Showing results for "Fire" in Europe

Learn about the Great Fire of London with iMinds insightful audio knowledge series. Before the Great Fire, the City of London was filled with crowded, timber-framed buildings with thin, plaster walls. Candles, rushlights, coals and fireplaces were omnipresent, and the risk of fire was paramount.The Great Fire of London is believed to have been started by the baker Thomas Farrynger shortly after midnight on Sunday, 2 September 1666, in his shop on Pudding Lane, just East of London Bridge.

Des Powell left school with no qualifications and little in the way of formal education. At nineteen he signed up to join the Parachute Regiment. Famously, the Paras is home to the UK military's second-toughest training regime after the SAS. Des Powell knows all about both. In fact, Des knows SAS selection better than anyone because he's done it twice. In SAS: Trial by Fire he tells the story of those gruelling tests: how Para training turned him into a soldier but, more crucially, how the SAS process turned him into a member of the elite.

Brought to you by Penguin. For centuries, Mount Etna has sent lava to engulf the towns and villages, terraced fields, orchards, vineyards, and citrus groves that nestle across its slopes. But still it remains home to a quarter of Sicily’s population. Why? Because Etna has always rewarded her...

A remarkable story of high hopes and crushing disappointment, the campaign contains moments of sheer horror and nerve-shattering excitement; pathos and comic relief; occasional cowardice and much selfless courage - all culminating in the climax of the First Battle of Ypres. And yet, as Peter Hart shows in this gripping and revisionary look at the war's first year, for too long the British part in the 1914 campaigns has been veiled in layers of self-congratulatory myth.

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his father’s death, the adolescent, dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the North, vows to avenge him. He is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons to safety. Against them is the queen, passionate, proud, and strong-willed and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men. She too is battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet fully grown but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions.

In 16th-century Europe, two women came to hold all the power, against all the odds. They were Elizabeth I and Catherine de Medici. One a Virgin Queen who ruled her kingdom alone, and the other a clandestine leader who used her children to shape the dynasties of Europe, much has been written about these iconic women. But nothing has been said of their complicated relationship: 30 years of friendship, competition and conflict that changed the face of Europe.

1666 was a watershed year for England. The outbreak of the Great Plague, the eruption of the second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London all struck the country in rapid succession and with devastating repercussions. Shedding light on these dramatic events, historian Rebecca Rideal reveals an unprecedented period of terror and triumph. Based on original archival research and drawing on little-known sources, 1666 takes listeners on a thrilling journey through a crucial turning point in history.

The opening of the pioneering Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the beginning of the railway network's vital role in changing the face of Britain. Fire & Steam celebrates the vision of the ambitious Victorian pioneers who developed this revolutionary transport system and the navvies who cut through the land to enable a country-wide railway to emerge.

WINNER OF THE CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE 2025 A FINANCIAL TIMES, BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE AND HISTORY TODAY BOOK OF THE YEAR The definitive history of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe. The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French...

From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth, the Renaissance.

In the 17th century, the people of London could boast that they had developed some of the most advanced firefighting technology and methods in the world, including the use of primitive fire engines. There were even vendors of such machines who advertised in papers of their machines' abilities to quench great fires.

The Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller, brought to by Penguin and published for the 75th anniversary 'Powerful . . . there is rage in his ink. McKay's book grips by its passion and originality. Some 25,000 people perished in the firestorm that raged through the city. I have never seen it better...

In the 1880s, control over northeastern Africa was a political minefield into which Prime Minister Gladstone did not want to step—until his emissary Charles Gordon was besieged in Khartoum, and the city became the focal point for war. It was the height of European colonialism. Injustices were administered, bloody battles fought, and civilians caught in the crossfire. Among the British officers were figures who would later adopt starring roles in the First World War, such as Egyptian Army sapper Captain Herbert Kitchener.

Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. It is a comprehensive account, animated by Ackroyd's concern for the close relationship between the present and the past as well as by what he describes as the peculiar "echoic" quality of London whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.

The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much - or too little - sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. 

Iceland, the land of fire and ice, has a storied history. After the Norse discovered Iceland, they began to settle it, allying the island nation with Norway. However, as power shifted in Scandinavia, Iceland would come to be governed by Denmark for several centuries.

An exploration of the origins, influences, and legacy of the scandalous Hell-Fire Clubs of the 18th century and beyond Reveals the club’s origins in the work of Rabelais and the magical practices of John Dee and how their motto, “Do What You Will,” deeply influenced Aleister Crowley...

The “fascinating” (Wall Street Journal) story of how military technology has transformed the world The history of warfare cannot be fully understood without considering the technology of killing. In Firepower, acclaimed historian Paul Lockhart tells the story of the evolution of weaponry...

The Great Fire of London was a massive fire in the ominous year of 1666 that destroyed the homes of more than 80 percent of the city’s 80,000 or so inhabitants. We will go over how the fire most likely started, why it took such a toll on the London population, and why it kept growing without them being able to extinguish the flames in time. You will also learn about how the city was built, how other competing countries saw the fire as a good thing, and how something else was even more disturbing at this time: the Great Plague of London

For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic.