Adam Usden

Adam Wagner

Adam Wasson

Adam Weymouth's work has been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, The Observer and the BBC. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Writing Centre as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.

Adam Weymouth

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg (1937-95) was born on the outskirts of Warsaw. His science fiction writing is largely focused around the consequences of totalitarianism. Although largely unread during his lifetime, after his suicide in 1995 his work began to receive major critical attention. He is now considered to be, along with Stanislaw Lem, one of Poland's greatest science fiction writers.

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Ade Edmondson

Adele Lang

Adele Nozedar is an author and photographer. Previously, she was in a cult indie band, then ran her own indie record label and became A&amp;R Director/General Manager of a major record company. 
 
Her wide-ranging passions are reflected in her books, which include The Hedgerow Handbook (2012), The Signs and Symbols Sourcebook (2011), The Secret Language of Birds (2006), and The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans (2013).

Adele Nozedar

Adele Puhn

Adeline Yen Mah

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer and book critic. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic,Slate,The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adelle Waldman

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an Indian illustrator based in France. She likes experimenting with bright, happy colours. She grew up reading fairytales, watching animated films and imagining adventure stories, and her style is an embodiment of her Indian heritage and western culture. She loves animals and taking long walks on the beach, but she is never too far away from a pencil and a paper to draw her perception of the world.

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand

Aditya Chakrabortty

Adiva Geffen is a bestselling writer and playwright. Her plays have appeared on major stages in Israel, she lectures and leads numerous writing workshops and she is a board member of the Israeli Writers’ Association. 
 
 Geffen started out as a special-education teacher, before serving as the spokesperson for the Habima National Theatre for more than a decade. She founded and subsequently led the Israeli Theatre Award for ten years, and now serves as head of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world. 
 
 Born in Haifa, Israel and the mother of three sons, Geffen now lives in Tel Aviv with her partner Aharon Meidan.

Adiva Geffen

Adnan Sarwar, 35, is a former British soldier who served in the Iraq War.  He has since worked as a military consultant to film and is a writer based in London.  Read more at www.adnansarwar.com / @adnansarwar

Adnan Sarwar

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Loos (1877-1933) was a leading Austro-Hungarian architect, perhaps most famous for the revolutionary 'Loos House' opposite the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, which caused outrage when it was built in 1912, and the wonderful American Bar, also in Vienna. He wrote extensively on architecture and design, working in reaction to the elaborate mass of decoration celebrated by the Vienna Secession movement.

Adolf Loos

Adolfo García Ortega

Adomnan of Iona

Adonis

Adriaan Van Dis

Adrian Bean

Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer and performer from London, best known for his comedy sketches which, explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Adrian's work has earned him nearly 20 million followers across social media and has been featured in CNN, The Times and Vogue. Adrian was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Just For Laughs, and his one-man play Inside Everyone sold out its debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival prior to opening.

Adrian Bliss

Adrian Desmond

Adrian Edmondson

Adrian Fort

Adrian Gilbert

Adrian Henri

Adrian House

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Seb Falk

The Middle Ages were a time of wonder. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinkers sought to understand the world around them, from the passing of the seasons to the stars in the sky. 
 
In this book, we walk the path of medieval science with a real-life guide, a fourteenth-century monk named John of Westwyk - inventor, astrologer, crusader - who was educated in England's grandest monastery and exiled to a clifftop priory. Following the traces of his life, we learn to see the natural world through Brother John's eyes: navigating by the stars, multiplying Roman numerals, curing disease and telling the time with an astrolabe. 
 
We travel the length and breadth of England, from Saint Albans to Tynemouth, and venture far beyond the shores of Britain. On our way, we encounter a remarkable cast of characters: the clock-building English abbot with leprosy, the French craftsman-turned-spy and the Persian polymath who founded the world's most advanced observatory. 
 
An enthralling story of the struggles and successes of an ordinary man and an extraordinary time, The Light Ages conjures up a vivid picture of the medieval world as we have never seen it before.

