Showing titles in 20th Century

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. 

The Titanic collided with an iceberg on the night of April 14, and 1,500 people died in the freezing waters as the ship met her watery grave. Spectacular in many ways, it's a story that has spurred legends and still sends shivers down the spine a century later. This minute-by-minute account of the sinking is based on over 20 years of research and offers amazing detail of that fateful night.

Brought to you by Penguin. A sweeping, original history of the Cold War, from an acclaimed historian of the USSR Why did the Cold War erupt so soon after the Second World War? How did it escalate so rapidly, spanning five continents over six decades? And what led to the spectacular collapse of...

Wallis in Love brings a fascinating new perspective on the 20th century's most controversial royal scandal. Andrew Morton's impeccable research and unerring skill for riveting storytelling combine to present a strong case for a new and startling reveal: that the woman who rocked the world with her uncompromising passion for the Prince of Wales may have fooled everyone by keeping the object of her true passion hidden away....

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ‘Hums with living history, human warmth and indignation’ New York Times Less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept The mystery has haunted generations since the Second World War: Who betrayed Anne Frank and her family? And why? Now, thanks to radical new...

The Victorian era has dominated the popular imagination like no other period, but these myths and stories also give a very distorted view of the 19th century. The early Victorians were much stranger than we usually imagine, and their world would have felt very different from our own. It was only during the long reign of the Queen that a modern society emerged in unexpected ways.

Called to action on 2 April 1982, the men of 45 Commando Royal Marines assembled from around the world to sail 8,000 miles to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentine invasion. Lacking helicopters and short of food, they ‘yomped’ in appalling weather carrying overloaded rucksacks, across the roughest terrain. Yet for a month in mid-winter, they remained a cohesive fighting-fit body of men. They then fought and won the highly successful and fierce night battle for Two Sisters, a 1,000 foot high mountain which was the key to the defensive positions around Stanley.

The momentous new book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain. In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the 20th century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events.

Brought to you by Penguin. A powerful, definitive account of modern Syria and its fate Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French ‘mandate’ carved out...

A SPECTATOR and PROSPECT Book of the Year 'Ceaselessly interesting, knowledgeable and evocative' Spectator 'A fresh way to write history' Alan Johnson 'A quirky, amused, erudite homage to France . . . ambitious and original' The Times _____ France: An Adventure History is a profoundly original...

Bloomsbury presents The International Brigades by Giles Tremlett, read by Laurence Bouvard. 'Magnificent. Narrative history at its vivid and compelling best' Fergal Keane The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism. The...

"With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was...

Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region's Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to two percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. This is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia's Christian population.

Telling the rousing story of a Jewish boy who fled persecution and returned to prosecute the Nazi oppressors, Walter Wolff's daughter Nina has reconstructed these events from family lore and her father’s own cache of more than 700 wartime letters and 200 photographs, which he revealed to her shortly before he died.

New from the author of Travellers in the Third Reich – the Sunday Times Top Three bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Month: a stunningly evocative portrait of Hitler’s Germany through the people of a single village. Oberstdorf is a beautiful village high up in the Bavarian Alps, a place...

Brought to you by Penguin. Read by the author, with Christine Kavanagh, Rosina Aichner, Laurence Dobeisz, Joe Jameson, Conor Macleod, Jamie Zubairi, Ayesha Antoine, Naruto Komatsu, Alfie Thompson, Chris Thompson, Nile Faure-Bryan, Sam Heaton, Michael Pender, Brónagh Grace and Ru Merritt. There...

József Debreczeni, a prolific Hungarian language journalist and poet, arrived in Auschwitz in 1944; had he been selected to go 'left', his life expectancy would have been approximately forty-five minutes. One of the 'lucky' ones, he was sent to the 'right', which led to twelve horrifying months of incarceration and slave labour in a series of camps, ending in the 'Cold Crematorium' - the so-called hospital of the forced labour camp Dörnhau, where prisoners too weak to work were left to die. Debreczeni beat the odds and survived.

One hot, humid day in July 1944, the Gestapo abducted 15-year-old Henry and his mother, forcing them onto cramped cattle cars in the Łódź Polish Ghetto. Like so many Jews before them, they had been selected to disappear–they were being sent to Auschwitz.

A hundred years after his murder, Rasputin continues to excite the popular imagination as the personification of evil. The spectre of the lustful Siberian holy man and peasant still casts its eerie shadow over Russia's bloody twentieth century. Numerous biographies, novels, and films recount his...

Brought to you by Penguin. Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire...