A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy novels and is an ambassador for Wattpad, known as @agatharoza. Entwined is her first novel.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A.J. Cronin

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A. T. Emerald lives with her husband and baby daughter in Nottinghamshire. She discovered her love of writing in 2020 and has not shut up about enemies to lovers ever since. She loves iced matcha, torrid love confessions with knives pressed to throats (fictional, of course) and does not accept bills for any therapy her books might incur.

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

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J R Daeschner

When J. R. Daeschner first heard about 'shin kicking' he was intrigued. As an American who had lived in Britain for some time, he thought he knew a thing or two about the country. But he'd never come across this centuries-old 'sport', which had to be one of the most painful and infuriating ever invented. J. R. had to find out more, and soon discovered that Britain has dozens, if not hundreds, of similar acts of lunacy enshrined as traditions; strange-named events such as cheese rolling, gurning, bog snorkelling... True Brits is a funny and fascinating travel guide to Britain's oddest places. people and traditions. Readers can follow J. R. as he meets some of the great British eccentrics who involve themselves in a host of bizarre pastimes which include hurling themselves down a grassy cliff in pursuit of a cheese, coating themselves in prickly green burrs, hanging toast on trees and prancing around with reindeer antlers on their heads. In an attempt to understand why seemingly ordinary people do such extraordinarily strange things, J. R. talks to countless characters, watches them in action, and even participates in many of the events himself, encountering plenty of occupational hazards along the way.

True Brits

Stephen Clarke

Published in the 200th Anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo a witty look at how the French still think they won, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde. 
 
Two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, the French are still in denial. 
 
If Napoleon lost on 18 June 1815 (and that's a big 'if'), then whoever rules the universe got it wrong. As soon as the cannons stopped firing, French historians began re-writing history. The Duke of Wellington was beaten, they say, and then the Prussians jumped into the boxing ring, breaking all the rules of battle. In essence, the French cannot bear the idea that Napoleon, their greatest-ever national hero, was in any way a loser. Especially not against the traditional enemy – les Anglais. 
 
Stephen Clarke has studied the French version of Waterloo, as told by battle veterans, novelists, historians – right up to today's politicians, and he has uncovered a story of pain, patriotism and sheer perversion ...

How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

Sue Elliott

Steve Humphries

In association with the flagship BBC2 series. 
 
This is the story of the men and women of a truly remarkable generation. Born into a world still reeling from the earth-shattering events of the Great War, they grew up during the appalling economic depression of the 1930s, witnessed the globe tear itself apart again during the Second World War, and emerged from post-war austerity determined to create a new society for their children. 
 
It is the story of people who raised their families during the immense social upheaval of the Fifties and Sixties, as the world in which they had grown up changed inexorably. It is the story of the people who shaped the way we live now. 
 
Britain's Greatest Generation tells this multi-faceted story through the eye-witness accounts of those who were there, from Japanese prisoner of war Fergus Anckorn to Dame Vera Lynn, from Bletchley Park veteran Jean Valentine to Dad's Army creator Jimmy Perry, and from fighter pilot Tom Neil to the Queen's cousin Margaret Rhodes. Together their testimony creates a vivid, often deeply moving picture of an extraordinary epoch – and the extraordinary people who lived through it.

Voices of World War Two

Memories of the Last Survivors

Jonathon Green

The language of crime has a long and venerable history - in fact, the first collection of words specifically used by criminals, Hye-Way to the Spittel House, dates from as early as 1531. Jonathon Green is our national expert on slang, and in Crooked Talk he looks at five hundred years of crooks and conmen - from the hedge-creepers and counterfeit cranks of the sixteenth century to the blaggers and burners of the twenty-first - as well as the swag, the hideouts, the getaway vehicles and the 'tools of the trade'. Not to mention a substantial detour into the world of prisons that faced those unlucky enough to be caught by the boys in blue. 
 
If you have ever wondered when the police were first referred to as pigs, why prison guards became known as redraws, or what precisely the subtle art of dipology involves, then this book has all the answers.

Crooked Talk

Five Hundred Years of the Language of Crime

Natalie Livingstone

'It covers three centuries of high living, high politics and high drama [...] it is so fascinating' MEL SYKES 
_____________________________ 
A Sunday Times bestseller 
Five women. One house. One extraordinary history. 
 
