Popular history writer Terry Deary takes us on a light-hearted and often humorous romp through the centuries with Mr & Mrs Peasant, recounting foul and dastardly deeds committed by the underclasses, as well as the punishments meted out by those on the ‘right side’ of the law. Discover tales of arsonists and axe-wielders, grave robbers and garroters...

Lacing tea with poison and slipping arsenic in to soup, this is what comes to mind we talk of murderesses of the Victorian age. Fuelled by a rumour-driven press and cases of notorious killers like Marry Ann Cotton, the Angel of Death, or Christiana Edmunds, the Chocolate Cream Killer, death by poisoning was a great anxiety of Victorian Britain. But what...

Eleanor of Provence was born in the province of her name in 1223. She has come to England at the age of twelve to marry the king, Henry III. He’s sixteen years older, but was a boy when he ascended the throne. He’s a kind, sensitive sort whose only personal attachments to women so far have been to his three sisters. The youngest of them is called Eleanor...

A ground-breaking work of narrative non-fiction that offers a dramatic new perspective on human history.

What was George Washington’s secret weapon during the American Revolution, and how did it lead to Britain colonising Australia? What protected Popes for centuries? And what does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? The answer to all these...

In this insightful new biography of Anne Lefroy, Judy Stove investigates the life of a writer who had a direct and undeniable influence on the life and works of Jane Austen. Jane shared some of her earliest writings with Anne who became a devoted confidant; it is believed that their friendship was an essential component in their creativity. As a...

Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over 500 million years of evolutionary history. It has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armour, and an even greater array of appendages since the time of its origin. In dinosaur fossils, skeletons are biological time capsules that tell us of lives we'll never see in the flesh...

From the Battle of Marathon to the Minotaur, from the Acropolis to Aristotle, from Theseus to the Theban hegemony, from slavery to Sparta, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece is a fascinating fully illustrated reference work, spanning both political history, society, wars, art, architecture, culture, philosophy and mythology. Covering the founding of the...

Binga is the definitive full-length biography of Jesse Binga, the first black banker in Chicago. Born into a large family in Detroit, Binga arrived in Chicago in 1892 in his late twenties with virtually nothing. Through his wits and resourcefulness, he rose to wealth and influence as a real estate broker, and in 1908 he founded the Binga Bank, the first...

Over the course of a year, Esther Rutter - who grew up on a sheep farm in Suffolk, and learned to spin, weave and knit as a child - travels the length of the British Isles, to tell the story of wool's long history here. She unearths fascinating histories of communities whose lives were shaped by wool, from the mill workers of the Border countries, to...

Warrior tells the story of forgotten man, a man whose bones were found in an Anglo-Saxon graveyard at Bamburgh castle in Northumberland. It is the story of a violent time when Britain was defining itself in waves of religious fervour, scattered tribal expansion and terrible bloodshed; it is the story of the fighting class, men apart, defined in life and...

Fleeing East from Nazi terror, over a million Polish Jews traversed the Soviet Union, many finding refuge in Muslim lands. Their story—the extraordinary saga of two thirds of Polish Jewish survivors—has never been fully told.

Author Mikhal Dekel’s father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern...

With a new world order emerging in the early 21st century, Chinese ground forces have been consistently improved and geared towards quality for costly main battle tanks, while still maintaining a huge number of cheaper AFVs. With 7,450 vehicles, China has today by far the largest number of armoured fighting vehicles of any army in the world. Modern Chinese...

Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose pioneering journalism paved the way for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she abhorred “objectivity shit” and wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. Her life, reportage, fiction and correspondence all reveal her passionate advocacy of social...

Stoicism offers rationally grounded, proven psychological techniques for the gradual development of consistent self-mastery, and emotional detachment from those elements of the human condition that tend to cause the most pervasive and unsettling forms of fear, anxiety, and avoidable disquiet. In the essays in A Life Worth Living, William Ferraiolo examines...

Introduction by Deborah Lipstadt, author of Denial

July 15, 1942, Wednesday
Remember this day; remember it well. You will tell generations to come. Since 8 o’clock today we have been shut away in the ghetto. I live here now. The world is separated from me and I’m separated from the world.

Renia is a young girl who dreams of becoming a poet. But Renia is...

When Victoria Hoffarth was at graduate school in the U.S., her lecturer, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, once told her class, “There are so many varied places in the world. It is incumbent upon us to search for one where we most fit.” Thus, despite having been born and brought up in the Philippines, Victoria never felt at home there. And so, she became a...

The Crusades shook the world. But why did they happen?

Their origins are revealed in a new light. As part of a medieval world war that stretched from Asia to Europe. At its centre was an ancient empire – Byzantium.

Told for the first time as a single, linked narrative are three great events that changed history: the fall of Byzantium in the eleventh...

The Stories of Classical Mythology Have Endured for 2500 Years.

The ancient Greeks, bedeviled by nearly unbearable adversities, struggled for 2500 years to define their cultural identity. In the end they prevailed, emerging from savage tribalism to become the world's first democracy and one of the greatest civilizations ever known.To help scale those...

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...

How can you speak up for someone accused of a savage murder?

Or sway a jury?

Or get a judge to drop a case?

"Gripping' - The Times

In this vivid memoir, England's most experienced murder case lawyer revisits his most notorious trials, from the murder of TV presenter Jill Dando, to the man given life because of an earprint, and the first British prosecution for...

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...

THE TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS FOR SUMMER

The inspiring true story of a father and son's fight to stay together and survive the Holocaust, for anyone captivated by The Cut Out Girl, The Choice and The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

'An extraordinary tale' The Times (Best Books of 2019)
___________

Where there is family, there is hope . . .

Vienna, 1939.

...

Who says you can't fight fascism in a cassock?

Whoever said that Christians had to be meek and mild hadn’t met Félix Kir – parish priest, French resistance hero and inventor of the Kir Royale. And they probably weren’t thinking of Archbishop Damaskinos who, when threatened with the firing squad by the Nazis, replied, ‘Please respect our traditions – in...

Lire Magazine Best Travel Book

Take four friends, put them on two Ural motorcycles (complete with sidecars), send them off on a 2,500-mile odyssey retracing history’s most famous retreat, add what some might consider an excessive amount of Vodka, and you’ve got Sylvain Tesson’sBerezina, a riotous and erudite book that combines travel, history, comradery, and...

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...

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...

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.

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 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...

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...