Alan Paton

Alan Pattullo

Alan Pauls

Alan Pollock is a playwright, translator and screenwriter. His numerous plays include One Night in November, Pigs and All Tomorrow's Parties.

Alan Pollock

Alan Root was born in London in 1937 but moved to Kenya as a young boy. He dropped out of school at sixteen but soon found himself behind the camera. He married Joan Thorpe in 1961 and together they produced an array of award-winning wildlife films including Baobab: Portrait of a Tree, commissioned by David Attenborough, Safari by Balloon, The Year of the Wildebeest and Castles of Clay, which was nominated for an Oscar. Alan won over sixty awards during his career, including an Emmy, three Lifetime Achievement Awards an OBE. Alan Root died in August 2017.

Alan Root

Alan Rosenthal

Alan Ruddock

Alan Rugman

Alan Rusbridger

Alan Ryan

Alan S. Blinder

Alan Shearer CBE  grew up in Newcastle, leaving home as a  teenager to pursue a career in professional football with his first  team, Southampton. He went on to  reach football stardom, winning the Premier League with Blackburn in  1995, breaking the world transfer record by signing to Newcastle United  in 1996 and achieving international success as the Captain of England.  Alan also holds the record for most goals scored in Premier League history.

Alan Shearer

Alan Siegel

Alan Simpson

Alan Spence

Alan Stewart

Alan Taylor

Alan Tennant

Alan Thompson

Alan Titchmarsh MBE is known to millions through his career as a television presenter of shows including Love Your Weekend, Love Your Garden, Ground Force, Gardeners' World, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and Spring Into Summer. He has written more than forty gardening books, as well as twelve novels and three volumes of memoirs. He was made MBE in the millennium New Year Honours list and holds the Victoria Medal of Honour, the Royal Horticultural Society's highest award.

Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Unterman

Alan Watts was a British philosopher, writer and speaker who was best known for his expertise in Eastern philosophies including Zen Buddhism and Taoism. He wrote over 25 books and numerous articles on subjects such as personal identity, the true nature of reality, higher consciousness, the meaning of life, concepts and images of God and the non-material pursuit of happiness.

Alan W Watts

Alan Warner is the author of eight novels: Morvern Callar, These Demented Lands, The Sopranos, The Man Who Walks, The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, The Stars in the Bright Sky, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, The Deadman's Pedal and Their Lips Talk of Mischief. He is Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University.

Alan Warner

Alan Watts

Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including the global bestseller The World Without Us, which has been translated into 34 international languages and was nominated for numerous awards. His writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times Magazine and many other places. Alan has worked on all seven continent and reported from 58 countries, and lives in western Massachusetts.

Alan Weisman

Alanna Mitchell

Alasdair Fotheringham is a freelance journalist and writer based in Spain. He writes regularly on cycling for the ‘I’, The Independent.co.uk, The Express, ProCycling and Cyclingnews. He has been reporting on the Tour de France and other top road cycling events since 1992. His first book was The Eagle of Toledo, a biography of cycling’s greatest ever climber, Federico Martín Bahamontes. He has also written Reckless, a biography of the ill-fated Luis Ocaña, the 1973 Tour winner and considered Eddy Merck’s top Grand Tour rival, and The End of the Road, an account of the 1998 Tour de France.

Alasdair Fotheringham

Alasdair Wickham

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. Having graduated from Cambridge University in modern languages, he went into journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Campbell worked for him first as press secretary, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. He continued to act as an advisor to Mr Blair and the Labour Party, including during subsequent election campaigns. He now splits his time between writing, speaking, politics in Britain and overseas, consultancy and charity, as chairman of fundraising for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, and a leading ambassador for the mental health campaign Time to Change. 
 
He lives in North London with his partner of thirty-five years, Fiona Millar. They have three children. His interests include running, cycling, bagpipes and Burnley Football Club. He has published six volumes of diaries, including the number one Sunday Times bestseller, The Blair Years, a memoir on depression, The Happy Depressive, and three novels.

Alastair Campbell

Alastair Nathan Cook was born in Gloucester, December 1984. He is an English cricketer. He plays for Essex County Cricket Club and previously for England. Cook is the fifth highest Test scorer of all time. 
 
He is regarded as England's most successful batsman ever and now he is an icon and role model in sport. 
 
Outside of cricket, Alastair has written columns in the Telegraph and Metro, he is a talented saxophone player and donates his time to raising money for cancer charities and the David Randall Foundation. He is now married with three children.

Alastair Cook

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Jane Robinson

Only a generation or two ago, illegitimacy was one of the most shameful things that could happen in a family. 
 
In the Family Way tells secrets kept for entire lifetimes: long-silent voices from the workhouse, the Magdalene Laundry or the distant mother-and-baby home. Anonymous childhoods are recalled, spent in the care of Dr Barnardo or a Child Migration scheme halfway across the world. 
 
There are sorrowful stories in this book, but it is also about hope: about supportive families who welcomed 'love-children' home, or those who were parted and are now reconciled. Most of all, In the Family Way is about finally telling the truth.

In the Family Way

Illegitimacy Between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties

Brian Dillon

In April 1916, a fire started in a vast munitions works located in the marshes of Kent. The resulting series of explosions killed 108 people and injured many more. 
 
In a brilliant piece of storytelling, Brian Dillon recreates the events of that terrible day - and, in so doing, sheds a fresh and unexpected light on the British home front in the Great War. He offers a chilling natural history of explosives and their effects on the earth, on buildings, and on human and animal bodies. And he evokes with vivid clarity one of Britain's strangest and most remarkable landscapes - where he has been a habitual explorer for many years. The Great Explosion is a profound work of narrative, exploration and inquiry from one of our most brilliant writers.

The Great Explosion

Gunpowder, the Great War, and a Disaster on the Kent Marshes

Noam Chomsky

In this collection of essays from 1969-2013, many in book form for the first time, Noam Chomsky exposes the real nature of state power. With unrelenting logic, he holds the arguments of empire up to critical examination and shatters the myths of those who protect the power and privilege of the few against the interests and needs to the many. 
 
This is an indispensable compilation of searing insights into the state of our modern world.

Masters of Mankind

Essays and Lectures, 1969-2013

Sven Beckert

For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business - if all the cotton bales produced in 2013 had been stacked on top of each other they would have made a somewhat unstable tower 40,000 miles high. 
 
Sven Beckert's superb new book is a history of the overwhelming role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. It is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant case history of how the world works.

Empire of Cotton

A New History of Global Capitalism

Francis Pryor

Francis Pryor's search for the origins of our island story has been the quest of a lifetime. In Home, the Time Team expert explores the first nine thousand years of life in Britain, from the retreat of the glaciers to the Romans' departure. Tracing the settlement of domestic communities, he shows how archaeology enables us to reconstruct the evolution of habits, traditions and customs. But this, too, is Francis Pryor's own story: of his passion for unearthing our past, from Yorkshire to the west country, Lincolnshire to Wales, digging in freezing winters, arid summers, mud and hurricanes, through frustrated journeys and euphoric discoveries. Evocative and intimate, Home shows how, in going about their daily existence, our prehistoric ancestors created the institution that remains at the heart of the way we live now: the family.

Home

A Time Traveller's Tales from Britain's Prehistory

Henry Kissinger

World Order is the summation of Henry Kissinger's thinking about history, strategy and statecraft. As if taking a perspective from far above the globe, it examines the great tectonic plates of history and the motivations of nations, explaining the attitudes that states and empires have taken to the rest of the world from the formation of Europe to our own times. 
 
Kissinger identifies four great 'world orders' in history - the European, Islamic, Chinese and American. Since the end of Charlemagne's empire, and especially since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Europeans have striven for balance in international affairs, first in their own continent and then globally. Islamic states have looked to their destined expansion over regions populated by unbelievers, a position exemplified today by Iran under the ayatollahs. For over 2000 years the Chinese have seen 'all under Heaven' as being tributary to the Chinese Emperor. America views itself as a 'city on a hill', a beacon to the world, whose values have universal validity. 
 
How have these attitudes evolved and how have they shaped the histories of their nations, regions, and the rest of the world? What has happened when they have come into contact with each other? How have they balanced legitimacy and power at different times? What is the condition of each in our contemporary world, and how are they shaping relations between states now? 
 
To answer these questions Henry Kissinger draws upon a lifetime's historical study and unmatched experience as a world statesman. His account is shot through with observations about how historical change takes place, how some leaders shape their times and others fail to do so, and how far states can stray from the ideas which define them. World Order is a masterpiece of narrative, analysis and portraits of great historical actors that only Henry Kissinger could have written.