Even today, Cliveden retains its royal mystique - it is where Meghan Markle and her mother spent the night before the royal wedding - but from its construction in the 1660s to its heyday in the 1960s, Cliveden has played host to a dynasty of remarkable and powerful women. 
 
Anna Maria, Elizabeth, Augusta, Harriet, and Nancy were five ladies who, over the course of three centuries, shaped British society through their beauty, personalities, and political influence. 
 
Restoration and revolution, aristocratic rise and fall, world war and cold war form the extraordinary backdrop against which their stories unfold. 
 
An addictive history of the period and an intimate exploration of the timeless relationships between people and place, The Mistresses of Cliveden is a story of sex, power and politics, and the ways in which exceptional women defy the expectations of their time.

The Mistresses of Cliveden

Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

Wibke Bruhns

In August 1944, Hans Georg Klamroth was executed for his part in the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler. Wibke Bruhns, his youngest daughter, was six years old at the time. Decades later, watching a documentary about the events of 20 July, images of her father in the Third Reich People's Court appeared on the screen - and she realises she never knew him. 
 
In My Father's Country, Bruhns tells of her search for her father. Returning to her ancestral home in Halberstadt, Northern Germany, she retraces her family's story from Kaiser Wilhelm to the end of World War Two, discovering old photographs, letters and diaries, which she uses to piece together a unique and unforgettable family epic.

My Father's Country

Gordon G. Chang

Nuclear Showdown published by Asia expert, Gordon Chang, was of the first books to exploire the full extent of the North Korean nuclear threat, its origins, international implications, and solutions. 
 
The United States is the mightiest nation in history, yet for six decades one of the world's weakest states has challenged the superpower and kept it at bay. Today, that country also threatens to change the course of human events with an act of unimaginable devastation. Nuclear Showdown analyses the failed society that has become the gravest threat to America and international order: North Korea. Chang's insightful book reveals the full horror of the crisis threatening to turn Asia into the world's next battleground. 
 
How can North Korea be stopped? No one seems to have an answer. For more than half a century, policymakers have failed when it comes to subjugating Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il. Nuclear Showdown proposes a solution that can defuse the standoff once and for all.

Nuclear Showdown

North Korea Takes On the World

Herbert Asbury

This classic history of crime tells how the Chicago underworld earned - and kept - its notorious reputation, from the time it was settled to the Prohibition days of the 1920s. Recounting the lives of such infamous early inhabitants as the original Mickey Finn and the mass murderer H. H. Holmes, it climaxes with the city's golden age of crime and a dramatic account of the careers of the biggest of the Big Shots - Big Jim Colosimo, Terrible Johnny Torrio, and the elusive Al Capone, revealing life as it was lived in the criminal districts and the infamous red light district where the brothels boasted opulence unheard of before or since. Rounded off with fascinating photographs and illustrations, this is one of the most detailed, reliable and readable accounts of the nether side of Chicago's first century.

The Gangs Of Chicago

Shimon Gibson

Here is the first archaeological evidence of the truth of the gospel stories to emerge in modern times. Unique about this site, is that it contains archaeological evidence that comes to us from the very time of the personalities and events described in the Gospels. For here is the largest ritual bathing pool ever found in the Jerusalem area, found indeed in the village where John the Baptist was born, showing unmistakable signs of ritual use in the first century AD and containing the earliest ever Christian art, depicting John the Baptist as well as the three crosses of the crucifixion. 
 
By using the forensic techniques available to the modern archaeologist Gibson - a working field archaeologist of the highest credentials - and his international team of experts will be able to draw information from the drawings, pottery, coins, bones, remains of a ritual fire, pieces of cloth etc found in the cave and, by matching these up with the contemporary literary sources, allow them to shed light on each other.This is a unique opportunity to build up a picture of the very first Christians, how they lived and even what they believed.As Gibson writes: 'By fitting together all the new archaeological facts with the basic historical information that has been available (sometimes even buried) in scholarly literature for a long time - I believe I am able to throw an amazing amount of light on the personality and mission of John the Baptist - the man, the prophet.Who was he? Where did he come from? What were his beliefs and what was the baptism all about?'

The Cave Of John The Baptist

Tim Pat Coogan

'The unofficial voice of modern Irish history' Economist 
 
When President of the Irish Republic Michael Collins signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, he remarked to Lord Birkenhead, 'I may have signed my actual death warrant.' In August 1922 at the height of the Irish Civil War, that prophecy came true - Collins was shot and killed by a fellow Irishman in a shocking political assassination. 
 
