Showing titles in Modern

When John Bercow retired as Speaker of the House of Commons on 31 October 2019, he had become one of the most recognisable and iconoclastic figures in British politics, occupying a ringside seat during one of the most febrile periods in modern British history. In his no-holds-barred memoir, he...

In 2020, Anthony Seldon, inspired by a fallen World War I soldier who dreamed of a 'Via Sacra' to commemorate the war dead and stand as a marker for the triumph of peace, set out on a 1,000km walk tracing the historic route of the Western Front. But there wasn't to be lasting peace, with the continent falling into an even more horrific war two decades later.

In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, acclaimed biographer of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky and one of the finest historians of modern Russia, brings his deep understanding of that country to bear on the man who leads it. 'One of our most accomplished, erudite and prolific historians of modern Russia'...

Murder, manslaughter, suicide, mishap - the very public business of determining death in colonial Sydney. Murder in colonial Sydney was a surprisingly rare occurrence, so when it did happen it caused a great sensation. People flocked to the scene of the crime, to the coroner's court and to the...

'ENORMOUS FUN' GUARDIAN 'SO ENTERTAINING' THE TIMES 'GOSSIPY, LIGHT AND FUN' TLS Queen Bees looks at the lives of six remarkable women who made careers out of being society hostesses, including Lady Astor, who went on to become the first female MP, and Mrs Greville, who cultivated relationships...

Geography comes before history. Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The exhilarating true story of the U.S. Navy’s improbable victory at the Battle of Samar—“a dire survival-at-sea saga” (Denver Post) from the acclaimed author of Neptune’s Inferno “A critically acclaimed, blow-by-blow look at a small American force...

Focusing on key characters from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Newton, Descartes, Spinoza, Louis XIV and Charles I, Dark Brilliance is a fascinating and wide-ranging history that explores the human costs of imposing progress and modernity.

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. From the end of World War Two to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the world lived within the shadow of the Cold War. Russia and America eyed each other with suspicion and hostility. World War Two was too recent to be forgotten and a...

*FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF EAST WEST STREET* As Governor of Galicia, SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter presided over an authority on whose territory hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were killed, including the family of the author's grandfather. By the time the war ended in...

For the Western allies, 11 November 1918 has always been a solemn date - the end of fighting which had destroyed a generation and a vindication of a terrible sacrifice with the total collapse of their principal enemies: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. But for much of the rest of Europe, this was a day with no meaning, as a continuing nightmarish series of conflicts engulfed country after country. In this highly original, gripping book, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War.

An awful lot has happened in the last 100 years or so. In fact, when you look at how much went on in the 20th century, it's amazing it didn't take longer than that. And what have we learnt? A few obvious lessons include: megalomaniac men with moustaches in charge of countries tend to turn out to be bad; anyone who thinks they can explain let alone sort out the Middle East is wrong; France simply cannot be relied upon; America may or may not be the cause of everything good and bad in the world (depending on who you ask). 

The terrible conflict that dominated the mid-19th century, the Crimean War, killed at least 800,000 men and pitted Russia against a formidable coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. It was a war for territory, provoked by fear that if the Ottoman Empire were to collapse then Russia could control a huge swathe of land from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. But it was also a war of religion, driven by a fervent, populist and ever more ferocious belief by the Tsar and his ministers that it was Russia's task to rule all Orthodox Christians and control the Holy Land.

In June 1992, Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not—as other British colonies over the decades—for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. Over the next five years, he kept this diary, which describes in detail how Hong Kong was run as a British colony and what happened as the handover approached. The book gives unprecedented insights into negotiating with the Chinese.

Brought to you by Penguin. In 2011, a 43-foot-high tsunami crashed into a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. In the following days, explosions would rip buildings apart, three reactors would go into nuclear meltdown, and the surrounding area would be swamped in radioactive water. It is now...

Brought to you by Penguin. Winner of the HWA Crown for Best Work of Historical Non-Fiction 2018 Times Book of the Year 2018 Less than forty years after the golden age of Elizabeth I, England was at war with itself. The bloody, devastating civil wars set family against family, friend against...

Michael Bergin's account of the years he and Carolyn Bessette shared—revisiting the years dramatized in FX's Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette Would she be alive today? Would we be together? Would we have been happy? Before she was Mrs. John F. Kennedy Jr. — before the...

Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour. World War One brought with it the world’s first experience of Total War, involving all of the world’s great powers, polarized between the Triple Entente, lead by Britain, France and Russia, and the Central Powers, dominated by Germany...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Drawing on exhaustive research, this “masterful narrative history” (Booklist) details how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world. “Thundering, magnificent...

Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian chronicle how an impoverished and terrorized China experienced radical political changes in the long 1970s and how ordinary people broke free from the beliefs that had shaped their lives during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. These changes, and the unprecedented and sustained economic growth that followed, transformed China and the world.