World Order

Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History

Michael Pye

Between the fall of Rome and the dawn of the Enlightenment, northern Europe went from barbaric outpost to being the centre of everything, building the world we know. We have ignored its impact, but the reason is the North Sea: boats carried food and raw materials but also new ideas and information. Seafarers raided and killed but also settled and coupled, bringing the tastes and technologies that would make us modern. This is the story of the saints and spies, fishermen and pirates, traders and marauders whose journeys changed everything.

The Edge of the World

How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

Hugh Thomas

Following Rivers of Gold and The Golden Age, World Without End is the conclusion of a magisterial three-volume history of the Spanish Empire by Hugh Thomas, its foremost worldwide authority 
 
World Without End is the climax of Hugh Thomas's great history of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. It describes the conquest of Paraguay and the River Plate, of the Yucatan in Mexico, the only partial conquest of Chile, and battles with the French over Florida, and then, in the 1580s, the extraordinary projection of Spanish power across the Pacific to conquer the Philippines. More significantly, it describes how the Spanish ran the greatest empire the world had seen since Rome - as well as conquistadores, the book is people with viceroys, judges, nobles, bishops, inquisitors and administrators of many different kinds, often in conflict with one another, seeking to organise the native populations into towns, to build cathedrals, hospitals and universities. Behind them - sometimes ahead of them - came the religious orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and finally the Jesuits, builders of convents and monasteries, many of them of astonishing beauty, and reminders of the pervasiveness of religion and the self-confidence of the age. 
 
Towering above them all, though moving rarely from the palace of the Escorial outside Madrid, is the figure of King Philip II, the central figure in the book. The Venetian ambassador thought him 'the arbiter of the world'. Once the Philippines had been consolidated, Philip's advisors contemplated an invasion of China: the Jesuit Father Sanchez called it 'the greatest enterprise which has ever been proposed to any monarch in the world'. It was an enterprise never undertaken, but never explicitly abandoned. 
Was it a great or a terrible empire? In contrast to other empire builders, the Spaniards entered upon arguments with each other about their right to rule other peoples, and their ruthlessness was often tempered by humanity. Hugh Thomas's conclusion is unequivocal: 'The speed with which the sixteenth-century conquistadores conquered such large territories on two vast continents, and the comparable success of missionaries with large populations of Indians, stands as one of the supreme epics of both valour and imagination by Europeans.'

World Without End

The Global Empire of Philip II

Andrew Gordon

Winner of the Longman's History Today Book of the Year Award and the inaugural Westminster Medal for Military Literature 
 
More than a century had gone by since the Battle of Trafalgar. Generation after generation of British naval captains had been dreaming ever since of a 'new' Trafalgar - a cataclysmic encounter which would decisively change a war's outcome. At last, in the summer of 1916, they thought their moment had come... 
 
Andrew Gordon's extraordinary, gripping book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of the British navy in the years leading up to Jutland and gives a superb account of the battle itself and its bitterly acrimonious aftermath.

The Rules of the Game

Jutland and British Naval Command

Tristram Hunt

Since the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and the end days of Empire, Britain's colonial past has been the subject of passionate debate. Tristram Hunt goes beyond the now familiar arguments about Empire being good or bad and adopts a fresh approach to Britain's empire and its legacy. Through an exceptional array of first-hand accounts and personal reflections, he portrays the great colonial and imperial cities of Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool: their architecture, culture, and society balls; the famines, uprisings and repressions which coursed through them; the primitive accumulation and ghostly bureaucracy which ran them; the British supremacists and multicultural trailblazers who inhabited them. 
 
From the pioneers of early America to the builders of modern India, from west to east and back again, Hunt follows the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively moulded the colonial experience and which in their turn transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. This vivid and richly detailed imperial story, located in ten of the most important cities which the Empire constructed, demolished, reconstructed and transformed, allows us a new understanding of the British Empire's influence upon the world and the world's influence upon it.

Ten Cities that Made an Empire

Alison Light

Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past, in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond. 
 
Epic in scope and deep in feeling, Common People is a family history but also a new kind of public history, following the lives of the migrants who travelled the country looking for work. Original and eloquent, it is a timely rethinking of who the English were - but ultimately it reflects on history itself, and on our constant need to know who went before us and what we owe them.

Common People

The History of An English Family

Alexander Monro

The Paper Trail tells the story of how a simple Chinese product has for two millennia allowed knowledge, ideas and religions to spread at an unprecedented rate around the world. Alexander Monro traces this groundbreaking invention's voyage, beginning with the Buddhist translators responsible for its spread across China and Japan, and follows it westward along the Silk Road, where it eventually became the surface of the Quran. Once paper reached Europe, it became indispensable to the scholars who manufactured the Renaissance and Reformation from their desks. As Monro uncovers, paper created a world in which free thinking could flourish, and brought disciplines from science to music into a new age.

The Paper Trail

An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention

Matt Lewis

In the depths of Antarctic winter, hundreds of miles from land or rescue, a small fishing boat is swallowed by waves as high as houses. 
 
The captain is fatally slow to act, and then paralyzed by fear. The officers flee for their lives. Only the actions of Matt Lewis, a 23-year-old British marine biologist and one of the most inexperienced men aboard, will save the lives of the South African crew. 
 
Lewis is the last man off the sinking boat, and leads the escape onto three life rafts. There the battle for survival begins.

Last Man Off

A True Story of Disaster, Survival and One Man's Ultimate Test

A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas

Anne Applebaum

A vivid and human glimpse into Europe's borderlands as they emerged from Soviet rule - back in print after nearly 20 years 
 
'In this superb book, in which one senses the spirit of Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz, the dramatic world of the Eastern borderlands comes to life' Ryszard Kapuscinski 
 
As Europe's borderlands emerged from Soviet rule, Anne Applebaum travelled from the Baltic to the Black Sea, through Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and the Carpathian mountains. Rich in vivid characters and stories of tragedy and survival, Between East and West illuminates the soul of a place, and the secret history of its people. 
 
'A beautifully written and thought-provoking account of a journey along Europe's forgotten edge' Timothy Garton Ash 
 
'A vivid and penetrating assessment of the lands between the Baltic and the Black Sea in all their drama and desolation . . . a wise and useful book' Robert Conquest 
 
'Combines the excitement of a well-written and adventurous travelogue with sophisticated reportage' Norman Davies 
 
'You will be totally absorbed' Norman Stone 
 
Anne Applebaum is a historian and journalist, a regular columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, and the author of several books, including Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, and Iron Curtain, which in 2013 won the Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature and the Cundill Prize in Historical Literature. She is the Director of Political Studies at the Legatum Institute in London, and she divides her time between Britain and Poland, where her husband, Radek Sikorski, serves as Foreign Minister.

Between East and West

Across the Borderlands of Europe

Adam Tooze

In the depths of the Great War, with millions of dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle. A new global order was being born. Adam Tooze's panoramic book tells the radical story of the struggle for global mastery from the battles of the Western Front in 1916 to the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Deluge is both a brilliantly illuminating exploration of the past and an essential history for the present.

The Deluge

The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931

Suetonius

'Because of his baldness and hairiness, he announced it was a capital offence for anyone either to look down on him as he passed or to mention goats in any context.' 
 
The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.70-130 CE). Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars is also available in Penguin Classics.

Caligula

Henry Mayhew

'...a good bit of spice to give the critlings a flavour, and plenty of treacle to make the mince-meat look rich' 
 
Radical Victorian reformer Henry Mayhew walked the streets of London interviewing ordinary flower girls, market traders, piemen and costermongers to create the first ever work of mass social observation, and the ultimate account of urban life - including an extraordinary description of the city from a hot air balloon. 
 
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. 
 
Henry Mayhew (1812-1887). Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor is available in Penguin Classics.

Of Street Piemen

Herodotus

'Do you see your son, standing over there, in the antechamber? Well, I am going to shoot him.'

The Madness of Cambyses

Geoff Dyer

By sea and on the airwaves, by dollar and yuan, a contest has begun that will shape the next century. China's rise has now entered a critical new phase, as it seeks to translate its considerable economic heft into a larger role on the world stage, challenging American supremacy. Yet he also shows why China may struggle to unseat the West - its ambitious designs are provoking anxiety, especially in Asia, while America's global alliances have deep roots. If Washington can adjust to a world in which it is not the sole dominant power, it may be able to retain its ability to set the global agenda.

The Contest of the Century

The New Era of Competition with China

Yaron Matras

In I Met Lucky People, Yaron Matras, the world's leading authority on the Romani, explains why we need to reconsider how we view their culture 
 
Who are the Romani people? As one of the last remaining societies in the Western hemisphere with a strictly oral culture, they have no written record of their history that can be consulted. From the early 1990s, linguist Yaron Matras has been working with the 'Rom', as they call themselves, one of a handful of people to have done so. Travelling widely in central and eastern Europe, studying their language and learning their dialects, he has witnessed their campaign for recognition. In I Met Lucky People Matras gives us the first comprehensive account of their culture, language and history. It is a story of the echoes of a rich past left in language and customs, and of how the changing fortunes of Europe throughout the centuries have been imprinted on Romani culture. 
 