The Light Ages

A Medieval Journey of Discovery

Norman Davies

George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover, came to Britain for the first time when he was thirty-one. He had a terrible relationship with his father, George I, which was later paralleled by his relationship to his own son. He was short-tempered and uncultivated, but in his twenty-three-year reign he presided over a great flourishing in his adoptive country - economic, military and cultural - all described with characteristic wit and elegance by Norman Davies. (George II so admired the Hallelujah chorus in Handel's Messiah that he stood while it was being performed - as modern audiences still do.) Much of his attention remained in Hanover and on continental politics, as a result of which he was the last British monarch to lead his troops into battle, at Dettingen in 1744.

George II (Penguin Monarchs)

Not Just a British Monarch

John Gooch

While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. Then, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties and an Allied invasion in 1943 which ushered in a terrible new era for the country. 
 
 John Gooch's new book is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight. 
 
 This remarkable book rightly shows the centrality of Italy to the war, outlining the brief rise and disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign.

Mussolini's War

Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935-1943

Daniel Todman

The second part of Daniel Todman's epic history of the Second World War opens with one of the greatest disasters in British military history - the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Unlike the aftermath of Dunkirk, there was no redeeming narrative available here. Britain had been defeated by a far smaller Japanese force in her grandly proclaimed, invincible Asian 'fortress'. 
 
The unique skill of Daniel Todman's history lies in its never losing sight of the inter-connectedness of the British experience. The agony of Singapore, for example, is seen through the eyes of its inhabitants, of its defenders, of Churchill's Cabinet and of ordinary people at home. Each stage of the war, from the nadir of early 1942 to the great series of victories in 1944-5 and on to Indian independence, is described both as it was understood at the time and in the light of the very latest historical research. 
 
Britain's War is a triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

Britain's War

A New World, 1942-1947

Valerie Hansen

When did globalization begin? Most observers have settled on 1492, the year Columbus discovered America. But as celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen shows, it was the year 1000, when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe, so an object could in theory circumnavigate the world. This was the 'big bang' of globalization, which ushered in a new era of exploration and trade, and which paved the way for Europeans to dominate after Columbus reached America. Drawing on a wide range of new historical sources and cutting-edge archaeology, this compelling revisionist argument shows how these encounters set the stage for the globalization that would dominate the world for centuries to come.

The Year 1000

When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began

Peter Gatrell

A striking characteristic of modern Europe has been the extreme fluidity of its populations. Whether trying to escape war and persecution or to find a better life, whether moving from the countryside to the city, or between countries, migrants have stood at the heart of the continent's experience. 
 
Peter Gatrell's powerful new book is the first to bring together all these stories into one place. He creates a compelling narrative bracketed by two nightmarish periods: the great convulsions that followed the final defeat of the Third Reich and the mass attempts in the 2010s by migrants to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. 
The Unsettling of Europe is a new history of a continent on the move, charting the ever-changing arguments about the desirability or otherwise of migrants and their central role in Europe's post-1945 prosperity. Above all Gatrell has written a book which makes the reader deeply aware of the many extraordinary journeys taken by countless individuals in pursuit of work, safety and dignity, all the time. 
This is a major book on a subject that, decade by decade, will always haunt Europe.

The Unsettling of Europe

The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present

David Woodman

Edward the Confessor, one of the last kings of Anglo-Saxon England, is in part a figure of myths created in the later medieval period. David Woodman traces the course of his 24-year-long reign through the lens of contemporary sources, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Vita Ædwardi Regis to the Bayeux Tapestry, to uncover the fraught and complex politics of his life. Edward was a shrewd politician who, having endured a long period of exile from England in his youth, ascended the throne in 1042 and came to control a highly sophisticated administration. Such was his power in the mid-eleventh century that the late Anglo-Saxon coinage from his reign is the only example in western Europe of a royal monopoly across such a large area. 
 
 What we know as 'England' had only relatively recently come into being and Woodman constructs a portrait of an age by untangling the truth from the saintly legend and shows how the events of Edward's reign led, through many twists and turns, to the Norman Conquest.

Edward the Confessor (Penguin Monarchs)

The Sainted King

Robert Service

Russia's recent past has encompassed revolution, civil war, mass terror and two world wars, and the country is still undergoing huge change. 
 
In his acclaimed history, now updated to 2020, Robert Service provides a superb panoramic viewpoint on Russia, exploring the complex, changing interaction between rulers and ruled from Nicholas II, Lenin and Stalin through to Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin and beyond. This new edition also discusses Russia's unresolved economic and social difficulties and its determination to regain its leading role on the world stage and explains how, despite the recent years of de-communization, the seven decades of communist rule which penetrated every aspect of life still continue to influence Russia today.

The Penguin History of Modern Russia

From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century, Fifth Edition

From Tsarism to the Twenty-first Century

Alexander Watson

In the autumn of 1914 Europe was at war. On both the Western and Eastern fronts elaborate war plans lay in ruins and had been discarded in favour of desperate improvisation. In the West this resulted in the remorseless world of the trenches; in the East all eyes were focused on the old, beleaguered Austro-Hungarian fortress of Przemysl. 
 
The siege that unfolded at Przemysl was the longest of the whole war. In the defence of the fortress and the struggle to relieve it Austria-Hungary suffered some 800,000 casualties. Almost unknown in the West, this was one of the great turning points of the conflict. If the Russians had broken through they could have invaded Central Europe, but by the time the fortress fell their strength was so sapped they could go no further. Alexander Watson, prize-winning author of Ring of Steel, has written one of the great epics of the First World War. Comparable to Stalingrad in 1942-3, Przemysl shaped the course of Europe's future. The siege was central to the war itself, but also a chilling harbinger of what would engulf the entire region in the coming decades, as nationalism, anti-semitism and an exterminatory fury took hold.

The Fortress

The Great Siege of Przemysl

Matthew Stanley

In 1916, Arthur Eddington, a war-weary British astronomer, opened a letter written by an obscure German professor named Einstein. The neatly printed equations on the scrap of paper outlined his world-changing theory of general relativity. Until then Einstein's masterpiece of time and space had been trapped behind the physical and ideological lines of battle, unknown. 
 
Einstein's name is now synonymous with 'genius', but it was not an easy road. He spent a decade creating relativity and his ascent to global celebrity owed much to against-the-odds international collaboration, including Eddington's globe-spanning expedition of 1919 - two years before they finally met. We usually think of scientific discovery as a flash of individual inspiration, but here we see it is the result of hard work, gambles and wrong turns. 
 
Einstein's War is a celebration of what science can offer when bigotry and nationalism are defeated. Using previously unknown sources and written like a thriller, it shows relativity being built brick-by-brick in front of us, as it happened 100 years ago.

Einstein's War

How Relativity Conquered Nationalism and Shook the World

Janet L. Nelson

Charles, King of the Franks, is one of the most remarkable figures ever to rule a European super-state. That is why he is so often called 'Charles the Great': by the French 'Charlemagne', and by the Germans 'Karl der Grosse'. 
 
 Janet L. Nelson's wonderful new book brings together everything we know about Charlemagne and sifts through the evidence to come as close as we can to understanding the man and his motives. Nelson has an extraordinary knowledge of the sources and much of the book is a sort of detective story, prying into and interpreting fascinating material and often obdurate scraps, from prayerbooks to skeletons, gossip to artwork. 
 
 Above all, Charles' legacy lies in his deeds and their continuing resonance. His successors - in some ways to the present day - have struggled to interpret, misinterpret, copy or subvert Charlemagne. Nelson gets us as close as we can ever hope to come to the real figure, as understood in his own time.

King and Emperor

A New Life of Charlemagne

Charles Moore

This third and climactic volume of Charles Moore's authorised biography gives the definitive account of Margaret Thatcher's third term in office and her life after it. Three stories run through the whole book. The first is Mrs Thatcher's dominance of her government in almost every domestic field, but also her growing intolerance of dissent, the increasing alienation of her most senior ministers over Europe and the fatal corrosion which followed. The second is her commanding presence on the world stage (including relations with Reagan, Gorbachev, Bush, Kohl and Mandela), her role in the ending of the Cold War, her central position in the response to the invasion of Kuwait, and her increasing isolation as America's priorities in Europe changed. The third is how she, a woman, coped and led in political worlds almost entirely occupied by men. The three stories come dramatically together in the autumn of 1990 when, at the moment of greatest domestic danger, she travelled to Paris to participate in the ceremonies ending the Cold War. The chapters here on her fall are, in their drama, unmatched in modern political biography.

