A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

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Stephen Fisher

'With his wealth of knowledge and exacting eye for detail, [Fisher's] book on D-Day is sure to impress a vast audience' Dan Snow 
'Stephen Fisher... is a very rare beast - a man who can bring stunning research and scholarship hand-in-glove with the gifts of a fine storyteller' James Holland 
'Written with verve and panache... It’s a brilliant evocation of one of the greatest days in history, and Fisher has done it proud. Bravo!' Robert Lyman, author of Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-1940 
_________ 
 
6th June 1944 saw the largest seaborne assault in human history: D-Day. The landings on the five Normandy beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, will go down in legend as the first footsteps on the journey to end the war in northern Europe. 
 
While much has been written about the operation as a whole, little detailed attention has been paid to the battle for Sword Beach itself, the easternmost of the amphibious attack areas. For the first time, historian and archaeologist Stephen Fisher puts the British landing under the spotlight and using previously unseen research, documents and personal testimonies pieces together the buildup, the day itself and its aftermath in such a way as to uniquely bring the operation to vivid life. 
 
Following a massive air and naval bombardment that began before the sun had even risen, the stage was set for the first of tens of thousands of troops to come ashore on Sword that day. It was to be a day of triumph and tragedy as the Allies pushed forward to the key objective of Caen against German defenders who were, uniquely on D-Day, backed up by an armoured division. 
 
Never before has this campaign been afforded such insightful and detailed scrutiny. Stephen Fisher brings his considerable knowledge and expertise to paint a thrilling picture of how the deep beachhead was established and pays tribute to the heroism and sacrifices that were made on that fateful day.

Sword Beach

The Untold Story of D-Day’s Forgotten Victory

Justine Firnhaber-Baker

One of the great epics of Europe's history, the story of the rise and rise of the Capetian dynasty dominates the Middle Ages. Starting in the tenth century from an insecure foothold around Paris, the Capetians built a nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and from the Rhône to the Pyrenees. They founded practices and institutions that endured until the Revolution, transformed Paris from a muddy backwater to a splendid metropole, and popularized the fleur-de-lys, the lily, as the emblem of France. Time and again, their opponents woefully misjudged who they were up against, as through guile, ruthlessness, luck and marriage the Capetians disposed of them all. 
 
This is their story, the story of the most powerful kingdom in Christendom. It is a tale of religious upheaval, heroism, adulterous affairs, holy wars, pogroms and persecution. From Hugh Capet to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Capetians were men and women of vision and ambition, who considered themselves chosen by God to fulfil a great destiny. If they were mistaken in their assumptions and merciless in their methods, in one respect they were right. They did not simply rule France: they created it. 
 
House of Lilies is a highly enjoyable, state-of-the-art account of this extraordinary sequence of events, set against one of the great eras in the history of western Europe, a time of remarkable cultural efflorescence. Justine Firnhaber-Baker brilliantly conveys not only the sheer glamour of the French court, but also the intellectual achievements, the battles and the centrality of religion, as well as the series of catastrophes that led to the dynasty's ultimate demise.

House of Lilies

The Dynasty that Made Medieval France

Phillips Payson O'Brien

In THE STRATEGISTS, Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are crucial to understanding how they fought WW2. For example, Churchill's experiences of facing the German Army in France in 1916 made him unwilling to send masses of British soldiers back there in the 1940s, while Hitler's mistakes on the Eastern Front were influenced by his reluctance to accept that conditions had changed since his own time fighting. The implications of the power of leaders remain with us to this day: to truly understand what is happening in Ukraine, for example, requires us to know what has influenced the leaders involved. 
 
This is a history in which leaders – and their choices – matter. For better or worse.

The Strategists

Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler – How War Made Them, And How They Made War

Mick Clifford

October 1971. Nineteen-year-old Una Lynskey vanishes near her home in Co. Meath. In the weeks that follow, and on flimsy grounds, gardaí identify three young local men as suspects. Within days of her body being found, one of the three is beaten to death by members of Una&rsquo;s family. 
 
The entire sequence of events is a tragedy in a quiet rural community - the wrong men jailed, no one ever facing justice - and becomes one of the most notorious failures in Irish policing and judicial history.In Who Killed Una Lynskey?, award-winning journalist Mick Clifford has built a compelling portrait of the case from interviews with the surviving main players, as well as exclusive access to the files of a private investigator who uncovered information the gardaí missed - or ignored. 
 
