British

This volume of Churchill's history of the Second World War recounts the events of 1941 surrounding America's entry into the War, Hitler's march on Russia, and the alliance between Britain and America.

Like her previous books, this book will be the result of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life, and the conditions in which most people lived, so often left out of history books. This period of mid-Victorian London encompasses a huge range of subjects.

"After the first forty days we were alone," writes Churchill. This edition is part two of Churchill's own abridgement of his original six-volume history of the Second World War.

Antonia Fraser deals with each woman in turn with sympathy - the sympathy they deserve for having had the unenviable fate of being Henry's wife. Inevitably, there was great rivalry between them; there was jealousy too: the desperate jealousy of queens who found themselves abandoned, but also the sexual jealousy of the king who discovered himself betrayed. The story Antonia Fraser tells is romantic and cruel, funny and sad, dramatic and enthralling. This is historical biography at its best.

The story of Britain from the earliest settlements in 3000BC to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603. To look back at the past is to understand the present. In this vivid account of over 4,000 years of British history, Simon Schama takes us on an epic journey which encompasses the very beginnings of the nation's identity, when the first settlers landed on Orkney. From the successes and failures of the monarchy to the daily life of a Roman soldier stationed on Hadrian's Wall, Schama gives a vivid, fascinating account of the many different stories and struggles that lie behind the growth of our island nation.

From ancient times to the present day, the story of England has been laced with drama, intrigue, courage and passion - a rich and vibrant narrative of heroes and villains, kings and rebels, artists and highwaymen, bishops and scientists. In Great Tales from English History, historian Robert Lacey captures the most pivotal moments and the stories of the extraordinary characters who helped shape a nation.

Sitwell's Fanfare for Elizabeth is a striking account of love, betrayal, and religion as it unfolds in the court of King Henry VIII. Sitwell navigates elegantly through the capricious nature both of Henry's court, and his love life. The youthful hardships of little Elizabeth are played out against the backdrop of the great drama of Henry's struggles with the Pope, and his six wives. Charming in style, Fanfare for Elizabeth ends on a vignette of Elizabeth in her early teens, still oblivious to the grandeur she will ultimately inherit.

This book may be described as Dame Edith Sitwell's personal notebook. It consists of essays on the subject of the general aspect of the plays-those great hymns to the principle and the glory of life, in which there are the same differences in nature, in matter, in light, in darkness, in movement, that we find in the universe, and in which the characters are so vast they seem each an element (Water, Hamlet; Air, Romeo and Juliet; Fire, King Lear) and which yet bear the stamp of our common humanity...

These chapters in the life of Edward the Rake are dealt with frankly and light-heartedly. It is the story of a man who enjoyed himself and his indelicate advantages to the full, a penetrating and yet not unsympathetic portrait of the monarch and of the discreetly swinging social world that he created around him.

From 1381 - when Sir John Cavendish, Lord Chief Justice of England, was killed during the Peasant's Revolt - to 1906, when the Duke of Devonshire's resignation brought down the Tory government: the family's fortunes (and misfortunes) mirrored the life of the nation. The Devonshires is also the story of the huge support networks of servants and labour needed to sustain the supremacy of a family whose accumulated wealth, from the dissolution of the monasteries to the coming of the railways, saw them found ship ports, holiday resorts, scientific laboratories, stud farms and some of the most significant buildings in the land.

In recent times the British monarchy has become an 'ultimate family' of international superstars, their adventures and personalities transmitted round the globe like episodes in the world's most popular soap opera. The process began with Queen Mary's transformation of the family into symbols of middle-class morality, but accelerated greatly with the televising of Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation and the euphoric sense of a 'new Elizabethan age' about to begin in gloomy postwar Britain.

London of the mind, the heart and the eye is displayed, discussed and dissected in this classic work of 1962 that unites the elegant prose of V.S. Pritchett and the revealing photographs of Evelyn Hofer. Here is a pithy, knowledgeable distillation of the essential London - a panorama of its history, art, literature and daily life. Here is the city that Londoners know, a paraodox of grandeur and grime, the locus of bustling markets and tranquil parks, of palaces and pubs, of docks and railway depots.