The unforgettable story behind the most destructive day in British military history...

June, 1916: The Great War is locked in stalemate, deep lines of trenches and barbed wire carved into the French countryside.

Sitting in an occupied chateau, General von Soden knows that something cataclysmic is coming. The British have been shelling for days and he is...

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Famed adventure writer David Roberts retraces the route of the legendary Domínguez-Escalante expedition.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new...

Late in his life, former president Lyndon B. Johnson told a reporter that he didn’t believe the Warren Commission’s finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy. Johnson thought Cuban president Fidel Castro was behind it. After all, Johnson said, Kennedy was running “a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean,” giving Castro...

'We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go, Always a little further; it may be, Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow.'

If there was ever anyone who went a little further, a little beyond, it was Alastair MacKenzie. In a career spanning 30 years, MacKenzie served uniquely with the New Zealand Army in Vietnam, the British Parachute Regiment, the...

Was an advanced civilization lost to history in the global cataclysm that ended the last Ice Age? Graham Hancock, the internationally bestselling author, has made it his life's work to find out -- and in America Before, he draws on the latest archaeological and DNA evidence to bring his quest to a stunning conclusion.

We've been taught that North and South...

As a boy, Jon Day was fascinated by pigeons, which he used to rescue from the streets of London. Twenty years later he moved away from the city centre to the suburbs to start a family. But in moving house, he began to lose a sense of what it meant to feel at home.

Returning to his childhood obsession with the birds, he built a coop in his garden and joined a...

From the Samuel Johnson prize-winning author of Mao's Great Famine, a timely and compelling exploration of the cult of personality that surrounded eight twentieth century dictators

Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung, Ceausescu, Mengistu of Ethiopia and Duvalier of Haiti.

No dictator can rule through fear and violence alone. Naked power can...

Once a skinny and weak child, Gino Bartali rose to become a Tour de France champion and one of cycling's greatest stars. But all that seemed unimportant when his country came under the grip of a brutal dictator and entered World War II on the side of Nazi Germany. Bartali might have appeared a mere bystander to the harassment and hatred directed toward...

Explore 60 of the world's most extraordinary and mysterious archaeological structures and locations to uncover fascinating insights into mankind's early understanding of the cosmos. 

Many ancient, even prehistoric, monuments and temples around the world show an amazingly sophisticated understanding of the heavens. They reflect this sacred knowledge in...

During the 1990s, as New York was transformed from a crumbling city into a vibrant metropolis, the New York Mets were anything but vibrant. Beginning in 1999, the team waged a battle to recapture the hearts of New York baseball fans from their crosstown rivals, and they came closer to succeeding than anyone dared dream. At the same time, mayor Rudy...

Madame Marie Tussaud is known worldwide for the chain of wax museums she started over 200 hundred years ago. Less known is that her original wax models were often of the famous and infamous people she personally knew during and after the French Revolution. These were people like Voltaire, Robespierre, and Napoleon — people who changed the world. Even more...

Mount Uniacke, Acacia Grove, Winckworth, Saint's Rest, Spruce Tree Cottage. Ever wonder how Nova Scotia houses got their names? The better-known names are largely connected with prominent historical figures who resided in commodious homes with sprawling grounds, but the naming tradition was far more prevalent than that. In this book, the author explains...

When a man is tired of London he is tired of life…

The history of London is bound up with the infamous river that flows through its centre.

The Thames has witnessed the rise and fall of an Empire. The births and deaths of bloodthirsty rulers. And the rapid evolution of a thriving metropolis. It is both the giver of life to the city and the...

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A moving and uplifting history set to music that reveals the rich life of one of the first internationally renowned female violinists.

Spanning generations, from the shores of the Black Sea to the glittering concert halls of New York, The Nightingale's Sonata is a richly woven tapestry centered around violin virtuoso...

In the 19th century, most travel books about the United States were written by men, often producing lengthy works describing political, social, and economic aspects of American life.

There were also a small number of female travel writers, who tended to write more about the business of daily life, the precise subject that today’s readers want to know...

‘Facts are introduced with a cool intelligence and take us through Victoria’s 81 years with skill in selection and quotation. Precise, informative, well balanced in comment... All is admirably documented... Mullen and Munson give a perspective to Victoria’s life and times.’

The Sunday Times

‘I must say at once that I have enjoyed this new biography...

The Greatest Day in History charts the events leading up to Armistice Day 1918, the day the First World War finally came to an end. Everyone remembered where they were on 11 November 1918, from Marlene Dietrich in Berlin and Gandhi on his sick bed to Charles de Gaulle in a German prison camp.

Eamon de Valera was in Lincoln Gaol. The Kaiser was in...

The Middle Class is a canter through the history of the men and women who made modern Britain and who now, in greater numbers than ever, dominate the country. There are pauses to analyse their ideals, dreams, ambitions and tastes. The book opens with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and ends with Margaret Thatcher and her translation of middle-class values into...