A timely, humane and compulsive read, this is a ground-breaking account of the botched investigation and its devastating consequences for not just four devastated families, but also the reputation of the gardaí.

Who Killed Una Lynskey?

A True Story of Murder, Vigilante Justice and the Garda ‘Heavy Gang’

Jane Robinson

‘Jane Robinson is brilliant at putting the women back into history and her biography of Barbara Leigh Bodichon, a Victorian feminist we should all be grateful to, is as entertaining as it is necessary.’ - Daisy Goodwin 
 
You have probably not heard of Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon but you certainly should have done. 
 
Name any 'modern' human rights movement, and she was a pioneer: feminism, equal opportunities, diversity, inclusion, mental health awareness, Black Lives Matter. While her name has been omitted from too many history books, it was Barbara that opened the doors for more famous names to walk through. And her influence owed as much to who she was as to what she did: people loved her for her robust sense of humour, cheerfulness and indiscriminate acts of kindness. 
 
This is a celebration of the life of the founder of Britain's suffrage movement: campaigner for equal opportunity in the workplace, the law, at home and beyond. Co-founder of Girton, the first university college for women, a committed activist for human rights, fervently anti-slavery, she was also one of Victorian England's finest female painters. 
 
Jane Robinson's brilliant new book shines a light on a remarkable woman who lived on her own terms and to whom we owe a huge debt.

Trailblazer

The First Feminist to Change Our World

Patrick Joyce

** Longlisted for the 2024 Cundill History Prize** 
 
‘A dozen pages in I realized that I had been waiting for much of my life to read this extraordinary book’ Annie Proulx 
 
A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. 
 
In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the nineteenth century to the present day. Into this passionate history, written with exquisite care, Joyce weaves remarkable individual stories, including those of his own Irish family, and looks at how peasant life has been remembered - and misremembered - in contemporary culture. 
 
This is a people whose voice is vastly underrepresented in human history. Yet for Joyce, we are all the children of peasants, who must respect the experience of our ancestors. This is particularly pressing when our knowledge of the land is being lost to climate crisis and the rise of industrial agriculture. Enlightening, timely and vital, this book commemorates an extraordinary culture whose impact on our history and our future remains profoundly relevant.

Remembering Peasants

A Personal History of a Vanished World

Nick Lloyd

In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires. 
 
Much has been written about the fighting in France and Belgium, yet the Eastern Front was no less bloody. Between 1914 and 1917, huge numbers of people - perhaps as many as 16 million soldiers and two million civilians - were killed, wounded or maimed in enormous battles that sometimes ranged across a front of 100 km in length. 
 
Through intimate eyewitness reports, diary entries and memoirs - many of which have never been translated into English before - Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. 
 
The Eastern Front paints a vivid and authoritative picture of a conflict that shook the world, and that remains central to understanding the tragic, blood-soaked trajectory of the entire twentieth century, including the current war in Ukraine.

The Eastern Front

A History of the First World War

Clair Wills

How far would you go for the missing? 
 
When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence. 
 
How could a whole family - a whole country - abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history? 
 
To discover the missing pieces of her family's story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child. 
 
There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence - stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother's Secrets

Christopher Harding

From the time of the ancient Greeks onwards the West's relationship with Asia consisted for the most part of outrageous tales of strange beasts and monsters, of silk and spices shipped over vast distances and an uneasy sense of unknowable empires fantastically far away. By the twentieth century much of Asia might have come under Western rule after centuries of warfare, but its intellectual, artistic and spiritual influence was fighting back. 
 
The Light of Asia is a wonderfully varied and entertaining history of the many ways in which Asia has shaped European and North American culture over centuries of tangled, dynamic encounters, and the central importance of this vexed, often confused relationship. From Marco Polo onwards Asia has been both a source of genuine fascination and equally genuine failures of comprehension. China, India and Japan were all acknowledged to be both great civilizations and in crude ways seen as superseded by the West. From Chicago to Calcutta, and from antiquity to the new millennium, this is a rich, involving story of misunderstandings and sincere connection, of inspiration and falsehood, of geniuses, adventurers and con-men. 
 
