Russia's sheer size has made it difficult to mobilize resources and to govern effectively, especially given its harsh climate, vast and vulnerable borders, and the diversity of its people. In this Very Short Introduction, Geoffrey Hos...

In the winter of 1910, the river that brought life to Paris quickly became a force of destruction.  Torrential rainfall saturated the soil, and faulty engineering created a perfect storm of conditions that soon drowned Parisian stre...

"Dan Jones has an enviable gift for telling a dramatic story while at the same time inviting us to consider serious topics like liberty and the seeds of representative government." —Antonia FraserFrom the New York Times bestsellin...

Drawing on unpublished letters and rare primary sources, King and Woolmans tell the true story behind the tragic romance and brutal assassination that sparked World War I In the summer of 1914, three great empires dominated Europe: G...

History has always mattered to Scots, and rarely more so than now at the outset of a new century, after more than ten years of a new parliament and the new census of 2011. An almost limitless archive of our history lies hidden inside ...

[Read by James Langton]A meticulously researched historical tour de force in the style of the bestselling In the Garden of Beasts. Historian Andrew Morton's 17 Carnations combines his considerable research background with his proven t...

This searing yet beautiful firsthand account of the life and working the conditions of industrial workers in the north of England during the 1930s caused Orwell to ask why Socialism had so little appeal.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters, Caught in the Revolution is Helen Rappaport's masterful telling of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution through eye-witness accounts left by foreign nationals who s...

For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a...

Throughout the centuries, royal mistresses have been worshiped, feared, envied, and reviled. They set the fashions, encouraged the arts, and, in some cases, ruled nations. Eleanor Herman's Sex with Kings takes us into the throne rooms...

In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident— unsettling and unexplained causes of death, a strange final ...

Told in the first person by a woman who lived the hard life as a cook in a number of England's country houses, this is the true story of what life was really like below the stairsPeople talk about feeling as if the modern world is s...

A well-researched story recounts how explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew battled against almost insuperable odds to return to civilization after their ship Endurance sank near the South Pole in 1914. Read by Tim Piggott-Smith.

The Gulag - a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners - was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet com...

A history of England from 1810 to 1820, known as the Regency period. While his father declined into apparent madness at Windsor, George, Prince of Wales, served as Regent. This was the age of opulence at Carlton House and Brighton Pav...

"Wonderful… [Flanders] shines in her readings of literary novels containing criminal and detective elements, such as Oliver Twist, Mary Barton and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but can be sharp and very funny about the vagaries of...

The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July 16–17, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. This book gives a riveting day-by-day account of the last fourteen days of their lives, as the consp...

Dubbed the "pirate queen" by the Vatican and Spain's Philip II, Elizabeth I was feared and admired by her enemies. Extravagant, whimsical, and hot-tempered, Elizabeth was the epitome of power. Her visionary accomplishments were made p...

In the summer of 1913, under the cover of London's perpetual smoggy dusk, two brilliant minds are pitted against each other — a celebrated gentleman thief and a talented Scotland Yard detective — in the greatest jewel heist of the...

A best-selling historian considers Churchill's first speech before Parliament--a speech that transformed both Churchill and the nation he had come to lead. On May 13, 1940, Winston Churchill stood before the House of Commons to deliv...

"The rise and fall of Venice's empire is an irresistible story and [Roger] Crowley, with his rousing descriptive gifts and scholarly attention to detail, is its perfect chronicler."—The Financial Times  The New York Times...

The Zhivago Affair is the dramatic, never-before-told story—drawing on newly declassified files—of how a forbidden book became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.In May 1956, an Italian publishing ...

In May of 1956, an Italian publishing scout took a train to the Russian countryside to visit the country's most beloved poet, Boris Pasternak. He left concealing the original manuscript of Pasternak's much anticipated first novel, ent...

The reissue of Joseph and Frances Gies's classic bestseller on life in medieval villages.This new reissue of Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural pe...

Fans of Julian Fellowes' hit show can step back 100 years to the world of the pampered, privileged upper classes and take a look at exactly what goes on behind the magisterial doors of their favorite stately home Using the charact...

Set against the backdrop of the turbulent thirteenth century, a time of chivalry and crusades, poetry, knights, and monarchs comes the story of the four beautiful daughters of the count of Provence whose brilliant marriages made them ...

Frances Evelyn 'Daisy' Maynard was a renowned beauty when at the age of 18 she married Lord Brooke, heir to the Earl of Warwick. It was the wedding of the year, and what followed was a tempestuous and scandalous lifestyle lived in the...

"If ever there was a book to read in the company of a nice cuppa, this is it." -The Washington Post In the dramatic story of one of the greatest acts of corporate espionage ever committed, Sarah Rose recounts the fascinating...

Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight armchair travellers, tourists or anyone interested in history. No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so muc...

"Michael Farquhar doesn't write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin's smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it."—Gene Weingarten,...