Percy Sykes began his career with Army Intelligence in India. Their main concern was the threat to India of the Russian advances across Central Asia. In 1893 they sent Sykes into eastern Persia on the first of many expeditions. Always with his terrier and often with his sister or his wife, he rode over thousands of miles of unknown desert, marsh and...

The popular image of the Vikings is of tall red-headed men, raping and pillaging their way around the coast of Europe, stopping only to ransack monasteries and burn longships. But the violent Vikings of the 8th century became the pious Christians of the 11th century, who gave gold crosses to Christian churches and in whose areas of rule pagan idols were...

Sons of My Fathers, based on the true story of author Michael A. Simpson’s family, is a multi-generational journey that intertwines two dramatic stories set one hundred years apart—the heroic saga of 19-year-old Ulysses Simpson who, when "hell comes to Georgia," joins his father on a course of revenge, a path that will forever change the destiny of their...

From activist, Pussy Riot member and freedom fighter Maria Alyokhina, a raw, hallucinatory, passionate account of her arrest, trial and imprisonment in a penal colony in the Urals for standing up for what she believed in. 'One of the most brilliant and inspiring things I've read in years. Couldn't put it down. This book is freedom' Chris Kraus, author...

Just in time for what would’ve been Audrey Hepburn’s 90th birthday...
THE NEVER-BEFORE-TOLD STORY OF A REMARKABLE SURVIVOR WHO WENT ON TO BECOME AN ICON FOR THE AGES

The story of one of the most enduring and beloved stars Hollywood has ever produced -- Audrey Hepburn -- has been told again and again since her passing in 1993. An Amazon search of books with...

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A spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress.

For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn’t noticed a swollen black lymph...

'It shows the variety and depth of the men sent into harms way during World War II, something emphasised by the population of Stalag Luft III. Most of the Allied POWs were flyers, with all the technical, tactical and planning skills that profession requires. Such men are independent thinkers, craving open air and wide-open spaces, which meant than an...

From the Charge of the Light Brigade to Scott of the Antarctic and beyond, it seems as if glorious disaster and valiant defeat have been essential aspects of the British national character for the past two centuries. In this fascinating book, historian Stephanie Barczewski argues that Britain's embrace of heroic failure initially helped to gloss over the...

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann's dark and splendid social history reveals the nineteenth century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many...

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in...

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the...

When first opened to the public in 1853, New York's Crystal Palace created a sensation. Those who had seen London's Crystal Palace, the structure it was openly intended to emulate, argued that America's copy far surpassed it. Built in what is today Bryant Park, a four-acre site between 40th and 42nd Streets, the colossus of glass and steel indeed seemed...

Goodreads Choice Nominee Ralph Webster tells the true story of his grandmother’s desperate journey from her life at the Pensione Alexandra in Naples to America - after Mussolini and the Fascists join with Hitler - and as countries across the world close their doors to Jewish refugees fleeing the spread of Nazi evil.

In 1934, at age fifty-one, Elsa’s...

The untold story of how FDR did the unthinkable to save the American economy

The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that when, in a bid to pull the country out of depression and get people back to work, he depreciated the U.S. dollar in...

It’s 1943, and Captain Hook is at sea aboard a hijacked German U-boat.

Hook has heard all the Peter Pan-themed jokes about his name—he knows that humour can be an indispensable tool for survival in war. And now, as his crew embark on their most daring mission yet, they may need it more than ever.

The crew set off for the French port of La Rochelle, with the...

Sometimes, a snake is just a snake. And sometimes…

First-century Rome.

Senator Gaius Lucius Nerva is taken ill at a dinner party and dies a few days later. His heartbroken wife, Flavia, is told it was a natural death. Calidus, Nerva’s recently freed slave, suspects otherwise.

As he embarks upon the funeral ceremonies, Calidus becomes more and more...

The authors of such literary classics as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were extraordinary not only because they were successful female writers in Victorian England, but also because they were sisters.

Growing up, all three sisters’ writings were significantly influenced by each other, but perhaps most...

A “comprehensive history of Satan’s snuff” (GQ), Tim Madge’s critically acclaimed White Mischief: A Cultural History of Cocaine. This informative, intriguing and often challenging account provides an overview of changing attitudes toward cocaine, from the wonder cure when it was first discovered 150 years ago, right through to its champagne status today.

JFK: The Last Speech explores the dramatic relationship between two seminal Americans—President John F. Kennedy and the poet Robert Frost—which reached its tragic climax in a surprising encounter with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War.

Born out of these events is Kennedy’s remarkable speech about poetry and power, which alters...

Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West’s greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy…

Codenamed ‘Orphan’ by his Russian recruiter, Maclean was Britain’s most gifted traitor. But as he leaked huge amounts of top-secret intelligence, an international code-breaking operation was rapidly closing in on him...

History of Italy and the Balkans also includes descriptions of related countries such as the Papal States and Malta. In total the book presents the histories of fourteen states. 

These books are designed as companion texts and when read together will give readers a good understanding of the important personalities and their contributions to European...