So ended the life of the greatest of all Irish nationalists, but his visions and legacy lived on. 
 
This authorative and comprehensive biography presents the life of a man who became a legend in his own lifetime, whose idealistic vigour and determination were matched only by his political realism and supreme organisational abilities. Coogan's biography provides a fascinating insight into a great political leader, whilst vividly portraying the political unrest in a divided Ireland, that can help to shape our understanding of Ireland's past, present and future. 
 
'There have been several other lives of Collins, but none has assembled such wealth of detail' Independent on Sunday

Michael Collins

A Biography

David Nobbs

As a small boy David Nobbs survived the Second World War unscathed, until his bedroom ceiling fell on him when the last bomb to be dropped on Britain by the Germans landed near his home. It was the nearest he came to the war, but National Service would later make him one of Britain's most reluctant soldiers. It was an unforgettable and often unpleasant experience. 
 
As a struggling writer, David was catapulted into the thrilling world of satire at the BBC when he rang THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS with a joke and got through to David Frost, who sent a taxi for the joke. He never looked back. His greatness as a modern comic writer was confirmed by the publication of THE FALL AND RISE OF REGINALD PERRIN, which he adapted into the immensely successful television series that has entered the fabric of British cultural life, through phrases, images and brilliant humour. 
 
A mesmerising, beautifully told tale of life in writing and comedy, I DIDN'T GET WHERE I AM TODAY is the hilarious, poignant and very personal story of David Nobbs' life, which also describes some of the most famous comedians of the last century and captures a golden age of British television.

I Didn't Get Where I Am Today

Nigel McCrery

A moving narrative history of the professional footballers who fought and died in World War I, with a foreword by Gary Lineker. 
 
In 1914, as today, successful footballers were heroes and role models. They were the sporting superstars of their time; symbols of youth, health and vigour. Naturally enough, when war broke out they felt it was their duty to join up and fight. Between 1914 and 1918, 213 professional players fell in action. Some teams lost half their players, either killed or else so badly injured in mind and body that they were never to play again. 
 
 The Final Season is the powerfully moving account of these young men who swapped the turf of the pitch and the cheers of the fans for the freezing mud of the battlefield and the terrible scream of shell fire. It follows them as they leave their fans and families behind, undergo training and then travel on to the bloody arenas of war: Ypres, Gallipoli, the Somme, Passchendaele. 
 
Nigel McCrery paints these men in vivid detail. From their achievements on the football pitch to their heroic conduct on the battlefield, we will learn of the selfless courage and determination they displayed in the face of adversity. For far too many, we will also learn when, and how, they made the ultimate sacrifice.

The Final Season

The Footballers Who Fought and Died in the Great War

Peter Caddick-Adams

Peter Caddick-Adams - one of the leading military historians of his generation - reviews one of the great final engagements of WW2: The Battle of the Bulge. Including specially commissioned maps, black and white photography, archive material and personal interviews, this is a riveting landmark study of a pivotal historical moment and perfect for readers of James Holland, John Keegan, Anthony Beevor and Max Hastings. 
 
'A thought-provoking and compelling account of one of the most iconic battles of the Second World War. Brilliant' -- James Holland 
'Caddick-Adams knows more about the Bulge than any other historian I have read...I admire his originality...Snow and Steel offers an authoritative narrative of the drama...' -- Max Hasting, The Sunday Times 
'An encyclopaedic and eminently readable book' -- Times Literary Supplement 
'A compelling read' -- ***** Reader review 
'The definitive Bulge history' -- ***** Reader review 
'Absolutely brilliant book' -- ***** Reader review 
'Brilliant read. Captivating and informative' -- ***** Reader review 
'Excellent, authoritative and very well written' -- ***** Reader review 
******************************************************************************************** 
Snow and Steel is a huge reassessment of Hitler's last great throw of the dice: 'The Battle of the Bulge', the battle for the Ardennes from 16 December 1944 to 25 January 1945. 
 
This is an utterly fascinating five weeks when for a time it looked like Hitler had outflanked the allied armies pushing toward the Rhine and might just throw them back to the Normandy beaches. It is also the context for the catastrophic events at Bastogne depicted so graphically in Band of Brothers. 
 
