Showing results by publisher "ISIS Publishing Ltd" in History

In Histories of the Unexpected, Sam Willis and James Daybell lead us on a journey of discovery that tackles some of the greatest historical themes but via entirely unexpected subjects. By taking this revolutionary approach, they not only present a new way of thinking about the past but also reveal the everyday world around us as never before. 

Iceland, 2017: When a young Italian tourist is found brutally murdered at a sacred church in northern Iceland, Magnus Jonson, newly returned to the Reykjavík police force, is called in to investigate. At the scene, he finds a stunned TV crew, there to film a documentary on the life of the legendary Viking Gudrid the Wanderer. Magnus quickly begins to suspect that there may be more links to the murdered woman than anyone in the film crew will acknowledge.

The Tudor era encompasses some of the greatest changes in our history. But while we know about the historical dramas of the times, what was life really like for a commoner? To answer this question, the renowned 'method historian' Ruth Goodman has slept, washed and cooked as the Tudors did. She is your expert guide to this fascinating era, drawing on years of practical historical study to show how our ancestors coped with everyday life, from how they slept to how they courted.

Fascinating Footnotes From History details 100 of the quirkiest historical nuggets - eye-stretching stories that sound like fiction but are 100 percent fact. There is Hiroo Onoda, the lone Japanese soldier still fighting the Second World War in 1974; Agatha Christie, who mysteriously disappeared for 11 days in 1926; and Werner Franz, a cabin boy on the Hindenburg who lived to tell the tale when it was engulfed in flames in 1937.

From renowned booze correspondent Henry Jeffreys comes this rich and full-bodied history of Britain and the Empire, told through the improbable but true stories of how the world’s favourite alcoholic drinks came to be. Learn how we owe the champagne we drink today to 17th-century methods for making sparkling cider; how madeira and India Pale Ale became legendary for their ability to withstand the long, hot journeys to Britain’s burgeoning overseas territories; and why whisky became the familiar choice for weary Empire builders who longed for home.

In 20 meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, reshaping landscapes and culinary tastes. To be British was to eat the world. The empire allowed Britain to harness the globe’s edible resources from salt beef to sugar. By the 20th century the wheat to make the working man’s loaf of bread was supplied by Canada, and his Sunday leg of lamb had been fattened on New Zealand’s grasslands. Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire. 

When reporter Rebecca Connolly is told of Roddie Drummond's return to the island of Stoirm she senses a story. Fifteen years before he was charged with the murder of his lover, Mhairi. When he was found Not Proven, Roddie left the island. Now he has returned for his mother's funeral - and it will spark an explosion of violence. Rebecca joins forces with local photographer Chaz Wymark to dig into the secrets surrounding Mhairi's death, and her mysterious last words of Thunder Bay, where, according to local lore, the souls of the dead set off into the afterlife. 

Czechoslovakia, October 1937. Vast crowds have gathered to watch the threatened nation's most prestigious sporting contest: the Grand Pardubice steeplechase. Notoriously dangerous, the race is considered the ultimate test of manhood and fighting spirit. The Nazis have sent their paramilitary elite-SS officers on a mission to crush the 'subhuman Slavs'. The local cavalry officers have no hope of stopping them. But there is one other contestant: a countess riding a little golden mare.

Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders focuses on the lives of pioneering women forging careers in the fields of medicine, law, academia, architecture, engineering and the church. In her startling study into the public and private worlds of these unsung heroines, Jane Robinson sheds light on their desires and ambitions, and how family and society responded to this emerging class of working women.

It's 1963. The year of the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the rise of teenage consumerism and sexual emancipation, and Kennedy's assassination...and the birth of Beatlemania. In the beginning, The Beatles were a band of brothers who really did make Britain twist and shout. This is the unprecedented story of the Beatles' remarkable journey from Liverpool dance hall favourites to becoming the biggest band in the world in the space of just twelve rollercoaster months.

