Did you ever think there was something funny about Irish history? Turns out you were right. As the centenary of 1916 approaches, this book reveals the funny side of Ireland's story. Using hearsay, rumor, and some brilliant cartoons, w...

An ancient Scots law says that the head of any dead whale found on the Scottish coast automatically becomes the property of the king, and the tail the property of the queen. The Scots excel at elephant polo, a game usually played in t...

Longlisted for the Orwell PrizeNamed a Best Book of the Year by The Times (London), New Statesman (London), Daily Express (London), and Commonweal MagazineIn the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother ...

The war between Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union that raged between 1941 and 1945 was the ultimate confrontation between the two great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Unprecedented in the scale of the destructi...

2,000 years of history in one riveting afternoon A country both admired and feared, Germany has been the epicenter of world events time and again: the Reformation, both World Wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall. It did not emerge as a m...

A riveting account of how the Nazi Party came to power and how the failures of the Weimar Republic and the shortsightedness of German politicians allowed it to happen.Why did democracy fall apart so quickly and completely in Germany i...

If you want to discover the captivating history of Russia, then keep reading...Four captivating manuscripts in one book:Russian History: A Captivating Guide to the History of Russia, Including Events Such as the Mongol Invasion, the N...

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Victorian Era, then keep reading...When Queen Victoria stepped onto the throne of Great Britain and Ireland in 1837, gone were the days when the monarch had supreme authority over...

For seven decades, our understanding of World War II has been shaped by a standard narrative built on conventional wisdom, propaganda, the dramatic but narrow experiences of soldiers on the ground, and an early generation of historian...

"This magnificent love letter to Rome" (Stephen Greenblatt) tells the story of the Eternal City through pivotal moments that defined its history—from the early Roman Republic through the Renaissance and the Reformation to ...

"A deftly written history that reads as smoothly as a novel." — Midwest Book Review In life, the eleventh-century Irish king Brian Boru held the Vikings at bay; in death, he remains a towering presence in history and lege...

The Second World War might have officially ended in May 1945, but in reality it rumbled on for another ten years...The end of the Second World War in Europe is one of the twentieth century's most iconic moments. It is fondly remembere...

Neil MacGregor, the Director of the British Museum, looks at the world through the eyes of Shakespeare's audience by exploring objects from that turbulent period. Examining these objects, Neil discusses how Shakespeare's audiences und...

A Washington Post Best Book of the YearBerlin is a city of fragments and ghosts, a laboratory of ideas, the fount of both the brightest and darkest designs of history's most bloody century. The once arrogant capital of Europe was deva...

A remarkable look at day-to-day life of the codebreakers whose clandestine efforts helped win World War II Bletchley Park looked like any other sprawling country estate. In reality, however, it was the top-secret headquarters of Br...

The New York Times bestselling author of Bringing Down the House and The Accidental Billionaires tells his most incredible story yet: A true drama of obscene wealth, crime, rivalry, and betrayal from deep inside the world of billionai...

From the early fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth, the Anglo-Scottish borderlands witnessed one of the most intense periods of warfare and disorder ever seen in modern Europe. As a consequence of near-constant conflict bet...

The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morriss magnificent history of the British Empire from 1837 to 1965. Huge in scope and ambition, it is always personal and immediate, bringing the story vividly to life. Pax Britannica, the second vol...

Now in paperback, a meticulously researched historical tour de force about the secret ties among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Adolf Hitler before, during, and after World War II.Andrew Morton tell...

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sönke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of covertly recorded, meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs during World War II that recently had been declassif...

In the brutally cold winter of 1919, 5,000 Americans battled the Red Army 600 miles north of Moscow. We have forgotten. Russia has not. "AN EXCELLENT BOOK." --Wall Street Journal - "INCREDIBLE." -- John U. Bacon -...

Who was the most beautiful woman in England in the twentieth century – and why did she become the most hated woman? Who spent £2 million to remodel her house for a king's weekend visit? What country house has a roof that is seven a...

The dark story of Adolf Hitler's life in 1924--the year that made a monsterBefore Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, there was 1924. This was the year of Hitler's final transformation into the self-proclaimed savior and infallib...

A New York Times Bestseller for 12 weeks! "Helen Rappaport paints a compelling portrait of the doomed grand duchesses." --People magazine"The public spoke of the sisters in a gentile, superficial manner, but Rappaport c...

Borderland tells the story of Ukraine. A thousand years ago it was the center of the first great Slav civilization, Kievan Rus. In 1240, the Mongols invaded from the east, and for the next seven centureies, Ukraine was split between w...

In A History of the English Monarchy, historian Gareth Russell traces the story of the English monarchy and the interactions between popular belief, religious faith and brutal political reality that helped shape the extraordinary jour...

The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when they should have been anything but.In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasi...

A trip through Paris as it will never be again-dark and dank and poor and slapdash and truly bohemianParis, the City of Light, the city of fine dining and seductive couture and intellectual hauteur, was until fairly recently always ac...

Americans call the Second World War "The Good War." But before it even began, America's wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens-and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was fina...

A penetrating investigation into how the KGB rose from the ashes of the Soviet Union and reinvented itself at the heart of the Russian state during Vladimir Putin's rule