 For military history fans this is one of those touchstone battles of World War Two, written by an author with a world-wide reputation. 
 
With specially commissioned maps, photographs, primary archival material and personal interviews, this is a truly controversial, commercial and landmark book.

Snow and Steel

Battle of the Bulge 1944-45

Isobel Charman

During the First World War three quarters of a million British people died – a figure so huge that it feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people's day-to-day lives. We resort to looking at the war from a distance, viewing its events in terms of their political or military significance. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is different. Like the all-star ITV series it accompanies, it immerses the reader in the everyday experiences of real people who lived through the war. Using letters, diaries, and memoirs – many of which have never previously been published – Isobel Charman has painstakingly reconstructed the lives of people such as separated newly-weds Alan and Dorothy Lloyd, plucky enlisted factory-worker Reg Evans and proudly independent suffragist Kate Parry Frye. A century on, they here tell their stories in their own words, offering a uniquely personal account of the conflict. 
 
The Great War: The People's Story is both a meticulously researched piece of narrative history and a deeply moving remembrance of the extraordinary acts of extremely ordinary people.

The Great War

A Nation's Story

The People's Story (Official TV Tie-In)

The entertaining biography of Edward VII and his playboy lifestyle, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde. 
 
Despite fierce opposition from his mother, Queen Victoria, Edward VII was always passionately in love with France. 
 
He had affairs with the most famous Parisian actresses, courtesans and can-can dancers. He spoke French more elegantly than English. He was the first ever guest to climb the Eiffel Tower with Gustave Eiffel, in defiance of an official English ban on his visit. He turned his French seduction skills into the diplomatic prowess that sealed the Entente Cordiale. 
 
A quintessentially English king? Pas du tout! Stephen Clarke argues that as 'Dirty Bertie', Edward learned all the essentials in life from the French.

Dirty Bertie: An English King Made in France

Richard Littlejohn

‘Littlejohn’s large-hearted nostalgia and aggression tempered with humour, remain a necessary tonic.’ The Times 
 
Born when wartime rationing was still in force and children ran free and wild, the world in which Richard Littlejohn grew up feels like it could be another country, let alone another century. 
 
In Littlejohn’s Lost World, he goes in search of his old childhood haunts - and instead finds an England changed beyond recognition. From the covered market that is now a 30-storey Dubai-style tower block to his old primary school, where today twelve different languages are spoken. 
 
From Muffin the Mule to Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival, Littlejohn takes us on a funny and poignant journey to a time and a place we will never see again. 
 
'His is the story of millions of others. If you, like him, feel that world has vanished forever, then you will find it vividly recreated in this captivating memoir.' Daily Mail

Littlejohn's Lost World

Henry Hemming

From the author of the Sunday Times bestseller, M: Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster 
 
In the World War II era, Geoffrey Pyke was described as one of the world's great minds. An inventor, adventurer and polymath, he was an unlikely hero of both world wars. He earned a fortune on the stock market, founded an influential pre-school, and is seen as the father of the U.S. Special Forces. 
 
In 1942, he convinced Winston Churchill to build an aircraft carrier out of reinforced ice. He escaped from a German WWI prison camp, wrote a bestseller, and aided Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. He even launched a private attempt to avert the outbreak of the Second World War by sending into Nazi Germany a group of pollsters disguised as golfers. 
 
And he may have been a Russian spy. 
 
70 years after his death, Henry Hemming reveals Pyke's astonishing story in full: his brilliance, his flaws, and his life of adventures, ideas, and secrets.

Churchill's Iceman

The True Story of Geoffrey Pyke: Genius, Fugitive, Spy

Pamela Cox

Annabel Hobley

‘[Go] behind the glamorous shop fronts and the glitzy shop floors of Britain’s department stores... Here the hidden history is revealed.’ Saga Magazine 
 
Meet the shopgirls and hear their incredible true stories of life behind the counter. 
 
In this lively and colourful history, we join shopgirl Chili Bouchier on her journey from the small ladies’ department at Harrods to star of the silver screen, and experience the raw courage of John Lewis’ Miss Austin during the Blitz in the West End. We follow Margaret Bondfield as she goes undercover, fiercely championing the rights of her fellow shopgirls; and stand alongside the impoverished interwar chain store assistants who stole stockings to supplement their meagre wages. And we celebrate with the art school entrepreneurs who kick-started the boutique movement of the swinging ’60s and made the shop floor their own. 
 
Here, these wonderful tales of friendship, hardship and triumph are revealed as never before. 
 
For fans of nostalgic history and memoir, including Call the Midwife; Mollie Moran's Aprons and Silver Spoons; and The Sugar Girls

Shopgirls

True Stories of Friendship, Hardship and Triumph From Behind the Counter

The True Story of Life Behind the Counter

Alexander Lee

Featuring the beauties of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, combined with the dark and hidden side of the Renaissance, by an acclaimed historian and expert in the period. 
 
Renowned as an age of artistic rebirth, the Renaissance is cloaked with an aura of beauty and brilliance. But behind the Mona Lisa’s smile lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity and corruption that has more in common with the present day than anyone dares to admit. Enter a world of corrupt bankers, greedy politicians, sex-crazed priests, rampant disease, and lives of extravagance and excess. Enter the world of the ugly Renaissance. 
 
Uncovering the hidden realities beneath the surface of the period’s best-known artworks, historian Alexander Lee takes the reader on a breathtaking and unexpected journey through the Italian past and shows that, far from being the product of high-minded ideals, the sublime monuments of the Renaissance were created by flawed and tormented artists who lived in an ever-expanding world of bigotry and hatred. The only question is: will you ever see the Renaissance in quite the same way again?

The Ugly Renaissance

Barry Turner

Tony Rennell

Compelling and moving real-life accounts of the impact on family life of the return of the troops at the end of the Second World War. 
 
Summer 1945. Britain was in jubilant mood. At last, the war was over. Soon the men would be coming home. Then everything would be fine: life would get back to normal. 
 
Or would it? Six long years of war had profoundly changed family life. For years, Dad had been a khaki figure in a photograph on the wall, a crumpled letter from overseas, an occasional visitor on weekend leave. Now he was here to stay, a stranger in a group that had learned to live without him - and was not always prepared to have him back. 
 
Most homecomings were joyful, never-to-be-forgotten moments of humour and hope. Others were hard. And there was no one to deal with the tears and the trauma. 
 
It would take hope and courage for families to live and love together again.

When Daddy Came Home

How War Changed Family Life Forever

A crime scene. A murder. A mystery. 
 
The most important person on the scene? The forensic scientist. And yet the intricate details of their work remains a mystery to most of us. 
 
Silent Witnesses looks at the history of forensic science over the last two centuries, during which time a combination of remarkable intuition, painstaking observation and leaps in scientific knowledge have developed this fascinating branch of detection. Throwing open the casebook, it introduces us to such luminaries as 'The Wizard of Berkeley' Edward Heinrich, who is credited with having solved over 2000 crimes, and Alphonse Bertillon, the French scientist whose guiding principle 'no two individuals share the same characteristics' became the core of identification. Along the way, it takes us to India and Australia, Columbia and China, Russia, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. And it proves that, in order to solve ever more complicated cases, science must always stay one step ahead of the killer.

Silent Witnesses

Charlie Richardson

Charlie Richardson, one of Britain's most notorious gangland bosses, sheds light on his extraordinary life story completed just weeks before his death in September 2012. 
 
Notorious Charlie Richardson was the most feared gangster in 1960s London. Boss of the Richardson Gang and rival of the Krays, to cross him would result in brutal repercussions. Famously arrested on the day England won the World Cup in 1966, his trial heard he allegedly used iron bars, bolt cutters and electric shocks on his enemies. 
 
The Last Gangster is Richardson’s frank account of his largely untold life story, finished just before his death in September 2012. He shares the truth behind the rumours and tells of his feuds with the Krays for supremacy, undercover missions involving politicians, many lost years banged up in prison and reveals shocking secrets about royalty, phone hacking, bent coppers and the infamous black box. 
 
Straight up, shocking and downright gripping, this is the ultimate exposé on this legendary gangster and his extraordinary life.

The Last Gangster

My Final Confession

Al Murray

Al Murray's (AKA The Pub Landlord) musing on his childhood where his fascination with history and all things war began. 
 
Have you ever watched a film with someone who, at the most dramatic scene, argues that the plane on screen hasn't been invented yet? Or that the tank rumbling towards the hero at the end of the film is the wrong tank altogether? 
 
Al Murray is that someone. Try as he might, he can’t help himself. 
 