Christopher Harding's captivating gallery of people and places celebrates Asia's impact on the West in all its variety.

The Light of Asia

A History of Western Fascination with the East

Anthony Grafton

At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks. 
 
Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse. The historical Faust, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Trithemius and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa are all fascinating characters, closely linked to monarchs, artists and soldiers and sitting at the heart of any definition of why the Renaissance was a time of such restless innovation. The study of the stars, architecture, warfare, even medicine: all of these and more were revolutionized in some way by the experiments and tricks of these extraordinary individuals. 
 
No book does a better job of allowing us to understand the ways that magic, religion and science were once so intertwined and often so hard to tell apart.

Magus

The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa

Martin Gilbert

&lsquo;By far the most lucid, comprehensive and authoritative account of Churchill that has been offered in a single volume&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
Drawing on decades of unprecedented access to Winston Churchill&rsquo;s family and estate, this classic bestseller remains the definitive biography of Britain&rsquo;s greatest prime minister. At once intimate and vastly ambitious, it transforms our understanding of who Churchill was and what he accomplished. 
 
&lsquo;A masterpiece of scholarship . . . Explores the strategic labyrinths of two world wars with an enviable clarity.&rsquo; Guardian 
 
&lsquo;Gilbert is, above all, a marshaller of material on a gigantic scale . . . The nakedness of the narrative proclaims its honesty, its unpretentiousness and its erudition.&rsquo; The Times 
 
&lsquo;One of the greatest histories of our time.&rsquo; Margaret Thatcher 
 
&lsquo;Genuinely riveting . . . Genius, courage, generosity, humour and imagination shine through.&rsquo; Financial Times 
 
&lsquo;A stupendous book. He has told the truth.&rsquo; A. J. P. Taylor 
 
&lsquo;The greatest adventure story of the century.&rsquo; Sunday Telegraph

Churchill: A Life

The Official Biography

Sinclair McKay

This insightful portrait of Winston Churchill delves beyond well-known political events, incorporating perspectives from various individuals who encountered him throughout his life. From Bletchley Park codebreakers to Hollywood stars, Harold Wilson to Gandhi, these lesser-known interactions reveal glimpses of the man behind the legend. 
 
We meet Churchill the mischievous schoolboy with a penchant for singing obscene songs, and Churchill the elder statesman shedding a tear in the House of Commons smoking room. Other incidents include a young journalist rudely dismissing a call from Churchill as a prank, and a visiting Dwight D. Eisenhower dreaming of being strangled, only to awake entangled in Churchill's borrowed nightshirt. 
 
The book showcases the profound transformations during Churchill's lifetime, which ran from Benjamin Disraeli's premiership to the release of the Rolling Stones' Route 66, and the shift from steam to atomic power. Examining controversial aspects of his legacy, this multifaceted portrait challenges preconceived notions, inviting readers to reconsider the complexities of Churchill.

Meeting Churchill

A Life in 90 Encounters

Frank Trentmann

In 1945, Germany lay in ruins, morally and materially. The German people stood condemned by history, responsible for a horrifying genocide and a war of extermination. But by 2015 Germany looked to many to be the moral voice of Europe, welcoming almost one million refugees. At the same time, it pursued a controversially rigid fiscal discipline and made energy deals with a dictator. Many people have asked how Germany descended into the darkness of the Nazis, but this book asks another vital question: how, and how far, have the Germans since reinvented themselves? 
 
Trentmann tells the dramatic story of the Germans from the middle of the Second World War, through the Cold War and the division into East and West, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunited nation's search for a place in the world. Their journey is marked by extraordinary moral struggles: guilt, shame and limited amends; wealth versus welfare; tolerance versus racism; compassion and complicity. Through a range of voices - German soldiers and German Jews; environmentalists and coal miners; families and churches; volunteers, migrants and populists - Trentmann paints a remarkable and surprising portrait over 80 years of the conflicted people at the centre of Europe.

Out of the Darkness

The Germans, 1942-2022

Neil Oliver

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. 
 
Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.. 
 
Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

Joachim C. Häberlen

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history. 
 
