the work of Blake and takes us on an extraordinary journey through secret societies and ancient rituals.

Why Mrs Blake Cried

William Blake and the Erotic Imagination

Ruth Dudley Edwards

They were 'Cudlipp' and 'Mr King' when they met in 1935. At 21, gregarious, extrovert and irreverent Hugh Cudlipp had many years of journalistic experience: at 34, shy, introspective and solemn Cecil Harmsworth King, haunted by the ghost of Uncle Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, the great press magnate, and bitter towards Uncle Harold, Lord Rothermere of the Daily Mail, was fighting his way up in the family business. 
 
Opposites in most respects, they were complementary in talents and had in common a deep concern for the underdog. Cudlipp, the journalistic genius, and King, the formidable intellect, were to become, in Cudlipp's words, 'the Barnum and Bailey' of Fleet Street. Together, on the foundation of the populist Daily Mirror, they created the biggest publishing empire in the world. 
 
Yet their relationship foundered sensationally in 1968, when - as King tried to topple the Prime Minister - Cudlipp toppled King. Through the story of two extraordinary men, Ruth Dudley Edwards gives us a riveting portrait of Fleet Street in its heyday.

Newspapermen

Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street

Philip Priestley

Victorian Prison Lives is the first account of the process of imprisionment in England between 1830 and 1914 to be drawn largely from the writings of prisoners themselves. The period was in some ways one of great change, beginning with an astonishing penitentiary experiement when prisons were seen as moral hospitals. But this approach eventually gave way to the idea of penal servitude and created a legacy of harshness and suffering still preserved in the reputations of Portland Chatham and Dartmoor. It was only towards the end of the period that the concept of modern prison administration began to emerge. But while statutary changes where taking place there was an underlying continuity. This is examined in a series of chapters on every aspect of prison life - from admission procedure, fellow prisoners and the nature of hard labour, diet and discipline to the process of release, which for a long-term prisioner could be as daunting as entry into prison.

Victorian Prison Lives

Eva Kolinsky

After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish survivors working to rebuild their lives.  Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain.  Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place.  Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment.  And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas.  Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience.  Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.

After The Holocaust

Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945

Daniel Pick

In 1875, General Garibaldi, the legendary military hero of Italian unification, left his island retreat in the Mediterranean for Rome. His battle cry no longer required, he was pursuing a mission that would become an obsession in his old age: to divert the River Tiber from Rome. 
 
Through this forgotten episode, Daniel Pick explores Garibaldi's passionate attachment to Rome and to Italy. In the bitter debate that ensued many myths were laid bare, and prevailing medical, social and political anxieties about the future of the state were exposed. 
 
The flood-prone Tiber had caused havoc, disease and death throughout history. In the capital, the General sought to replace it with a Parisian-style boulevard that would be a wonder of the modern world. But behind his florid promise to revitalise 'Italy' lay a complex and shadowy history, including a traumatic event felt by Garibaldi as the defining tragedy of his life: the loss of his wife Anita. Despite himself, he became embroiled in the political labyrinth of Rome and a drama of thwarted ambition, grand illusion and disillusionment, whose significance was not lost on Garibaldi's later admirer, Benito Mussolini, another self-styled redeemer of the Eternal City and the fever-ridden marshes of Italy.

Rome Or Death

The Obsessions of General Garibaldi

Terry Parssinen

In September 1938, Hitler had been in power for more than five years, and had abrogated most of the constraints placed on German militarism by the Treaty of Versailles. Earlier that year he had forced Austria into his Third Reich without a single shot fired, and his sights were set on Czechoslovakia. It was in this climate that a coup was born, led by Lieutenant Colonel Hans Oster of German military leaders, members of the Berlin police, local troop commanders, civil authorities, religious leaders, and a courageous group of resisters who assembled in a mission to unseat, and even kill, Hitler. 
 
The Oster Conspiracy of 1938 mines the cultural and political milieu of post-WWI Europe, the forces and personal histories that motivated the group to such decisive and dangerous action, and the catalyst of their ultimate failure. This is narrative history at its best: revelatory, well documented with archival material, people with a rich cast of characters, fast-paced, and highly provocative.

The Oster Conspiracy of 1938

The Unknown Story of the Military Plot to Kill Hitler

Catherine Fletcher

1527. Gregorio 'The Cavalier' Casali is Henry VIII's man in Rome. An Italian freelance diplomat, he charmed his way into the English service before he was twenty. But now he faces an almighty challenge. Henry wants a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and Casali must persuade Pope Clement VII of his master's case. 
 