Growing up in the 1970s, Al, with the help of his dad, became fascinated with the history of World War Two. They didn’t go to football; they went to battlefields. Because like so many of his generation whose childhood was all about Airfix, Action Man and Where Eagles Dare, he grew up in the cultural wake of the Second World War. 
 
Part memoir, part life obsession, this is Al Murray musing on what he knows best. And he’s sure to tell you things about history that you were never taught at school.

Watching War Films With My Dad

Allan Williams

The story of the photographic intelligence work undertaken from a country house at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire, is one of the great lost stories of the Second World War . 
 
At its peak in 1944, almost 2,000 British and American men and women worked at the top-secret Danesfield House, interpreting photographs - the majority stereoscopic so they could be viewed in 3D - to unlock secrets of German military activity and weapons development. Millions of aerial photographs were taken by Allied pilots, flying unarmed modified Spitfires and Mosquitos on missions over Nazi Europe. it was said that an aircraft could land, the photographs be developed and initial interpretation completed within two hours - marking the culmination of years of experiments in aerial intelligence techniques. 
 
Their finest hour began in 1943, during the planning stages of the Allied invasion of Europe, when Douglas Kendall, who masterminded the interpretation work at Medmenham, led the hunt for Hitler's secret weapons. Operation Crossbow would grow from a handful of photographic interpreters to the creation of a hand-picked team, and came to involve interpreters from across the Medmenham spectrum, including the team of aircraft specialists led by the redoubtable Constance Babington Smith. In November that year, whilst analysing photographs of Peenemunde in northern Germany, they spotted a small stunted aircraft on a ramp. This intelligence breakthrough linked the Nazi research station with a growing network of sites in northern France, where ramps were being constructed aligned not only with London, but targets throughout southern Britain. 
 
Through the combined skill and dedication of the Crossbow team and the heroism of the Allied pilots, throughout late 1943 and 1944 V-weapon launch sites were located and through countermeasures destroyed, saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and changing the course of the war. 
 
Operation Crossbow is a wonderful story of human endeavour and derring-do, told for the first time.

Operation Crossbow

The Untold Story of the Search for Hitler’s Secret Weapons

Michael Williams

In the seven decades since the darkest moments of the Second World War it seems every tenebrous corner of the conflict has been laid bare, prodded and examined from every perspective of military and social history. 
 
But there is a story that has hitherto been largely overlooked. It is a tale of quiet heroism, a story of ordinary people who fought, with enormous self-sacrifice, not with tanks and guns, but with elbow grease and determination. It is the story of the British railways and, above all, the extraordinary men and women who kept them running from 1939 to 1945. 
 
Churchill himself certainly did not underestimate their importance to the wartime story when, in 1943, he praised ‘the unwavering courage and constant resourcefulness of railwaymen of all ranks in contributing so largely towards the final victory.’ 
 
And what a story it is. 
 
The railway system during the Second World War was the lifeline of the nation, replacing vulnerable road transport and merchant shipping. The railways mobilised troops, transported munitions, evacuated children from cities and kept vital food supplies moving where other forms of transport failed. Railwaymen and women performed outstanding acts of heroism. Nearly 400 workers were killed at their posts and another 2,400 injured in the line of duty. Another 3,500 railwaymen and women died in action. The trains themselves played just as vital a role. The famous Flying Scotsman train delivered its passengers to safety after being pounded by German bombers and strafed with gunfire from the air. There were astonishing feats of engineering restoring tracks within hours and bridges and viaducts within days. Trains transported millions to and from work each day and sheltered them on underground platforms at night, a refuge from the bombs above. Without the railways, there would have been no Dunkirk evacuation and no D-Day. 
 
Michael Williams, author of the celebrated book On the Slow Train, has written an important and timely book using original research and over a hundred new personal interviews. 
 
This is their story.

Steaming to Victory

How Britain's Railways Won the War

Alex Kershaw

_______________________ 
The true story behind the hit NETFLIX drama 
 
From the invasion of Italy to the gates of Dachau, no World War II infantry unit in Europe saw more action or endured worse than the one commanded by Felix Sparks. 
 
The US Army 157th regiment, known as the Thunderbirds, drew many of its men from more than fifty different Native American tribes, mixed in with Mexican-Americans and men more used to herding cattle in the American southwest. Felix Sparks, tasked with leading the diverse regiment regarded by generals as one of the US's finest fighting forces, was a maverick officer, and the only man to survive his company's wartime odyssey from bitter beginning to victorious end. 
 