'Required reading' - Financial Times 
 
Yaron Matras is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, and Editor of the journal Romani Studies. His involvement with Romani issues began in the advocacy and civil rights arena. Matras was media relations officer to the Roma National Congress from 1988 -1995, and founding editor of RomNews, one of the very first advocacy information services on Romani issues. He has worked closely with the Open Society Institute's Roma programmes, is a founding member of the European Academic Network on Romani Studies, and has led several large-scale research projects on Romani language and culture, including an international research consortium on Romani migrations. He is the author of over a dozen books and numerous chapters and articles on Romani language and culture, and speaks the Romani language fluently.

I Met Lucky People

The Story of the Romani Gypsies

Lyn Macdonald

In this vivid account of the first months of the First World War, Lyn Macdonald draws on personal accounts of surviving veterans, bringing to life the disillusionment, the questioning and the heroism of the men of the British Army. 
 
The officers and men of 1914 were prepared to fight and ready to lay down their lives because it was their job. These men believed they were fighting the War to end War.

1914

The Days Of Hope

Peter Schneider

Over the last five decades, no city has changed more than Berlin: divided in 1961, reunited in 1989, it has become Europe's most vibrant melting-pot of artists, immigrants and entrepreneurs. Blending memoir, history and reportage, this legendary Berliner takes us behind the scenes there - looking at everything from life under the Stasi and the difference between East and West Berliners' sex-lives to the city's night-life, politics and hidden quirks - and reveals what makes Berlin the uniquely fascinating place it is.

Berlin Now

The Rise of the City and the Fall of the Wall

Eduardo Galeano

This is not an official history of the world. It is about what happens between the cracks. It is about the forgotten, the overlooked, the marginalized. It contains a story from history for every day of the year: a journey, feast, tragedy, revolution or little-known occurrence that happened on that date but has slipped from memory. Resonant, unflinchingly radical, mordantly funny, it joins humanity's darkest hours to its sweetest victories. It is the story of our lives.

Children of the Days

A Calendar of Human History

Denis Winter

Millions of British men were involved in the Great War of 1914-18. But both during and after the war, the individual voices of the soldiers were lost in the collective picture. Men drew arrows on maps and talked of battles and campaigns, but avoided what it felt like to be in the front line. Civilians did not ask and soldiers did not write. 
 
Death's Men portrays the life of ordinary soldiers who were called on to face the appalling fears and discomforts of the Front. It shows the reality of the First World War through the voices of the men who fought.

Death's Men

Soldiers Of The Great War

Richard Barber

The destruction of the French army at Crécy in 1346 and the subsequent siege and capture of Calais marked a new era in European history. The most powerful, glamorous and respected of all western monarchies had been completely humiliated by England, a country long viewed either as a chaotic backwater or a mere French satellite. 
 
The young Edward III's triumph would launch both countries, as we now know, into a grim cycle of some 90 years of further fighting ending with English defeat, but after Crécy anything seemed possible - Edward's claim to be King of France could be pressed home and, in any event, enormous rewards of land, treasure and prestige were available both to the king and to the close companions who had made the victory possible. It was to enshrine this moment that Edward created one of the most famous of all knightly orders, the Company of the Garter. 
 
Barber writes about both the great campaigns and the individuals who formed the original membership of the Company - and through their biographies makes the period tangible and fascinating. This is a book about knighthood, battle tactics and grand strategy, but it is also about fashion, literature and the privates lives of everyone from queens to freebooters. Barber's book is a remarkable achievement - but also an extremely enjoyable one.

Edward III and the Triumph of England

The Battle of Crécy and the Company of the Garter

Bill Wasik

Monica Murphy

The most fatal virus known to science, rabies-a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans-kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes. 
 
"A searing narrative." 
-The New York Times 
 
"In this keen and exceptionally well-written book, rife with surprises, narrative suspense and a steady flow of expansive insights, 'the world's most diabolical virus' conquers the unsuspecting reader's imaginative nervous system. . . . A smart, unsettling, and strangely stirring piece of work." 
-San Francisco Chronicle 
 
"Fascinating. . . . Wasik and Murphy chronicle more than two millennia of myths and discoveries about rabies and the animals that transmit it, including dogs, bats and raccoons." 
-The Wall Street Journal

Rabid

A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus

Lucy Inglis

Travel back to the eighteenth century as Lucy Inglis brilliantly recreates the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition and fantastic ruin. 
 