The history of the Guinea Pig Club, the band of airmen who were seriously burned in aeroplane fires, is a truly inspiring, spine-tingling tale. Plastic surgery was in its infancy before the Second World War. The most rudimentary techniques were known only to a few surgeons worldwide. The Allies were tremendously fortunate in having maverick surgeon Archibald McIndoe - nicknamed ‘the Boss’, or ‘the Maestro’ - operating at a small hospital in East Grinstead in the south of England. McIndoe constructed a medical infrastructure from scratch.

In Paris, January 1943, 230 French women resisters were rounded up and sent on a train to Auschwitz - the only train, in the four years of the German occupation, to take women of the resistance to a death camp. The youngest was a schoolgirl of 15, the eldest a farmer’s wife of 68; there were among them teachers, biochemists, sales girls, secretaries, housewives and university lecturers. The women turned to one another, finding solace and strength in friendship and shared experience.

Rome, AD 67. Vespasian is tasked with the impossible: should he quell the revolt in Judaea, as the emperor Nero has instructed? If his conquest succeeds, he risks becoming the sole object of the emperor's jealousy. If he fails, then his punishment will be severe. But Nero has committed suicide. Sabinus, Vespasian's brother, is caught between the warring factions of Aulus Vitellius, a cruel opportunist, and the noble Marcus Salvius Otho, who finds himself severely outnumbered.

On 9th September 1560 Amy Robsart, the wife of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite courtier, Robert Dudley, was found lying dead at the foot of a staircase. It was a death that scandalised Tudor England. Was it an accident, suicide or murder? Robert Dudley’s open flirtation with the young Queen Elizabeth only fuelled rumours that he had orchestrated his own wife’s death. With Dudley now conveniently widowed, perhaps the queen had found her consort at last.

In each chapter of How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy explores how to survive one of history's greatest threats: succumbing to the lava flows of Pompeii, drowning on board the Titanic, falling prey to the Black Death, and more. Using hindsight and modern science to estimate everything from how fast you'd need to run to outpace a T. rex to the advantages of different body types in surviving the Donner Party tragedy, Cassidy gives you a detailed battle plan for survival, helping you learn about the era at the same time

Everyone knows three things about the Women’s Institute: that they spent the war making jam; the sensational Calendar Girls were WI; and, more recently, that slow-handclapping of Tony Blair. About 215,000 women in the UK belong to the WI. Their membership crosses class and has recently begun to recruit huge numbers of young women.

Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eyewitness accounts left by foreign nationals who saw the drama unfold. Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin's Bolshevik coup in October, Petrograd was in turmoil - felt nowhere more keenly than on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt, where the foreign visitors and diplomats who filled hotels, clubs, bars and embassies were acutely aware of the chaos breaking out.

1913: the last long summer before the war. The country is gripped by suffragette fever. These impassioned crusaders have their admirers; some agree with their aims if not their forceful methods, while others are aghast at the thought of giving any female a vote. Meanwhile, hundreds of women are stepping out onto the streets of Britain. They are the suffragists: nonmilitant campaigners for the vote, on an astonishing six-week protest march they call the Great Pilgrimage.

Award-winning historian Chris Bellamy uncovers the Gurkhas` origins in the Hills of Nepal, the extraordinary circumstances in which the British decided to recruit them, and their rapid emergence as elite troops. Bellamy looks at the wars the Gurkhas have fought this century, from the two world wars through the Falklands to Iraq and Afghanistan, and examines their remarkable status now, when each year 11,000 hopefuls apply for just over 170 places in the British Army Gurkhas.

In this colourful history of the wild world of crime reporting since 1700, Duncan Campbell reveals what it's really like to deal with murderers, gangsters, victims, informers and detectives, looking at the 'hacks in the macs' who would go to any lengths to get a story - and serve it up to an ever-eager reading public. Crime is a prism through which we see society and its phobias.