Set against the backdrop of war-torn Renaissance Italy, Our Man in Rome weaves together tales from the grubby underbelly of Tudor politics with a gripping family saga to reveal the extraordinary true story behind history's most infamous divorce. 
 
Through six years of cajoling, threats and bribery, Casali lives by his wits. He manoeuvres his brothers into lucrative diplomatic postings, plays off one master against another, dodges spies, bandits and noblemen alike. But as the years pass and Henry's case drags on, his loyalties are increasingly suspected. What will be Casali's fate? 
 
Drawing on hundreds of unknown archive documents, Our Man in Rome reconstructs his tumultuous life among the great and powerful at this turning point for European history. From the besieged Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome to the splendours of Greenwich Palace, we follow his trail in the service of Henry VIII. Lavish ceremony and glamorous parties stand in contrast to the daily strains of embassy life, as Casali pawns family silver to pay the bills, fights off rapacious in-laws and defends himself in the face of Anne Boleyn's wrath. 
 
This vivid and compelling book will make us think anew about Henry, Catherine and the Tudor world.

Our Man in Rome

Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador

David Kynaston

David Kynaston's ground-breaking history of the City of London, published in four volumes between 1994 and 2001, is a modern classic. Skilfully edited into a single volume by David Milner, it tells a story as dramatic as any novel, while explaining the mysteries of the financial world in a way that we can all understand. 
 
This is a story of booms, busts and bankruptcies, dress codes, eating habits, pay, humour, changing architecture and the unique culture of the Square Mile which brings us up to the modern age.

City of London

The History

Audrey Salkeld

Leni Riefenstahl will always be remembered for her brilliant film of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - still rated as one of the best documentaries ever made. Before that she was acclaimed for her roles in silent feature films, when German cinema was in its artistic heyday in the 1920s. She pioneered the box office success of such classic mountaineering dramas as The White Hell of Piz Palu and then began to direct her own films. The Blue Light was admired by Hitler and led to her filming the Wagnerian Nuremberg Rally of 1934. After the war she was shunned by the film industry, despite a court in 1952 proclaiming her not guilty of supporting the Nazis in a punishable way. Her undoubted charisma led to many affairs and grandiose schemes - deep sea diving in her seventies and still filming wildlife in her nineties. Audrey Salkeld has sifted the fact from the legend and gives us a moving portrait of the great movie `star' who suffered more in the `wilderness' than her enduring fame suggests.

A Portrait Of Leni Riefenstahl

Emma Gerstein

In the early 1960s Anna Akhmatova encouraged Emma Gerstein to record her own memories of the renowned Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam.  But Gerstein's vivid and uncompromising account was not at all what she had expected. When first published in Moscow in 1998 Gerstein's memoirs provoked responses from condemnation to rapturous praise amongst Russian readers. A shrewd observer, a close member of the Mandelstam and Akhmatova family circles, and a serious literary specialist in her own right, Gerstein is uniquely qualified to remove both poets from their pedestals without diminishing them, or their work, and to bring back to life the Soviet 1930s. Part biography, part autobiography, this book radically alters our view of Russia's two greatest 20th century poets, providing memorable glimpses of numerous other figures from that partly forgotten and misunderstood world, and offers several unforgettable vignettes of Boris Pasternak.  Gerstein's integrity and perceptive comment make her account compulsively readable and enables us to re-examine that extraordinary epoch.

Moscow Memoirs

Norman Longmate

The British Isles, it is often believed, have not been invaded for nearly a thousand years. In fact, as Norman Longmate reveals in this highly entertaining book (the successor to his acclaimed Defending the Island), foreign soldiers have landed on British soil on many occasions.In this definitive study of a long-neglected subject Norman Longmate make constant use of original sources, including contemporary eyewitness accounts. These are woven into an enthralling narrative, packed with fact - about weapons, ships, armies and fortresses - spiced with anecdote, and ranging over international and political as well as military and naval history. The result is above all an exciting story, which shows how, against all the odds, the British people managed to retain their freedom from the days of James I to those of George VI.

