Showing titles in Great Britain

Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight the armchair traveler, the tourist, or just about anyone interested in history. No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so much censure as the English: extolled as the Athenians of modern times, yet hammered for their self-satisfaction and hypocrisy. But their history has been a spectacular one.

Ambitious and talented people flocked to court of George II and Queen Caroline in search of power and prestige, but Kensington Palace was also a gilded cage. Successful courtiers needed level heads and cold hearts; their secrets were never safe. Among them, a Vice Chamberlain with many vices, a Maid of Honour with a secret marriage, a pushy painter, an alcoholic equerry, a Wild Boy, a penniless poet, a dwarf comedian, two mysterious turbaned Turks and any number of discarded royal mistresses.

Brought to you by Penguin. ** READ BY AL MURRAY ** 'War as it should be described. The book is an assault on the senses...Painful to read but impossible to put down' Gerard de Groot, The Times From the bestselling author of Normandy '44 and Sicily '43 comes an extraordinary account of the last...

In this magisterial book, Roy Jenkins' unparalleled command of the political history of Britain and his own high-level government experience combine in a narrative account of Churchill's astounding career that is unmatched in its shrewd insights, its unforgettable anecdotes, the clarity of its overarching themes, and the author's nuanced appreciation of his extraordinary subject.

Brought to you by Penguin. Antony Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy is the closest you will ever get to war - the taste, the smell, the noise and the fear. The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was...

The Falklands War was one of the strangest in British history - 28,000 men sent to fight for a tiny relic of empire 8,000 miles from home. At the time, many Britons saw it as a tragic absurdity, but the British victory confirmed the quality of British arms and boosted the political fortunes of the Conservative government.

Bloomsbury presents The Blazing World by Jonathan Healey, read by Oliver Hembrough. A WATERSTONES, TELEGRAPH, ECONOMIST AND NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR A major new history of England's turbulent seventeenth century and how it marked the birth of a new world 'This is a wonderful book...

Brought to you by Penguin. The early 1980s were the most dramatic, colourful and controversial in our modern history. Margaret Thatcher had come to power with a daring plan to reverse Britain's decline into shabbiness and chaos. But as factories closed their doors, dole queues lengthened and the...

What was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a visitor to late 16th-century England would ask.

Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable.

We tend to think about the Middle Ages as a dark and backward time, characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. We believe that life was unchanging over the period, so if a peasant fell asleep in in the year 1000 and woke up six hundred years later, he would return to a world that was instantly recognisable. We hold that change is facilitated by science and technological innovation, and that it was the inventions of recent centuries, from the steam engine to the Internet, that created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

THE #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTELLER A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES, TELEGRAPH, DAILY MAIL, TIMES AND SUNDAY TIMES ‘ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY, MIND-BLOWINGLY EXPLOSIVE’ ED BALLS 'SENSATIONAL' DAILY MAIL THE UNMISSABLE, UNVARNISHED MEMOIRS OF BORIS JOHNSON Boris Johnson has always been larger...

Brought to you by Penguin. Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in 20th-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world. There have been over a thousand previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts...

A BBC History magazine, Esquire, Historia magazine and Waterstones History Book of the Year 'James comes alive in full flamboyance … Russell expertly weaves the bedchamber gossip into the tapestry of a tumultuous reign' SUNDAY TIMES 'Brings the backbiting and power struggles of the Jacobean...

London Labour and the London Poor is a rare and fascinating insight into the lives and struggles of the 19th-century poor. Written by journalist and reformer Henry Mayhew, a founder and editor of the satirical magazine Punch, it collects hundreds of testimonials from the lower strata of Victorian society. We encounter street entertainers, 'pure finders', cabinetmakers, gingerbread sellers, 'screeve-fakers', swindlers, and burglars. We hear accounts from toshers finding items in sewers, people attempting to train pigs to dance, and witness the sale of everything from gilt watches and chickweed to needles, dog collars, and eel soup.

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ENTITLED, 'THE MOST DEVASTATING ROYAL BIOGRAPHY EVER WRITTEN', DAILY MAIL THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER A Daily Mail Royal Book of the Year, 2021 'Darkly compelling...hundreds of eye-popping details...Gripping ... damning portrait of the Windsors' Daily Mail 'Book of...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘A lasting work of social history’ THE TIMES ‘A genuinely new history of our nation’ DAN JONES ‘This celebration of women is a triumph of popular history’ SPECTATOR FROM THE MULTI-MILLION BESTSELLING HISTORICAL NOVELIST COMES THE CULMINATION OF HER...

The authoritative biography of Prince Philip, the late husband of Queen Elizabeth II, their marriage and their legacy. 'It is a beautifully written book about a unique and extraordinary man. I have read many other books about Philip but this is the best.' - DAILY EXPRESS This is the story of...

The Amazon History Book of the Year 2013 is a magisterial chronicle of the calamity that befell Europe in 1914 as the continent shifted from the glamour of the Edwardian era to the tragedy of total war. 1914: a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, Imperial Europe was...

Brought to you by Penguin. From the Queen's stoic resolve to the crisis of Meghan and Harry. From the ascendance of Camilla and Kate to the downfall of Andrew. Full of remarkable inside access, The Palace Papers by Sunday Times bestselling author Tina Brown will change how you understand the...