In the decades between, Joachim C. Häberlen argues, new movements emerged that transformed the nature of protesting. Activism moved beyond traditional demonstrations, from squatting to staging 'happenings' and camping out at nuclear power plants. People protested in the way they dressed, the music they listened to, the lovers they slept with, the clubs where they danced all night. New movements were born, notably anti-racism, women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. And protest turned inward, as activists experimented with new ways of living and feeling, from communes to group therapy, in their efforts to live a better life in the here and now. 
 
Some of these struggles succeeded, others failed. But successful or not, their history provides a glimpse into roads not taken, into futures that did not happen. The stories in Häberlen's book invite us to imagine different futures; to struggle, to fail, and to try again. In a time when we are told that there are no alternatives, they show us that there could be another way.

Beauty is in the Street

Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe

Christopher de Hamel

The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. But we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. 
 
This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years. A monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America - all of them were participants in what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club. 
 
This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel's unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion which crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been. 
 
In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript 'at a bookseller's in a back alley'. This was his reaction: 'The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold - as many of them were - cannot be told.' The members of de Hamel's club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style, and a lifetime's experience.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

Yaroslav Trofimov

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Yaroslav Trofimov has spent months on end at the heart of the conflict, very often on its front lines. In this authoritative account, he traces the war’s decisive moments—from the battle for Kyiv to more recently the gruelling and bloody arm wrestle involving the Wagner group over Bakhmut—to show how Ukraine and its allies have turned the tide against Russia in a modern-day battle of David and Goliath. Putin had intended to conquer Ukraine with a vicious blitzkrieg, in a few short weeks. But in the face of this existential threat, the Ukrainian people fought back, turning what looked like certain defeat into a great moral victory, even as the territorial battle continues to seesaw to this day. This is the story of their epic bravery in the face of almost unthinkable aggression.

Our Enemies Will Vanish

Anthony Bale

From the medieval bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses. 
 
Using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, north Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a living atlas that blurs the distinction between real and imagined places, offering the reader a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

The World Through Medieval Eyes

Klaus-Michael Bogdal

This remarkable book describes a dark side of European history: the rejection of the Roma from their initial arrival in the late Middle Ages to the present day. To Europeans, the Roma appeared to be in complete contradiction with their own culture, because of their mysterious origins, unknown language and way of life. As representatives of an oral culture, for centuries the Roma have left virtually no written records of their own. Their history has been conveyed to us almost exclusively through the distorted images that European cultures project. 
 
Persecuted and shunned, the Roma nonetheless spread out across the continent and became an important, indeed indispensable element in the European imagination. Countless composers, artists and writers have responded to Romani culture and to fantasies thereof. Their projections onto a group whose illiteracy and marginalization gave it so little direct voice of its own have always been a very uneasy mixture of the inspired, the patronizing and the frighteningly ignorant. The book also shows the link between cultural violence, social discrimination and racist policies that paved the way for the genocide of the Roma.

Europe and the Roma

A History of Fascination and Fear

Martin Gayford

Two artistic giants. One small house. 
 
From October to December 1888 a pair of largely unknown artists lived under one roof in the French provincial town of Arles. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh ate, drank, talked, argued, slept and painted in one of the most intense and astonishing creative outpourings in history. Yet as the weeks passed Van Gogh buckled under the strain, fought with his companion and committed an act of violence on himself that prompted Gauguin to flee without saying goodbye to his friend. 
 
The Yellow House is an intimate portrait of their time together as well as a subtle exploration of a fragile friendship, art, madness, genius and the shocking act of self-mutilation that the world has sought to explain ever since.

The Yellow House

Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles

Alice Albinia

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. 
 
The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles - from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias - transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.

The Britannias

And the Islands of Women

An Island Quest

Christabel Bielenberg

On 29 September 1934, at the German Embassy office in London, Christabel Bielenberg officially became a German citizen. Having met her German husband Peter two years prior, Christabel decided to renounce her British citizenship, planning to start married life with Peter in Berlin. Though Adolf Hitler had risen to power in 1933, Christabel and Peter were convinced the German people would see through the newly elected chancellor. 
 