Margaret Thatcher

The Authorized Biography, Volume Three: Herself Alone

Florian Huber

One of the least understood stories of the Third Reich is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but also by thousands of ordinary Germans during the war's closing period. Some of these were provoked by straightforward terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms. 
 
Florian Huber's remarkable book confronts this terrible phenomenon. Other countries have suffered defeat, but not responded in the same way. What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation and suffering, to do this? 
 
In a brilliantly written, thoughtful and original work, Huber describes some of the key events from the First World War to the end of the Second which shaped the period, showing how the sheer intensity, allure and ferocity of Hitler's regime swept along millions. Its sudden end was, for many of them, simply impossible to absorb.

Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself

The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945

Rosemary Horrox

No English king has so divided opinion, both during his reign and in the centuries since, more than Richard III. 
 
 He was loathed in his own time for the never-confirmed murder of his young nephews, the Princes in the Tower, and died fighting his own subjects on the battlefield. This is the vision of Richard we have inherited from Shakespeare. Equally, he inspired great loyalty in his followers. 
 
 In this enlightening, even-handed study, Rosemary Horrox builds a complex picture of a king who by any standard failed as a monarch. He was killed after only two years on the throne, without an heir, and brought such a decisive end to the House of York that Henry Tudor was able to seize the throne, despite his extremely tenuous claim. Whether Richard was undone by his own fierce ambitions, or by the legacy of a Yorkist dynasty which was already profoundly dysfunctional, the end result was the same: Richard III destroyed the very dynasty that he had spent his life so passionately defending.

Richard III (Penguin Monarchs)

A Failed King?

Dominic Sandbrook

The early 1980s were the most dramatic, colourful and controversial years in our modern history. Margaret Thatcher had come to power in 1979 with a daring plan to reverse Britain's decline. But as factories closed their doors, dole queues lengthened and the inner cities exploded in flames, would her harsh medicine rescue the Sick Man of Europe - or kill it off? 
 
Evocative, surprising and gloriously entertaining, Dominic Sandbrook's new book recreates the great turning point in Britain's modern history. For some people this was an age of unparalleled opportunity, the heyday of computers and credit cards, Sloane Rangers and Spandau Ballet. But as industries collapsed, working-class communities buckled and the Labour Party tore itself apart, it was also an age of extraordinary acrimony. And when Argentine forces seized the Falklands, it seemed the final humiliation for a deeply divided country. 
 
Here are the early 1980s in all their gaudy glory: Chariots of Fire, Joy Division, the Austin Metro and Juliet Bravo; wine bars, Cruise missiles, the battle of Goose Green and the ZX Spectrum. And towering above them all, the most controversial Prime Minister in our modern history - the Iron Lady.

Who Dares Wins

Britain, 1979-1982

Sinclair McKay

In February 1945 the Allies obliterated the German city of Dresden. Bombs weighing over 1,000 lbs fell every seven and a half seconds and killing an estimated 25,000 people. But was Dresden a legitimate military target or a last act of mass murder in a war already won? 
 
In Dresden, bestselling author Sinclair McKay creates a vast canvas and brings it alive with touching human detail, from the history of the city to the attack itself through the eerie period of reconstruction. Impeccably researched and deeply moving, McKay uses never-before-seen sources to relate the untold stories of a city, its people and their triumph in the face of disaster.

Dresden

The Fire and the Darkness

Brendan Simms

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms' major new biography shows, Hitler's main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism, but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-semitism and his determination to secure the 'living space' and living standards necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States. 
 
