Showing titles in Modern

THE PHENOMENAL INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER M. is a startling look into the fascist mindset, a portrait of unrelenting determination, and an impeccable work of historical fiction. Italy is exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of the inept moderates and the agonizing machinations of a...

This is the story of Elizabeth I's inner circle and the crucial human relationships which lay at the heart of her personal and political life. Using a wide range of original sources - including private letters, portraits, verse, drama, and state papers - Susan Doran provides a vivid and often dramatic account of political life in Elizabethan England and the queen at its center.

U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is a central character in the movie “Bridge of Spies” starring Tom Hanks. In his classic 1970 memoir, Powers reveals the full story behind what happened in the most sensational espionage case in Cold War history. After his U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot...

Bloomsbury presents Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945–2000 by James Stourton, read by Charles Armstrong. The modern art market was born on a single night. On 15 October 1958 Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an ‘event sale’ of Impressionist paintings from...

In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. Armstrong's case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers (indeed some aspects of his story appear in Sayers' Unnatural Death). It is a near-perfect whodunnit.  

From Frank Brady, who wrote one of the best-selling books on Bobby Fischer of all time and who was himself a friend of Fischer’s, comes an impressively researched biography that for the first time completely captures the remarkable arc of Bobby Fischer’s life. When Bobby Fischer passed away in January 2008, he left behind a confounding legacy. Everyone knew the basics of his life—he began as a brilliant youngster, then became the pride of American chess, then took a sharp turn, struggling with paranoia and mental illness. But nobody truly understood him.

‘Lucid and damning … an absorbing – and infuriating – tale of complicity, coverup and denial’ PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of EMPIRE OF PAIN A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II – and...

The season of 1939 brought all those 'in Society' to London. The young debutante daughters of the upper classes were presented to the king and queen to mark their acceptance into the new adult world of their parents. They sparkled their way through a succession of balls and parties and sporting events. As the hot summer drew on, the newspapers filled with ever more ominous reports of the relentless progress towards war. There was nothing to do but wait - and dance. 

Bloomsbury presents The Last Titans: Churchill and de Gaulle by Richard Vinen, read by Charles Armstrong. 'Deeply researched yet highly readable, with fresh and often provocative insights' DAVID REYNOLDS 'A vivid and shrewd reckoning ... setting its assessment in the perspective of today's...

‘Haunting.’ Jonathan Freedland ‘Powerful.’ Daniel Finkelstein The profoundly moving and deeply intimate story of one Jewish family’s fate in the Holocaust, following the thread from Germany to Latvia and to Britain. In November 1941, Peter Bradley's grandparents, Sally and Bertha...

Eyewitness accounts from the BBC Archive are at the heart of this unique history of the first half of the 20th Century, narrated by Tim Pigott-Smith. The events of 1900-1949 are described by the people who saw them happen, from the death of Queen Victoria and accession of Edward VII through the...

The principles of the French Revolution remain the only possible basis for a just society - even if, after more than 200 years, they are more contested than ever before. In A New World Begins, Jeremy D. Popkin offers a riveting account of the revolution that puts the listener in the thick of the debates and the violence that led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the establishment of a new society.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Metaxas is a scrupulous chronicler and has an eye for a good story. . . . full, instructive, and pacey.” —The Washington Post From #1 New York Times bestselling author Eric Metaxas comes a brilliant and inspiring biography of the most influential man in modern...

Eric Hobsbawm traces with brilliant anlytical clarity the transformation brought about in every sphere of European life by the Dual revolution - the 1789 French revolution and the Industrial Revolution that originated in Britain. This enthralling and original account highlights the significant 60 years when industrial capitalism established itself in Western Europe and when Europe established the domination over the rest of the world it was to hold for half a century.

Victory in the Kitchen is a culinary biography: a life lived through food, ranging from rural Berkshire to wartime London, via Belle Epoque Paris and prohibition-era New York. While Georgina Landemare saw herself as ordinary, her accomplishments, and the life she lived, were anything but. She started her career as a nursemaid and ended it cooking for one of the best-known figures in British history, Winston Churchill, a man to whom food was central as a diplomatic tool in a time when the world was embroiled in a worldwide war.

From the Somme to Gallipoli to the home front, First World War for Dummies provides an authoritative, accessible, and engaging introduction to the War to End All Wars. It takes a global perspective of this global conflict, proving insight into the actions and motivations of the participants and how each nation's story fits into the wider one.

From Max Hastings comes a collection of talks and lectures exploring the wars of the 20th century with the verve, insight and originality that has made him a number one bestselling historian. What is war like to live through, for civilian victims, especially women, as well as soldiers, sailors...

In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing, and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the 14 months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov. 

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Four years of war turned Ypres into a ghost town. Not a leaf grew on a tree. Scarcely one stone stood upon another. From the battered ramparts the eye swept clean across a field of rubble to the swamp-lands beyond . . .' The Third Battle of Ypres, ending in a...

Robert Forczyk covers the development of armored warfare in North Africa from the earliest Anglo-Italian engagements in 1940 to the British victory over the German Afrikakorps in Operation Crusader in 1941. The war in the North African desert was pure mechanized warfare, and in many respects the most technologically advanced theatre of World War II. It was also the only theatre where for three years British and Commonwealth, and later United States, troops were in constant contact with Axis forces.