But soon Christabel found herself living under the horrors of Nazi rule and Allied bombings as the war progressed. Closely associated with resistance circles, her husband was arrested after the failure of the plot against Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, and she herself was interrogated by the Gestapo. Though she lived in constant fear for her and her family’s safety, Christabel survived the war with the help of other like-minded Germans who were against Hitler and the Third Reich. 
 
With various memorable encounters – from a simple-minded Nazi official who was also her odd-job gardener to the good-hearted Black Forest villagers who sheltered her till the liberation – Christabel shares not only the hardships and worry but also the humour and humanity she found during these dark days. The human dimension of her writing brings about an unforgettable portrait of an evil time.

The Past Is Myself

Julian Jackson

Few images more shocked the French population during the Occupation than the photograph of Marshal Philippe Pétain - the great French hero of the First World War - shaking the hand of Hitler on 20 October 1940. In a radio speech after this meeting, Pétain told the French people that he was 'entering down the road of collaboration'. He ended with the words: 'This is my policy. My ministers are responsible to me. It is I alone who will be judged by History.' Five years later, in July 1945, the hour of judgement - if not yet the judgement of History - arrived. Pétain was brought before a specially created High Court to answer for his conduct between the signing of the armistice with Germany in June 1940 and the Liberation of France in August 1944. 
 
Julian Jackson uses Pétain's three-week trial as a lens through which to examine the central crisis of twentieth-century French history - the defeat of 1940, the signing of the armistice and Vichy's policy of collaboration - what the main prosecutor Mornet called 'four years to erase from our history'. As head of the Vichy regime in the Second, Pétain became one of France's most notorious public figures, and the lightening-rod for collective guilt and retribution immediately after the Second World War. In France on Trial Jackson blends politics and personal drama to explore how different national factions sought to try to claim the past, or establish their interpretation of it, as a way of claiming the present and future.

France on Trial

The Case of Marshal Pétain

Simon Heffer

‘An epic new history . . . a work of epic scholarship, breathtaking range, and piercing originality’ Daily Express 
‘An astonishing achievement of narrative history . . . I think the word is "magisterial".’ Spectator 
‘Excellent, thorough, detailed and combatively argued.’ Sunday Times______________________________________ 
 
Sing As We Go is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939. 
 
It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of popular entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it. 
__________________________________________'Magisterial . . . an extraordinary achievement.’ Literary Review 
‘A masterful portrayal of political, social and cultural upheaval between the wars.’ Daily Mail

Sing As We Go

Britain Between the Wars

Christopher Somerville

Travelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville, author of The January Man and Ships of Heaven, sets out to discover how the land beneath our feet shapes our past, our present and our future. 
 
Taking a journey of a thousand miles, Christopher Somerville begins in the far north, at the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, formed when the world was still molten, and travels south-eastwards to the furthest corner of Essex, where new land is being formed. Crossing bogs, scaling peaks and skirting quarry pits, he unearths the stories bound up in the layers of rock beneath our feet, and examines how they have influenced everything from how we farm to how we build our houses, from the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. 
 
Told with characteristic humour and insight, this gripping exploration of the British landscape and its remarkable history cannot fail to change the way you see the world beyond your door. 
 
&lsquo;Somerville is a walker&rsquo;s writer&rsquo; Nicholas Crane

Walking the Bones of Britain

A 3 Billion Year Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary

Rachel Chrastil

Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe's pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless amazement. A new German Empire was proclaimed (as a deliberate humiliation) in the Palace of Versailles, leaving the French to face civil war in Paris, reparations and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. 
 
Bismarck's War tells the story of one of the most shocking reversals of fortune in modern European history. The Franco-Prussian War was deliberately engineered by Bismarck, both to destroy French power and to unite Germany. It could not have worked better, but it also had lurking inside it the poisonous seeds of all the disasters that would ravage the twentieth century. 
 
Chrastil's book explores the military, technological, political and social events of the war, its human cost and the way that the sheer ferocity of war, however successful, has profound consequences for both victors and victims.

Bismarck's War

The Franco-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe

Tommy Conlon

Ronan McGreevy

November 1983. As top supermarket executive Don Tidey sets out on the school run, he is snatched from his car and driven away at speed. The IRA, using kidnapping to fund its armed campaign, has its latest victim. 
 