Drawing on new sources, Brendan Simms traces the way in which Hitler's ideology emerged after the First World War. The United States and the British Empire were, in his view, models for Germany's own empire, similarly founded on appropriation of land, racism and violence. Hitler's aim was to create a similarly global future for Germany - a country seemingly doomed otherwise not just to irrelevance, but, through emigration and foreign influence, to extinction. His principal concern during the resulting cataclysm was not just what he saw as the clash between German and Jews, or German and Slav, but above all that between Germans and what he called the 'Anglo-Saxons'. In the end only dominance of the world would have been enough to achieve Hitler's objectives, and it ultimately required a coalition of virtually the entire world to defeat him. 
 
Brendan Simms's new book is the first to explain Hitler's beliefs fully, demonstrating how, as ever, it is ideas that are the ultimate source of the most murderous behaviour.

Hitler

Only the World Was Enough

In this gloriously colourful book, Dominic Sandbrook recreates the extraordinary period of the late 1970s in all its chaos and contradiction, revealing it as a decisive point in our recent history. Across the country, a profound argument about the future of the nation was being played out, not just in families and schools but in everything from episodes of Doctor Who to singles by the Clash. These years saw the peak of trade union power and the apogee of an old working-class Britain - but also the birth of home computers, the rise of the ready meal and the triumph of the Grantham grocer's daughter who would change our history forever.

Seasons in the Sun

Britain, 1974-1979

The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. The headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation. As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid the gloom, glittered a creativity and cultural dynamism that would influence our lives long after the nightmarish Seventies had been forgotten. 
 
In this brilliant new history, Dominic Sandbrook recreates the gaudy, schizophrenic atmosphere of the early Seventies: the world of Enoch Powell and Tony Benn, David Bowie and Brian Clough, Germaine Greer and Mary Whitehouse. An age when the unions were on the march and the socialist revolution seemed at hand, but also when feminism, permissiveness, pornography and environmentalism were transforming the lives of millions. It was an age of miners' strikes, tower blocks and IRA atrocities, but it also gave us celebrity footballers and high-street curry houses, organic foods and package holidays, gay rights and glam rock. 
 
For those who remember the days when you could buy a new colour television but power cuts stopped you from watching it, this book could hardly be more vivid. It is the perfect guide to a luridly colourful Seventies landscape that shaped our present from the financial boardroom to the suburban bedroom.

State of Emergency

Britain, 1970-1974

The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974

Susan Neiman

What can we learn from the past in order to move forward? 
 
Susan Neiman's Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman, who grew up as a white girl in the American South during the civil rights movement, is a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. In clear and gripping prose, she uses this unique perspective to combine philosophical reflection, personal history and conversations with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. 
 
Through focusing on the particularities of those histories, she provides examples for other nations, whether they are facing resurgent nationalism, ongoing debates over reparations or controversies surrounding historical monuments and the contested memories they evoke. It is necessary reading for all those confronting their own troubled pasts.

Learning from the Germans

Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil

Serhii Plokhy

In November 1943, with the outcome of the Second World War hanging in the balance, the Allies needed a new plan. The Americans' audacious suggestion to the Soviets was to open a second air front, with the US Air Force establishing bases in Soviet-controlled territory. Despite Stalin's obvious reservations about the presence of foreign troops in Russia, he was persuaded, and in early 1944 and Operation Baseball and then Frantic were initiated as B-17 Superfortresses were flown from bases in Italy to the Poltova region in today's Ukraine. 
 
Award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy tells the gripping, little-known story of this encounter between American and Soviet soldiers and how their collaboration quickly fell apart, mirroring the transition from the Grand Alliance to the Cold War. Soviet secret policemen watched over the Americans, shadowing their every move. A catastrophic air raid by the Germans revealed the limitations of Soviet air defences. As their initial enthusiasm turned into disappointment, the American soldiers started calling themselves the Forgotten Bastards of Ukraine. Ultimately, no common purpose could overcome their cultural and political differences. 
 
Drawing on newly opened Russian archives as well as CIA records, Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front offers a riveting bottom-up history one of the Second World War's most unlikely alliances.