Island Fortress

The Defence of Great Britian 1606-1945

Piers Brendon

This astute biography brilliantly captures, in one volume, the full range of Winston Churchill's astonishing career. perhaps the greatest political figure of modern times, Churchill's achievement extended well beyond his emblematic role in the Second World War. Piers Brendon brings great wit and dozens of pungent anecdotes to this penetrating account, illuminating the 'monstrous compound' of courage and egotism, rudeness and humour, brutality and compassion that was Winston Churchill. What emerges from these pages is one of the most fascinating and colourful figures of the twentieth century. To rescue Churchill from being buried under millions of words Piers Brendon has written a brief but brilliant profile of the colossus.

Churchill

Hal Vaughan

Coco Chanel, high priestess of couture, created the look of the chic modern woman: her simple and elegant designs freed women from their corsets and inspired them to crop their hair. By the 1920s, Chanel employed more than two thousand people in her workrooms, and had amassed a personal fortune. But at the start of the Second World War, Chanel closed down her couture house and went to live quietly at the Ritz, moving to Switzerland after the war. For more than half a century, Chanel's life from 1941 to 1954 has been shrouded in rumour. Neither Chanel nor her biographers have told the full story, until now. 
 
In this explosive narrative Hal Vaughan pieces together Chanel's hidden years, from the Nazi occupation of Paris to the aftermath of the Liberation. He uncovers the truth of Chanel's anti-Semitism and long-whispered collaboration with Hitler's officials. In particular, Chanel's long relationship with 'Spatz', Baron von Dincklage, previously described as a tennis-playing playboy and German diplomat, and finally exposed here as a Nazi master spy and agent who ran an intelligence ring in the Mediterranean and reported directly to Joseph Goebbels. 
 
Sleeping with the Enemy tells in detail how Chanel became a German intelligence operative, Abwehr agent F-7124; how she was enlisted in spy missions, and why she evaded arrest in France after the war. It reveals the role played by Winston Churchill in her escape from retribution; and how, after a nine-year exile in Switzerland with Dincklage, and despite French investigations into her espionage activities, Coco was able to return to Paris and triumphantly reinvent herself - and rebuild the House of Chanel. 
 
As Hal Vaughan shows, far from being a heroine of France, Chanel was in fact one of its most surprising traitors.

Sleeping With the Enemy: Coco Chanel, Nazi Agent

Philip Ball

In the twelfth century, Christians in Europe began to build a completely new kind of church - soaring, spacious monuments flooded with light from immense windows. These were the first Gothic churches, the crowning example of which was the cathedral of Chartres: a revolution in thought embodied in stone and glass, and a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds. 
 
In Universe of Stone, Philip Ball explains the genesis and development of the Gothic style. He argues that it signified a profound change in the social, intellectual and theological climate of Western Christendom. As the church represented nothing less than a vision of heaven on earth, this shift in architectural style marked the beginning of the argument between faith and reason which continues today, and of a scientific view of the world that threatened to dispense with God altogether.

Universe of Stone

Chartres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind

Norma Clarke

Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs.  He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well:  Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney.  It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters.  It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors.  Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case.  Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.

Dr Johnson's Women

Anthony Brandt

Dozens of missions set out for the Arctic during the first half of the nineteenth century; all ended in failure and many in disaster, as men found themselves starving to death in the freezing wilderness, sometimes with nothing left to eat but their companions' remains. Anthony Brandt traces the complete history of this noble and foolhardy obsession, which originated during the sixteenth century, bringing vividly to life this record of courage and incompetence, privation and endurance, heroics and tragedy. Along the way he introduces us to an expansive cast of fascination characters: seamen and landlubbers, scientists and politicians, sceptics and tireless believers. 
 
The Man Who Ate His Boots is a rich and engaging work of narrative history - a multifaceted portrait of noble adventure and of imperialistic folly.

The Man Who Ate His Boots

Sir John Franklin and the Tragic History of the Northwest Passage

Lacey Baldwin Smith

Tudor England abounded with traitors great and small, whose ill-timed, self-defeating and irrational antics guaranteed their failure. Yet from the inept and calamitous intrigues of 'Sweet-Lips' Gregory Botolf in 1540 and Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour during the reign of Edward VI, to the bungling efforts at a palace coup by Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, during the final years of Elizabeth's reign, treason didn't prosper. Modern historians tend to dismiss the wave of political disasters as the works of men of unsound mind. Here, Lacey Baldwin Smith re-evaluates this mania for conspiracy in the light of psychological and social impulses peculiar to the age. 
 