What follows is a massive manhunt and, twenty-three days later, a chaotic rescue in a Leitrim wood. No one emerges unscathed – not the man at the centre of the drama, not the local community, not the police, not the Irish state. And especially not the families of the soldier and the young police officer killed as Tidey is freed. 
 
Powerful, intimate and searching, The Kidnapping is a brilliantly reported account of an iconic episode and the shadow it still casts.

The Kidnapping

A hostage, a desperate manhunt and a bloody rescue that shocked Ireland

James Holland

'Richly impressive, hard to surpass' William Boyd 
'A notable account of an epic human experience' Max Hastings 
&lsquo;James Holland brings every inch of this battle vividly to life&rsquo; History Revealed 
&lsquo;This excellent book&hellip;The Savage Storm reinforces Holland&rsquo;s reputation as certainly the busiest and probably the most popular military historian of the second world war working today&rsquo; Spectator 
&lsquo;A must for anyone wanting to better understand the brutal campaign&hellip; thoroughly deserves a place on the bookshelf&rsquo; Soldier Magazine 
_____________________ 
 
From the bestselling author of Brothers in Arms comes the story of the most pivotal Allies campaign of World War II. 
 
With the invasion of France the following year taking shape, and hot on the heels of victory in Sicily, the Allies crossed into Southern Italy in September 1943. They expected to drive the Axis forces north and be in Rome by Christmas. And although Italy surrendered, the German forces resisted fiercely and the swift hoped-for victory descended into one of the most brutal battles of the war. 
 
Even though shipping and materiel were already being safeguarded for the D-Day landings, there were still huge expectations on the progress of the invading armies, but those shortages were to slow the advance with tragic consequences. As the weather closed in, the critical weeks leading up to Monte Cassino would inflict a heavy price for every bloody, hard fought mile the Allied troops covered. 
 
Chronicling those dark, dramatic months in unflinching and insightful detail, The Savage Storm is unlike any campaign history yet written. James Holland has always recounted the Second World War at ground level, but this version telling brings the story vividly to life like never before. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other incredible documents, Holland traces the battles as they were fought - across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end, frigid cold and relentless rain - putting readers at the heart of the action to create an entirely fresh and revealing telling of this most pivotal phase of the war. 
_____________________ 
 
Praise for James Holland 
 
'Impeccably researched and superbly written' Observer 
'Holland has something new to say.... Filled with insight and detail' Neil Oliver 
'James Holland is the best of the new generation of WW2 historians' Sebastian Faulks 
'[A] captivating and dramatic account. . . Drawn from letters and diaries, Holland&rsquo;s immersive narrative is told through the eye-level perspectives... Readers will be enthralled' Publishers Weekly 
&lsquo;A remarkable achievement by a historian at the height of his powers. Holland has successfully illustrated both the significance and the savagery of the Italian campaign... through a powerful and compelling narrative&rsquo; Military History Matters

The Savage Storm

The Brutal Battle for Italy 1943

David Mitchell

This will be the most refreshing, entertaining history of England you'll have ever read. 
 
Certainly, the funniest. 
 
Because David Mitchell will explain how it is not all names, dates or ungraspable historical headwinds, but instead show how it's really just a bunch of random stuff that happened with a few lucky bastards ending up on top. Some of these bastards were quite strange, but they were in charge, so we quite literally lived, and often still live, by their rules. 
 
It's a great story. And it's our story. If you want to know who we are in modern Britain, you need to read this book.

Unruly

A History of England's Kings and Queens

Brendan O'Leary

A century ago the resolution to Ireland’s long struggle for independence was a settlement that saw six of its northern counties remain in the United Kingdom while the other twenty-six formed the new Republic of Ireland. Since partition the unification of the two parts of the island has seemed impossible, particularly because of the bloody legacy of past conflict. 
 
However, by 2030, if not sooner, the demographic and electoral advantages of Ulster Unionists – who identify as British – will be over. Political developments on both sides of the Irish border, and within Great Britain, make calls for unification referendums increasingly likely. Yet even those who want these to happen are not prepared. 
 
Making Sense of a United Ireland is a remarkable exploration of this most contentious of issues by Professor Brendan O'Leary, a global expert on divided places, who has worked on the Irish question for nearly forty years.

Making Sense of a United Ireland

Should it happen? How might it happen?

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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