Forgotten Bastards of the Eastern Front

An Untold Story of World War II

Peter Hennessy

Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain - and also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of 'Supermac' Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance. Above all, Having It So Good captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.

Having it So Good

Britain in the Fifties

The first volume of Hennessy's postwar history of Britain concerns an age dominated by the shadow of war. With the beginnings of the Cold War, the foundations of the new Europe and the granting of independence of former colonies, Britain was forced to negotiate a new place in the world. It was also a time of rationing and of rebuilding, marked by the founding of the NHS and the welfare state. This comprehensive history embraces both high politics and everyday experience. It recreates the mood of the time and tells us where people lived, how they worked and what they wore.

Never Again

Britain 1945-1951

Harold Macmillan - the presiding figure in Peter Hennessy's magnificent new history - famously said in 1960 that the wind of change was blowing over Africa and the remaining British Empire. But it was blowing over Britain too - its society; its relationship with Europe; its nuclear and defence policy. And where it was not blowing hard enough - the United Kingdom's economy - great efforts were made to wipe away the cobwebs of old industrial practices and poor labour relations. Life was lived in the knowledge that it could end in a single afternoon of thermonuclear exchange if the uneasy, armed peace of the Cold War tipped into a third world war. As with his acclaimed histories of British life in the two previous decades, Never Again and Having it so Good, Peter Hennessy explains the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of a nation with inimitable wit and empathy.

Winds of Change

Britain in the Early Sixties

Mark B. Smith

Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world. It is both European and exotic, powerful and weak, brilliant and flawed. Why are we so afraid of it? 
 
Time and again, we judge Russia by unique standards. We have usually assumed that it possesses higher levels of cunning, malevolence and brutality than other countries. Yet it has more often than not been a crucial ally, not least against Napoleon and in the two world wars. We admire its music and its writers. We lavish praise on the Russian soul. And still we think of Russia as a unique menace. What is it about this extraordinary country that consistently provokes such excessive responses? And why is this so dangerous? 
 
Mark B. Smith's remarkable new book is a history of this 'Russia Anxiety'. Whether Russia has been ally or enemy, superpower or failing state, it has always had a exceptional status in our imagination.

The Russia Anxiety

And How History Can Resolve It

Catherine Bailey

In September, 1944, the SS march into a remote Italian castle, arrest a mother and seize her two sons, aged just two and three. If Hitler has his way she will never see them again. For Fey Pirzio-Biroli is the daughter of Ulrich von Hassell, executed days before after the failed assassination of the Fuhrer. Mercilessly cast into the Nazi death machine, Fey must cling to the hope that one day she will escape and rescue her lost children . . .

Fey's War

The True Story of a Mother, her Missing Sons and the Plot to Kill Hitler

Mark Bostridge

Whether honoured and admired or criticized and ridiculed, Florence Nightingale has invariably been misrepresented and misunderstood. As the Lady with the Lamp, ministering to the wounded and dying of the Crimean War, she offers an enduring image of sentimental appeal and one that is permanently lodged in our national consciousness. But the awesome scale of her achievements over the course of her 90 years is infinitely more troubling - and inspiring - than this mythical simplification. 
 
 From her tireless campaigning and staggering intellectual abilities to her tortured relationship with her sister and her distressing medical condition, this vivid and immensely readable biography draws on a wealth of unpublished material and previously unseen family papers, disentangling the myth from the reality and reinvigorating with new life one of the most iconic figures in modern British history.

Florence Nightingale

The Woman and Her Legend: 200th Anniversary Edition

Orlando Figes

The Europeans is a richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband Louis. Their ambitious lives and complex loves were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous European cultural landscape that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change. This culture - through trains, telegraphs and printing - allowed artists of all kinds to exchange ideas and make a living, as they travelled across the whole continent from the British Isles to Imperial Russia. 
 
The Europeans is Orlando Figes' masterpiece. It describes huge changes through intimate details, little-known stories and through the lens of Turgenev and the Viardots' touching, strange love triangle. Events which we now see as central to European high culture are made completely fresh, allowing the reader to revel in the sheer precariousness with which the great salons, premieres and bestsellers came into existence.