Tudor England accepted unquestioningly the conspiracy theory of history; it assumed the existence of evil; and it instinctively believed that a greater and usually malicious reality lay behind outward appearance. Sensible men were for ever on guard against their Iago, dedicated to evil for its own sake, who lurked under the guise of a trusted friend or servant. Father's advised their sons, 'Love no man: trust no man'; contemporary literature and drama reflected and reinforced this belief, as did the essentials of Tudor education which taught students how to dissemble convincingly upon a public stage. 
 
By looking at the behaviour of the flamboyant Robert Devereux (who bore all the hallmarks of paranoia) as a case study in political hysteria, Lacey Baldwin Smith examines the ways in which insecurity in the midst of political and religious revolution was obsessive and self-perpetuating, and produced throughout the kingdom a state of hysteria that was unique to the sixteenth century.

Treason In Tudor England

Politics and Paranoia

Alison Weir

The story of the death, in sinister circumstances, of the boy-king Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, is one of the most fascinating murder mysteries in English history. It is a tale with profound moral and social consequences, rich in drama, intrigue, treason, scandal and violence. 
 
 In this gripping book Alison Weir re-examines all the evidence - including that against the Princes' uncle, Richard III, whose body was recently discovered beneath a Leicester car park. She brilliantly reconstructs the whole chain of events leading to their murder and reveals how, why and by whose order they died.

The Princes In The Tower

Neal Ascherson

Black Sea is a homage to an ocean and its shores and a meditation on Eurasian history, from the earliest times to the present. It explores the culture, history and politics of the volatile region which surrounds the Black Sea. 
 
 Ascherson recalls the world of Herodotus and Aeschylus; Ovid's place of exile on what is now the coast of Romania; the decline and fall of Byzantium; the mysterious Christian Goths; the Tatar Khanates; the growth of Russian power across the grasslands, and the centuries of war between Ottoman and Russian Empires around the Black Sea. He examines the terrors of Stalinism and its fascist enemy, both striving for mastery of these endlessly colourful and complex shores, and investigates the turbulent history of modern Ukraine. 
 
 This is a story of Greeks, Scythians, Samatians, Huns, Goths, Turks, Russians, Ukrainians and Poles. This is the sea where Europe ended. It is the place where 'barbarism' was born. 
 
UPDATED WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR 
 
'Every page is freighted with rich and fascinating detail' Independent 
 
'A brilliant biography of place' Guardian

Black Sea

From Pericles to Putin

Joseph O'Connor

Joseph O'Connor's love affair with all things American led to an extraordinary tour of the United States to visit the nine different towns called Dublin, as well as some of the great cities and tiny hamlets in between. Along the way he wittily deconstructs the legends of a whole pantheon of Irish American heroes, from John F. Kennedy to Billy the Kid, and takes a quick detour to finally answer that most important question: was Elvis really Irish? 
 
The result is a hilarious, poignant and unforgettable book that celebrates the breathtaking diversity of the Irish influence on America and actually manages to find a town called Dublin, somewhere on the planet, that doesn't have one single pub within its limits...

Sweet Liberty

Travels in Irish America

Edward Pearce

There may be a civil war, starting in the Midlands. The Birmingham garrison have rough-sharpened their swords and barricades have gone up in the town. Wellington is trying to form a government without a majority. The Duke says 'The English people are usually quiet; if not, there are ways of making them.' These are the Days of May, High Summer of English Reform.  The new Whig government has staggered everyone with a reform bill more drastic than all expectations, one to wipe out rotten boroughs and enfranchise industrial towns. It has passed the Commons, been thrown out by the Lords, then, in an election, is massively endorsed. Now in May 1832, the Lords are again blocking it. Political unions formed to promote reform are denounced for Jacobinism and revolution.  One Tory, John Croker, hopes that 'the coming revolutionary regime' will let Princess Victoria 'live quietly as Miss Guelph'.  King William IV, influenced by the Court and Queen Adelaide, refuses to make new peers; stalemate may turn into street fighting. The struggle is recorded here. The players, painted vividly, speak in their own voices from 170-year-old Hansards: the radicals, Cobbett and Hunt; the Ultras, Wetherell and Eldon, resisting all reform; Lord Chancellor Brougham, drunk and brilliant in a great speech; Lord Alport, who manages the nightmare legislative struggle, tempted by suicide; a mad backbencher demanding a day of fasting and penitence.  Here too are the riots and the quiet politics of British constitutional reform.  The outcome - the 1832 Act - is the most important event in the last 300 years of parliamentary history.

Reform!

The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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