The first Plantagenet king inherited a blood-soaked kingdom from the Normans and transformed it into an empire that stretched at its peak from Scotland to Jerusalem. In this epic history, Dan Jones vividly resurrects this fierce and s...

The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England surveys the epic saga of England's monarchs, spanning ten great dynasties, from the invading Normans of 1066 to the House of Windsor today. Edited by noted historian Antonia Fraser, the boo...

Ms. Alexander has sensibly, and ably, concentrated on the characters and interactions of the men, as revealed in diaries and letters, and used her text as a frame for previously unpublished pictures by the expedition's Australian phot...

[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...

By the author of the internationally bestselling biography The Orientalist, The Black Count brings to life one of history's great forgotten heroes: a man almost unknown today yet with a personal story that is strikingly familiar.  Hi...

WASPs finally get their due in this stimulating history by one of the world's leading geneticists. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is the most illuminating book yet to be written about the genetic history of Britain and Ireland.

From the inimitable and bestselling author Thomas Cahill, another popular history, focusing on the Renaissance and Reformation and how this innovative period changed the Western world.  In Volume VI of his acclaimed Hinges of History...

On a visit to the British National Archive in 2001, Sonke Neitzel made a remarkable discovery: reams of meticulously transcribed conversations among German POWs that had been covertly recorded and recently declassified. Neitzel would ...

The buzz about the Guggenheim Bilbão aside, the Basques seldom get good press--from the 12th-century Codex of Calixtus ('A Basque or Navarrese would do in a French man for a copper coin') to current news items about ETA, the Basque n...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and Romania was a Communist backwater where "history had virtually stopped" since World War II. In Bucharest, Romania's capital, Kaplan discove...

Peter Ackroyd at his most magical and magisterial---a glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of Venice, the ultimate city.

What has happened in Poland? Poland has erupted four times in the last 25 years, but only the events of 1980 have had comprehensive media coverage. As a result, many questions have been raised in the minds of Western observers. How we...

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...

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...

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...

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...

January, 1649. After seven years of fighting in the bloodiest war in Britain’s history, Parliament had overpowered King Charles I and now faced a problem: what to do with a defeated king, a king who refused to surrender? Parliamenta...

Norman Brook was Cabinet Under Secretary during the Second World War and took personal, handwritten notes of the exchanges between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his ministers. The BBC gained exclusive access to his notebooks, a...

No one will argue with the fact that Ireland is a beautiful, enchanted place. But Ireland has a history more varied, turbulent, fascinating, and terrible than any other. From the first English presence in Ireland in the twelfth centur...

Some of the Americans in Weimar and then Hitler's Germany were merely casual observers, others deliberately blind; a few were Nazi apologists. But most slowly began to understand the horror of what was unfolding, even when they found ...

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 ...

In these first 25 episodes from the landmark BBC radio series, Martin Sixsmith brings his first-hand experience of reporting from Russia to this fascinating narrative, witnessing the critical moment when the Soviet Union finally lost ...

This biography of William Kidd reveals that he was actually a sea captain hired as a pirate hunter. Zacks evokes the seafaring world of the 18th century, and recounts the rivalry between Captain Kidd and his arch-nemesis, the all-but-...