The Europeans

Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

Thomas Penn

It is 1461 and England is crippled by civil war. One freezing morning, a teenage boy wins a battle in the Welsh marches, and claims the crown. He is Edward IV, first king of the usurping house of York... 
 
 Thomas Penn's brilliant new telling of the wars of the roses takes us inside a conflict that fractured the nation for more than three decades. During this time, the house of York came to dominate England. At its heart were three charismatic brothers - Edward, George and Richard - who became the figureheads of a spectacular ruling dynasty. Together, they looked invincible.. 
 
 But with Edward's ascendancy the brothers began to turn on one another, unleashing a catastrophic chain of rebellion, vendetta, fratricide, usurpation and regicide. The brutal end came at Bosworth Field in 1485, with the death of the youngest, then Richard III, at the hands of a new usurper, Henry Tudor. 
 
 The story of a warring family unable to sustain its influence and power, The Brothers York brings to life a dynasty that could have been as magnificent as the Tudors. Its tragedy was that, in the space of one generation, it destroyed itself.

The Brothers York

An English Tragedy

Antony Beevor

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER ON THE LAST DAYS OF THE THIRD REICH 
 
2025 marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Read and remember the history that led to this important moment. 
 
'Recounts, in harrowing detail and with formidable skill, the brutal death-throes of Hitler's Reich at the hands of the rampaging Red Army' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 
 
'An irresistibly compelling narrative, of events so terrible that they still have the power to provoke wonder and awe' Adam Sisman, Observer 
 
The Red Army had much to avenge when it finally reached the frontiers of the Reich in January 1945. Political instructors rammed home the message of Wehrmacht and SS brutality. The result was the most terrifying example of fire and sword ever known, with tanks crushing refugee columns under their tracks, mass rape, pillage and destruction. Hundreds of thousands of women and children froze to death or were massacred because Nazi Party chiefs, refusing to face defeat, had forbidden the evacuation of civilians. Over seven million fled westwards from the terror of the Red Army. 
 
Antony Beevor reconstructs the experiences of those millions caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich's final collapse, telling a terrible story of pride, stupidity, fanaticism, revenge and savagery ­- but also one of astonishing endurance, self-sacrifice and survival against all odds. 
 
'Makes us feel the chaos and the fear as if every drop of blood was our own . . . compellingly readable, deeply researched, and beautifully written' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Spectator 
 
'Brilliant. Combines a soldier's understanding of war's realities with a novelist's eye for detail' Orlando Figes, Sunday Times 
 
'Startling, chilling, compelling. Beevor's writing burns like a torch at night in a landscape of ruins'Literary Review 
 
'Powerful, diligently researched and beautifully written . . . even better than Stalingrad' Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday

Berlin

The Downfall 1945

Described by his creator as 'short, fat and primitive', Evert Bäckström is a rather unique homicide detective but he is undeniably the real deal with it comes to modern policing. 
 
This series is blackly comic, thrillingly compelling and utterly real.

Bäckström

CAMP GOLD

Caedmon Aisquith

Cairo Trilogy

Can You Solve the Murder?

Capital

Care Bears

Cartoon Kid

Cath Kidston

A crime-fiction series with a twist - private investigator Catherine Berlin, is a damaged soul struggling with a heroin addiction, but she still manages to do her best, even when her own neck is on the chopping block.

Catherine Berlin

Celeste Express

Central Intelligence

Chaos and Flame

Charles Hayden

Charles Paris Dramatisations

Charlie Bass

Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

Charlie and Lola

Cherry Blossoms After Winter

Chevalier

Chinese Cinderella

Life at Tanglewood isn't all sleepovers, picnics and beach parties. Cherry, Summer, Skye, Coco and Honey all face some tough life challenges in this delicious series from bestselling girls' favourite Cathy Cassidy. Every sister has a secret to share. Which one will be your favourite?

Chocolate Box Girls

Christmas

Chronicles of Vladimir Tod

Churchminister

Welcome inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, and learn how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.

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