This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and prostitutes to rent boys and hot air balloonists, dog-nappers and foundlings. Georgian London reveals their daily lives: quickie marriages outside Fleet Prison, clandestine visits to Covent Garden, the terror of serial killers and lawless highwaymen and days out at the Tower Zoo. 
 
Here, amongst a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, discover the making of the capital millions know and love today.

Georgian London

Into the Streets

Vic Gatrell

The colourful, salacious and sumptuously illustrated story of Covent Garden - the creative heart of Georgian London - from Wolfson Prize-winning author Vic Gatrell 
 
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE HESSELL TILTMAN PRIZE 2014 
 
In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London's Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the eighteenth century. It was the world's first creative 'Bohemia'. The nation's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden's Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and an intimacy that was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here.

The First Bohemians

Life and Art in London's Golden Age

Barbara Tuchman

War pressed against every frontier. Suddenly dismayed, governments struggled and twisted to fend it off. It was no use . . . 
 
Barbara Tuchman's universally acclaimed, Pulitzer prize-winning account of how the first thirty days of battle determined the course of the First World War is to this day revered as the classic account of the conflict's opening. From the precipitous plunge into war and the brutal and bloody battles of August 1914, Tuchman shows how events were propelled by a horrific logic which swept all sides up in its unstoppable momentum.

The Guns of August

The Classic Bestselling Account of the Outbreak of the First World War

Charles Townshend

A gripping narrative of the most critical years in modern Ireland's history - from Charles Townshend, author of Easter 1916 
 
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
 
The protracted, terrible fight for independence pitted the Irish against the British and the Irish against other Irish. It was both a physical battle of shocking violence against a regime increasingly seen as alien and unacceptable and an intellectual battle for a new sort of country. The damage done, the betrayals and grim compromises put the new nation into a state of trauma for at least a generation, but at a nearly unacceptable cost the struggle ended: a new republic was born. 
 
Charles Townshend's Easter 1916 opened up the astonishing events around the Rising for a new generation and in The Republic he deals, with the same unflinchingly wish to get to the truth behind the legend, with the most critical years in Ireland's history. There has been a great temptation to view these years through the prisms of martyrology and good-and-evil. The picture painted by Townshend is far more nuanced and sceptical - but also never loses sight of the ordinary forms of heroism performed by Irish men and women trapped in extraordinary times. 
 
'The author has devoted his life to the study of Irish history and this huge work is the pinnacle of his labours' John Banville on Easter 1916

The Republic

The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923

Five Minute Mum

Flaptastic

Fluffy

Folk Art

Football Academy

Football Skills

Forbidden Spaces Trilogy

Foul Play

DICK FRANCIS was one of the most successful post-war National Hunt jockeys and author of forty-three bestselling novels, a volume of short stories (Field of 13), the biography of Lester Piggott and his own autobiography (The Sport of Queens). He was rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest thriller writers in the world. 
 
 Since his death, his son FELIX FRANCIS has taken over the literary reigns from his father and Dick's legacy lives on through the Dick Francis novels. The Francis flair is clear for all to see in these national treasure thrillers, and readers will appreciate the sporadic reappearance of beloved series characters Sid Halley and Jeff Hinkley.

Francis Thriller

Frank Behr

Once a Detective Inspector in the Nottinghamshire Force, Frank Elder has retired to an isolated cottage in Cornwall, and is trying to live the quiet life. The past, however, is never far behind him.

Frank Elder

Fred

Free Collars Kingdom

Jean Plaidy combines imagination with facts to bring the French Revolution alive in this dynamic historical fiction series. From Louis XV’s debauchery to Marie Antionette’s demise, it is clear there was only one way this was going to end.

French Revolution

French Vintage Classics

Frieda Klein

Fright Club

From Scratch

Frontline Nurses Series

Frostheart

Fun With Ladybird

Funnybones

G.F. Newman’s The Corrupted

Gabriel's Inferno

The Roman grip on Britain is growing weaker and Druids are on the rise. Emperor Nero has turned away. Boudicca is preparing to lead tribes to war. 
 
Standing in her way is Gaius Valerius Verrens, commander of the veterans legion. In this battle he earns the accolade of Hero of Rome - but where will that title lead him next?

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