Here, his remarkable true story is told for the first time, along with those of the men who bravely fought alongside him. 
_______________________ 
'Exceptional....The Liberator balances evocative prose with attention to detail and is a worthy addition to vibrant classics of small-unit history like Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers' Wall Street Journal 
 
'A revealing portrait of a man who led by example and suffered a deep emotional wound with the loss of each soldier under his command ... The Liberator is a worthwhile and fast-paced examination of a dedicated officer navigating - and somehow surviving - World War II.' Washington Post 
 
'A history of the American war experience in miniature, from the hard-charging enthusiasm of the initial landings to the clear-eyed horror of the liberation of the concentration camps.' The Daily Beast 
 
'Kershaw has ensured that individuals and entire battles that might have been lost to history, or overshadowed by more 'important' people and events, have their own place in the vast, protean tale of World War II ... Where Kershaw succeeds, and where The Liberator is at its most riveting and satisfying, is in its delineation of Felix Sparks as a good man that other men would follow into Hell - and in its unblinking, matter-of-fact description, in battle after battle, of just how gruesome, terrifying and dehumanizing that Hell could be.' Time

The Liberator

One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey From the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau

Michael Dobbs

From the bestselling author of One Minute to Midnight, this is the riveting story of the last six months of World War II, when the hopeful Allied situation inspired by the Yalta Conference descended into the open conflict that would lead to the Cold War. 
 
When FDR, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin gathered outside the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945, they had Hitler's armies on the run, and victory was just a matter of time. Their mission was to forge the decisions that would shape the postwar world, and above all to divide up Europe between Soviet and Western influence. These men had been fighting side by side for nearly four years but the cracks in their alliance were emerging; even before the Second World War ended, another conflict was beginning. 
 
Six Months captures this turning point of the twentieth century, re-creating the steady breakdown in relations between powers. While the Berlin airlift and the Iron Curtain would not arrive for three years, by August 1945 the West and the Soviet Union were firmly on the path to a Cold War. Michael Dobbs brilliantly renders the personalities and geopolitics that drove this descent, illuminating the aims and frustrations of the key leaders. This is a vivid story of power, personalities, and national interests competing at a crucial moment in history.

Six Months in 1945

FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman – from World War to Cold War

Max Decharne

Over seven centuries London has changed dramatically - from walled medieval settlement to bustling modern metropolis. But throughout its history there has been one inescapable constant: murder. It winds through the heart of the capital as surely as the River Thames. 
 
Capital Crimes tells the story of crime and punishment in the city, &shy;from the killing of infamous 'questmonger' Roger Legett during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 through to the hanging of Styllou Christofi in 1954. Along the way we encounter such shocking characters as railway murderer Franz Muller, the ‘baby farmers’ of Finchley and the notorious political assassin John Bellingham. Some are well known, some obscure; the lives and fates of all, however, have much to tell us, providing a glimpse into the workings of London’s mysterious underworld and reminding us that dark deeds are not so far removed from everyday life as we would perhaps like to believe.

Capital Crimes

Seven Centuries of London Life and Murder

Diane Atkinson

Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, poet and pamphleteer. Her good looks and wit attracted many male admirers, first her husband, the Honourable George Norton, and then the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. 
 
After years of simmering jealousy, George Norton accused Caroline and the Prime Minister of a ‘criminal conversation’ (adultery) resulting in a trial referred to as ‘the scandal of the century’. 
 
Cut off and bankrupted by George Norton, she went on to become one of the most important figures in changing the law for wives and mothers.

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

Simon Elmes

It’s now ninety years since the BBC made its first broadcast and the British love affair with radio began. 
 
This book is a journey through that fascinating history and a celebration of the many wonderful voices that were part of it: Marion Cran, who pioneered the first gardening programme in the 1920s; The Goons and Kenneth Horne, comedy greats of the 1950s; John Peel, Alan Freeman, Kenny Everett and other heroes of the pirate stations; all the way up to Eddie Mair, Fi Glover and Danny Baker, the much-loved voices of today. 
 
A delightful blend of insight, history and nostalgia, Hello Again will appeal to any radio aficionado.

Hello Again

Nine decades of radio voices

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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