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SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017 #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘The best political book of the year’ Andrew Marr ‘A superb work of storytelling and reporting. Sets new benchmark for the writing of contemporary political history’ Guardian The only book to tell the full story of how and...

A Telegraph Best Book 2025 'Elegant and terrifying, the story of those who gave up life in the West for Ukraine's frontlines – some to save democracy, some to save themselves. A modern-day Homage to Catalonia – and Fight Club on steroids.' – Oliver Poole, London Standard ‘A great read’...

Brought to you by Penguin. The bestselling historian on the dramatic wartime relationship - and shocking similarities - between two tyrants This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Holocaust by Laurence Rees, read by Jonathan Keeble. This landmark work answers two of the most fundamental questions in history - how, and why, did the Holocaust happen? Laurence Rees has spent twenty-five years meeting...

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE ESCAPE ARTIST A THE ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Magnificent . . . Important and impressive' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'Astonishing . . . Freedland is a master' MICK HERRON 'Remarkable . . . This is how the best history books will be written in the...

A thrilling peek behind the curtain at the men who supported Britain's most famous king from Sunday Times bestselling author Tracy Borman OBE 'An outstanding work of historical artistry' - ALISON WEIR Henry VIII is well known for his tumultuous relationships with women, and he is often defined...

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...

A Green Beret's gripping memoir of American Special Forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.    

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and...

Brought to you by Penguin. The dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst...

Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-41 offers a penetrating insight into a series of momentous political decisions that shaped the course of the Second World War. The hurricane of events that marked the opening of the Second World War meant that anything could happen. For the aggressors there was no limit to their ambitions; for their victims a new Dark Age beckoned. Over the next few months their fates would be determined.

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years. The book covers the complex history of the diverse societies and economies of Iran against the background of dynastic changes, revolutions, civil wars, foreign occupation, and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

If you could travel back in time, the period from 1660 to 1700 would make one of the most exciting destinations in history. It's the age of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London, bawdy comedy and the libertine court of Charles II, Christopher Wren in architecture, Henry Purcell in music and Isaac Newton in science. In The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain, Ian Mortimer answers the crucial questions that a prospective traveller to 17th-century Britain would ask.

Britain's empire has gone. Our manufacturing base is a shadow of its former self; the Royal Navy has been reduced to a skeleton. In military, diplomatic and economic terms, we no longer matter as we once did. And yet there is still one area in which we can legitimately claim superpower status: our popular culture.

It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would officially end nearly five years later. Unofficially, however, it has never ended: Many of the horrors we live with today are rooted in the First World War. The Great War left millions of civilians and soldiers maimed or dead. It also saw the creation of new technologies of destruction: tanks, planes, and submarines; machine guns and field artillery; poison gas and chemical warfare.

This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

No. 1 Sunday Times Bestseller Best-selling author Tom Bower reveals the making of a monarch – King Charles III King Charles faces many challenges as he succeeds his mother to the throne. Despite his hard work and genuine concern for the disadvantaged, King Charles III has struggled in the past...

The bloodbath at Waterloo ended a war that had engulfed the world for over 20 years. It also finished the career of the charismatic Napoleon Bonaparte. It ensured the final liberation of Germany and the restoration of the old European monarchies, and it represented one of very few defeats for the glorious French army, most of whose soldiers remained devoted to their Emperor until the very end.

Penguin presents the unabridged audiobook edition of Empire by Niall Ferguson, read by Jonathan Keeble. Once vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of...

In the summer of 1914 most of Europe plunged into a war so catastrophic that it unhinged the continent's politics and beliefs in a way that took generations to recover from. The disaster terrified its survivors, shocked that a civilization that had blandly assumed itself to be a model for the rest of the world had collapsed into a chaotic savagery beyond any comparison.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Arnhem by Antony Beevor, read by Sean Barrett. On 17 September 1944, General Kurt Student, the founder of Nazi Germany's parachute forces, heard the growing roar of aero engines. He went out on to his balcony above the flat landscape of southern Holland...

Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 'An insightful and important book, that often reads like a good thriller, and that exposes the danger of mixing powerful technology with irresponsible politics' - Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens 'As moving as it is painstakingly researched. . . a...

Darkly funny, shockingly honest, Brothers in Arms is an unforgettable account of a soldier's tour of Afghanistan, the brutal reality of war – every scary, exciting moment – and the bonds of friendship that can never be destroyed. ‘If you could choose which two limbs got blown off, what...

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...

The world at the beginning of the 20th century seemed for most of its inhabitants stable and relatively benign. Globalising, booming economies married to technological breakthroughs seemed to promise a better world for most people. Instead the 20th century proved to be overwhelmingly the most violent, frightening and brutalised in history, with fanatical, often genocidal warfare engulfing most societies between the outbreak of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. What went wrong?

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Choice by Edith Eger, read by Tovah Feldshuh with an introduction by the author. The extraordinary true story of survival, hope and empowerment from a Holocaust survivor. THE AWARD-WINNING INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Even in hell, hope can flower. In...

From Cleopatra to Grace Kelly, an epic new history of royal women that shatters the myths we have built around them. 'Erudite, clever, brilliant' KATE MOSSE 'A royal smash. Kate Williams is at the top of her game' KATE LISTER 'A fascinating and excellent chronicle of female rulers' SIMON SEBAG...

The Napoleonic Wars saw fighting on an unprecedented scale in Europe and the Americas. It took the wealth of the British Empire, combined with the might of the continental armies, almost two decades to bring down one of the world's greatest military leaders and the empire that he had created. Napoleon's ultimate defeat was to determine the history of Europe for almost 100 years. From the frozen wastelands of Russia, through the brutal fighting in the Peninsula to the blood-soaked battlefield of Waterloo, this book tells the story of the dramatic rise and fall of the Napoleonic Empire.

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career - 1958 to 1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark.