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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

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

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Joby Warrick

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Black Flags, the harrowing true story of the mission to find and destroy Syria's chemical weapons and defeat ISIS - only to lose control of both. 
 
'Presents [the story] sharply and compellingly' Washington Post 
'Excellent' Independent 
 
In August 2012, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was clinging to power in a vicious civil war. Concerned that Assad might resort to chemical weapons, the international community warned that any such use would cross "a red line", warranting a military response. When a year later Assad bombed the Damascus suburb of Ghouta with sarin gas, killing hundreds, global leaders were torn between living up to their word and becoming mired in another unpopular Middle Eastern war. So when Russia offered to store Syria's chemical weapons, the world leaped at the solution. 
 
So begins a race to find, remove, and destroy 1,300 tons of chemical weapons in the middle of Syria's civil war. Told in harrowing detail, the initial effort is a tactical triumph for the West, but soon Russia's long game becomes clear: it has UN cover to assist Assad's regime. Meanwhile, the territory gains of ISIS further destabilise the country, and the terrorist organisation seeks to secure Syria's chemical arsenals for itself, with horrifying consequences. 
 
Red Line is a classic Joby Warrick true-life thriller: a character-driven narrative with a cast of heroes and villains, including weapons hunters, politicians, commandos, diplomats, and spies. Through original reporting and eyewitness accounts from direct participants, Joby Warrick reveals how a well-intentioned effort to save Syrian lives became swept up in a calamitous chain of events that would spawn a terrorist movement, unleash torrents of refugees, frustrate two U.S. presidents and empower the Western alliance's most dangerous foes.

Red Line

The Unravelling of Syria and the Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World

David Hepworth

The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times. 
 
The resulting fusion of American can-do and British fuck-you didn’t just lead to rock and roll’s most resonant music. It ushered in a golden era when a generation of kids born in ration card Britain, who had grown up with their nose pressed against the window of America’s plenty, were invited to wallow in their big neighbour’s largesse. 
 
It deals with a time when everything that was being done - from the Beatles playing Shea Stadium to the Rolling Stones at Altamont, from the Who performing their rock opera at the Metropolitan Opera House to David Bowie touching down in the USA for the first time with a couple of gowns in his luggage - was being done for the very first time. 
 
Rock and roll would never be quite so exciting again.

Overpaid, Oversexed and Over There

How a Few Skinny Brits with Bad Teeth Rocked America

Selma van de Perre

Selma van de Perre was seventeen when the Second World War began. Until then, being Jewish in the Netherlands had been of no consequence. But by 1941 it was a matter of life or death. Several times, Selma avoided being rounded up by the Nazis. Then, in an act of defiance, she joined the Resistance movement, using the pseudonym Margareta van der Kuit. For two years 'Marga' risked it all. Using a fake ID, and passing as Aryan she travelled the country delivering newsletters, sharing information, keeping up morale  - doing, as she later said, what 'had to be done'. In July 1944 her luck ran out. She was transported to Ravensbrück women's concentration camp as a political prisoner. Unlike her parents and sister - who, she later discovered, died in other camps - she survived by using her alias. It was only after the war ended that she was allowed to reclaim her identity and dared to say once again: My name is Selma. Now, at ninety-nine, Selma remains a force of nature. Full of hope and courage, this is her story in her own words.

My Name Is Selma

The remarkable memoir of a Jewish Resistance fighter and Ravensbrück survivor

Paul Ham

'Outstanding . . . thought-provoking, readable and informative' Soldier 
 
One hundred years on... 
 
On 18 July 1917, a heavy artillery barrage was unleashed by the Allied forces against an entrenched German army outside the town of Ypres. it was to be the opening salvo of one of the most ferociously fought and debilitating encounters of the First World War. 
 
Few battles would encapsulate the utter futility of the war better that what became known as the Battle of Passchendaele. By the time the British and Canadian forces finally captured Passchendaele village on 6 November, the Allies had suffered over 271,000 casualties and the German army over 217,000. 
 
Passchendaele: Requiem for Doomed Youth shows how ordinary men on both sides endured this constant state of siege, with a very real awareness that they were being gradually, deliberately felled. Here, Paul Ham tells the story of an army caught in the grip of an extraordinary power struggle – both global and national. As Prime Minister Lloyd George and Commander Haig’s relationship deteriorated beyond repair, so a terrible battle of attrition was needlessly and painfully prolonged. 
 
Ham lays down a powerful challenge to the ways in which we have previously seen this monumental battle. Through an examination of the culpability of governments and military commanders in a catastrophe that destroyed the best part of a generation, Paul Ham argues that Passchendaele, far from being a breakthrough moment, was the battle that nearly lost the Allies the war. 
 
‘Paul Ham brings new tools to the job, unearthing fresh evidence of a deeply disturbing sort. He has a magpie eye for the telling detail.’ Ben Macintyre, The Times

Passchendaele

The Bloody Battle That Nearly Lost The Allies The War

Jane Robinson

It is a myth that either of the World Wars liberated women. 
 
The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 was one of the most significant pieces of legislation in modern Britain. It marked at once political watershed and a social revolution; the point at which women of 21 and over were recognised in law as being as competent as men. But were they? What actually happened when this bill was passed? This is the story of what happened next. 
 
Ladies Can't Climb Ladders focuses on the lives of six women - six pioneers - forging paths in the fields of medicine, law, academia, architecture, engineering and the church. Robinson's startling study into the public and private lives of these women sheds light not on the desires and ambitions of her subjects but how family and society responded to the working woman and what their legacy looks like today. 
 
This book is written in their honour. It is a book about live subjects: equal opportunity, the gender pay gap, and whether women can expect, or indeed deserve, to have it at all. 
'An important and crackingly good read.' - Telegraph

Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders

The Pioneering Adventures of the First Professional Women

Sophy Roberts

Siberia's history is traditionally one of exiles, bitter cold and suffering. Yet there is another tale to tell. Dotted throughout this remote landscape are pianos created during the boom years of the nineteenth century. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos travelled into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is remarkable. That they might still be capable of making music in such a hostile landscape is nothing less than a miracle. 
 
The Lost Pianos of Siberia is an absorbing story about a piano hunt - a quixotic journey through two centuries of Russian history and eight time zones stretching across an eleventh of the world's land surface. It reveals not only an unexpected musical legacy, but profound humanity in the last place on earth you might expect to find it.

The Lost Pianos of Siberia

A Sunday Times Paperback of 2021

A Sunday Times Book of 2020

Eddy de Wind

Eddy de Wind, a Dutch doctor and psychiatrist, was shipped to Auschwitz with his wife Friedel in 1943. They made it through the brutal selection process and were put to work. Each day, each hour became a battle for survival. For Eddy, this meant negotiating with the volatile guards in the medical barracks. For Friedel, it meant avoiding the Nazis' barbaric medical experiments. As the end of the war approached the Nazis fled, taking many prisoners with them. Eddy hid under a pile of old clothes and stayed behind. Finding a notebook and pencil, he began to write with furious energy about his experiences. Last Stop Auschwitz is the result - an extraordinary account of life as a prisoner, a near real-time record of the struggle to survive but also of the flickering moments of joy Eddy and Friedel found in each other. Documenting the best and the worst of humanity, it is a unique and timeless story that reminds us of what we as humans are capable of, but that there is hope, even in Hell.

Last Stop Auschwitz

My story of survival from within the camp

Hallie Rubenhold

SOON TO BE STREAMED ON NETFLIX 
 
By the Baillie Gifford prize-winning and No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of THE FIVE 
 
'A fascinating expose of the seamy side of eighteenth century life' MAIL ON SUNDAY 
'Rubenhold's pages practically reek with smelly, pox-ridden Georgian Soho' GUARDIAN 
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In 1757, a down-and-out Irish poet, the head waiter at the Shakespear's Head Tavern in Covent Garden, and a celebrated London courtesan became bound together by the publication of a little book: Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies. This salacious work - detailing the names and 'specialities' of the capital's sex-workers- became one of the eighteenth century's most scandalous bestsellers. 
 
Yet beyond its titillating passages lies a glimpse into the lives of those who lived and died by its profits - a tragicomic opera of the Georgian era, motivated by poverty, passionate love, aspiration and shame. 
 
In this modern and visceral narrative, historian Hallie Rubenhold reveals the story behind Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, and the legion of ordinary women whose lives in the sex trade history has chosen to ignore. 
 
'Scrupulously researched' DAILY TELEGRAPH 
 
'Crackles with drama and tension' GUARDIAN 
 
'Compelling and ingenious' INDEPENDENT 
 
WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: 
 
'This book is an absolute 'must'-read for any person interested in English social history' 5 **** 
'Fascinating' 5 **** 
'Brilliant. Full of intelligent insight which brings this period to vibrant life' 5 **** 
________ 
 
**BUY THE AUTHOR'S BRAND NEW WORK, STORY OF A MURDER** 
'Terrific' Ian Rankin 
'I dare you to put it down' Lucy Worsley 
'Fascinating' Val McDermid

The Covent Garden Ladies

the book that inspired BBC2’s ‘Harlots’

Neil Oliver

"Everyone should have two copies - one for the car and one for the house to plan journeys. . . a reminder to think more about the places you pass and less about your route, because every British journey is through rich history." (Edward Stourton) 
 
From much-loved historian Neil Oliver, comes this beautifully written, kaleidoscopic history of a place with a story like no other. 
 
The British Isles, this archipelago of islands, is to Neil Oliver the best place in the world. From north to south, east to west it cradles astonishing beauty. The human story here is a million years old, and counting. But the tolerant, easygoing peace we enjoy has been hard won. We have made and known the best and worst of times. We have been hero and villain and all else in between, and we have learned some lessons. 
 
The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places is Neil’s very personal account of what makes these islands so special, told through the places that have witnessed the unfolding of our history. Beginning with footprints made in the sand by humankind’s earliest ancestors, he takes us via Romans and Vikings, the flowering of religion, through civil war, industrial revolution and two world wars. From windswept headlands to battlefields, ancient trees to magnificent cathedrals, each of his destinations is a place where, somehow, the spirit of the past seems to linger.

The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, the conquering Japanese Army transferred some 2500 British and Australian prisoners to a jungle camp on the north-eastern coast of Borneo: Sandakan. 
 
There they were beaten, broken, worked to death, thrown into bamboo cages on the slightest pretext and subjected to tortures so ingenious and hideous that the victims were driven to the brink of madness. But this was only the beginning. 
 
 In late 1944, Allied aircraft began bombing the coastal towns of Sandakan and Jesselton, and the Japanese resolved to abandon the prison camp and move the prisoners 250 miles inland. The journey there became known as the Sandakan Death marches. More than a thousand prisoners set out on the epic marches. Only six survived. 
 
This is the story of the survivors and the fallen.

Sandakan

THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
A TIMES Top Ten Best True Crime book: 'Groundbreaking. Extraordinary' 
 
'Terrific' Ian Rankin 
'Gripping' NEW YORK TIMES 
'At last, the Ripper's victims get a voice... An eloquent, stirring challenge to reject the prevailing Ripper myth' MAIL ON SUNDAY 
 
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 
____________ 
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. 
 
They came from Fleet Street, Knightsbridge, Wolverhampton, Sweden and Wales. They wrote ballads, ran coffee houses, lived on country estates, they breathed ink-dust from printing presses and escaped people-traffickers. 
 
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. 
 
Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women. 
 
Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories. 
____________ 
 
PRAISE FOR THE FIVE 
 
'Devastatingly good. The Five will leave you in tears, of pity and of rage.' LUCY WORSLEY 
'Fascinating, compelling, moving.' BRIDGET COLLINS, author of The Binding 
'An angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth. Powerful and shaming.' GUARDIAN 
'Haunting' SUNDAY TIMES 
'What a brilliant and necessary book' JO BAKER, author of Longbourn 
'Beautifully written and with the grip of a thriller, it will open your eyes and break your heart.' ERIN KELLY 
'An outstanding work of history-from-below ... magnificent' SPECTATOR 
'Deeply researched' THE NEW YORKER 
 
**NOW BUY THE BRAND NEW WORK BY HALLIE RUBENHOLD: STORY OF A MURDER

The Five

The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

'A concise study of one of the most fascinating and evil men in history... Essential for anyone interested in military history' - Soldier 
 
Millions of words have been spent and misspent on Adolf Hitler. But there remains one aspect as yet insufficiently explored: the impact of the First World War on the man who would go on to indelibly shape the Second. 
 
Hitler fought at First Ypres and he saw something on the battlefields that eluded his fellow soldiers, something that would become the cornerstone of his later life. He saw this war as heroic, noble and natural – the last act of the fittest in the great drama of the human race. 
 
Where did it all start? This is the story of how Hitler became the Fuhrer.

Young Hitler

The Making of the Fuhrer

Simon Thurley

'Excellent . . . Fresh, learned, readable and full of life' Dan Jones, Mail on Sunday 
 
Houses of Power is the result of Simon Thurley's thirty years of research, picking through architectural digs, and examining financial accounts, original plans and drawings to reconstruct the great Tudor houses and understand how these monarchs shaped their lives. 
________ 
 
What was it like to live as a royal Tudor? 
Why were their residences built as they were and what went on inside their walls? 
Who slept where and with who? 
Who chose the furnishings? 
And what were their passions? 
________ 
 
The Tudors ruled through the day, throughout the night, in the bath, in bed and in the saddle. Their palaces were genuine power houses - the nerve-centre of military operations, the boardroom for all executive decisions and the core of international politics. 
 
Far more than simply an architectural history - a study of private life as well as politics, diplomacy and court - it gives an entirely new and remarkable insight into the Tudor world.

Houses of Power

The Places that Shaped the Tudor World

_______ 
 
'A history book that should be read by all' - Stylist. 
 
Set against the background of the campaign for women to win the vote, this is a story of the ordinary people effecting extraordinary change. 
 
1913: the last long summer before the war. The country is gripped by suffragette fever. These impassioned crusaders have their admirers; some agree with their aims if not their forceful methods, while others are aghast at the thought of giving any female a vote. 
 
Meanwhile, hundreds of women are stepping out on to the streets of Britain. They are the suffragists: non-militant campaigners for the vote, on an astonishing six-week protest march they call the Great Pilgrimage. Rich and poor, young and old, they defy convention, risking jobs, family relationships and even their lives to persuade the country to listen to them. 
 
Fresh and original, full of vivid detail and moments of high drama, Hearts and Minds is both funny and incredibly moving, important and wonderfully entertaining.

Hearts And Minds

The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote

In this searing indictment of the rationale behind the First World War, Paul Ham argues that European leaders did not ‘sleepwalk’ into war, but that they fully accepted and understood the consequences of the decisions they were making. 
 
In August 1914, the European powers plunged the world into a war that would kill or wound 37 million people, tear down the fabric of society, uproot ancient political systems and set the world on course for the bloodiest century in human history. 
 
On the eve of the 100th anniversary of that terrible year, Ham takes the reader on a journey into the labyrinth, to reveal the complexity, the layered motives, the flawed and disturbed minds that drove the world to war. What emerges is a clear sense of what happened and why. 'To understand the past,' Ham concludes, 'and share that understanding, is the chief role of the historian. To understand the past is to liberate ourselves from its awful shadow and steel ourselves against it happening again.'

1914 The Year The World Ended

Edward Stourton

"An engaging, balanced and thoroughly researched history. It is often a moving and amusing tale containing plenty of mavericks and colourful episodes." (Lawrence James, The Times) 
 
Auntie's War is a love letter to radio. 
 
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British institution unlike any other, and its story during the Second World War is also our story. This was Britain’s first total war, engaging the whole nation, and the wireless played a crucial role in it. For the first time, news of the conflict reached every living room – sometimes almost as it happened; and at key moments: 
- Chamberlain’s announcement of war 
- The Blitz 
- The D-Day landings 
- De Gaulle's broadcasts from exile 
- Churchill's fighting speeches 
 
Radio offered an incomparable tool for propaganda; it was how coded messages, both political and personal, were sent across Europe, and it was a means of sending less than truthful information to the enemy. 
 
Edward Stourton is a sharp-eyed, wry and affectionate companion on the BBC’s wartime journey, investigating archives, diaries, letters and memoirs to examine what the BBC was and what it stood for. Auntie’s War is an incomparable insight into why we have the broadcast culture we do today. 
 
A BBC RADIO 4: BOOK OF THE WEEK

Auntie's War

The BBC during the Second World War

Chris Bryant

"A proudly partisan history of the British aristocracy - which scores some shrewd hits against the upper class themselves, and the nostalgia of the rest of us for their less endearing eccentricities. A great antidote to Downton Abbey." (Mary Beard) 
 
Exploring the extraordinary social and political dominance enjoyed by the British aristocracy over the centuries, Entitled seeks to explain how a tiny number of noble families rose to such a position in the first place. It reveals the often nefarious means they have employed to maintain their wealth, power and prestige and examines the greed, ambition, jealousy and rivalry which drove aristocratic families to guard their interests with such determination. In telling their history, Entitled introduces a cast of extraordinary characters: fierce warriors, rakish dandies, political dilettantes, charming eccentrics, arrogant snobs and criminals who quite literally got away with murder.

Entitled

A Critical History of the British Aristocracy

Henry Winter

'England invented football, codified it, became champions of the world in 1966 but humiliatingly then forgot how to play the greatest game of all. England took their eye off a ball they arrogantly thought they owned, allowing other nations to run off with it.' 
 
It was Fifty Years of Hurt from when Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup trophy at Wembley to arguably the nadir of the national game - defeat by Iceland at Euro 2016 and the most botched managerial appointment in FA history. In this groundbreaking book, a Sunday Times bestseller, Henry Winter addresses the state England are in as they celebrate, or rather not, the golden anniversary of their greatest moment. Part lament, part anatomy of an obsession, both personal and collective, it analyses the truth behind the endless excuses, apportions the blame for the crimes against English football, but is also a search for hope and solutions. 
 
As well as players and managers, Henry Winter talks to the fans, to agents, to officials, to the governing bodies, about every aspect, good and bad, of English football over the past five decades to provide answers to the question: 'where did it all go wrong?'. It is a passionate journey by a writer with vast personal insight into the national team, with unprecedented access to all areas of the game, but also by a fan who wants his England back. The Fifty Years of Hurt must end.

Fifty Years of Hurt

The Story of England Football and Why We Never Stop Believing

John O'Farrell

Like bubonic plague and stone cladding, no-one took Margaret Thatcher seriously until it was too late. Her first act as leader was to appear before the cameras and do a V for Victory sign the wrong way round. She was smiling and telling the British people to f*** off at the same time. It was something we would have to get used to.' 
 
Things Can Only Get Better is the personal account of a Labour supporter who survived eighteen miserable years of Conservative government. It is the heartbreaking and hilarious confessions of someone who has been actively involved in helping the Labour party lose elections at every level: school candidate: door-to-door canvasser: working for a Labour MP in the House of Commons; standing as a council candidate; and eventually writing jokes for a shadow cabinet minister. 
 
Along the way he slowly came to realise that Michael Foot would never be Prime Minister, that vegetable quiche was not as tasty as chicken tikki masala and that the nuclear arms race was never going to be stopped by face painting alone.

Things Can Only Get Better

*THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER* 
As seen on Apple TV - 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything 
 
The Sixties ended a year late - on New Year's Eve 1970, when Paul McCartney initiated proceedings to wind up The Beatles. Music would never be the same again. 
 
The next day would see the dawning of a new era. 1971 saw the release of more monumental albums than any year before or since and the establishment of a pantheon of stars to dominate the next forty years - Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Rod Stewart, the solo Beatles and more. 
 
January that year fired the gun on an unrepeatable surge of creativity, technological innovation, blissful ignorance, naked ambition and outrageous good fortune. By December rock had exploded into the mainstream. 
How did it happen? This book tells you how. 
 
It's the story of 1971, rock's golden year.

1971 - Never a Dull Moment

Rock's Golden Year

Bill Bryson

In At Home, Bill Bryson applies the same irrepressible curiosity, irresistible wit, stylish prose and masterful storytelling that made A Short History of Nearly Everything one of the most lauded books of the last decade, and delivers one of the most entertaining and illuminating books ever written about the history of the way we live. 
 
Bill Bryson was struck one day by the thought that we devote a lot more time to studying the battles and wars of history than to considering what history really consists of: centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping and merely endeavouring to get more comfortable. And that most of the key discoveries for humankind can be found in the very fabric of the houses in which we live.This inspired him to start a journey around his own house, an old rectory in Norfolk, wandering from room to room considering how the ordinary things in life came to be. 
 
Along the way he did a prodigious amount of research on the history of anything and everything, from architecture to electricity, from food preservation to epidemics, from the spice trade to the Eiffel Tower, from crinolines to toilets; and on the brilliant, creative and often eccentric minds behind them. And he discovered that, although there may seem to be nothing as unremarkable as our domestic lives, there is a huge amount of history, interest and excitement - and even a little danger - lurking in the corners of every home.

At Home

A Short History of Private Life

Erik Larson

1st May 1915: the luxury ocean liner Lusitania sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool. 
 
Her passengers were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone and its submarines were bringing terror to the Atlantic. 
 
 But the Lusitania’s captain, William Thomas Turner, had faith in the gentlemanly terms of warfare that had, for a century, kept civilian ships safe from attack. 
 
He also knew that his ship was the fastest then in service and could outrun any threat. Germany was, however, intent on changing the rules, and Walther Schwieger, the captain of Unterseeboot-20, was happy to oblige. For this would be the ill-fated Lusitania’s final crossing . . .

Dead Wake

The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Over the last two hundred years Parliament has witnessed and effected dramatic and often turbulent change. Political parties rose – and fell. The old aristocratic order passed away. The vote was won for the working classes and, eventually, for women. The world was torn apart by two extraordinarily bloody wars. And individual politicians were cheered for their altruism or their bravery and jeered for their sexual or financial misdemeanours. 
This second volume of Chris Bryant’s majestic Parliament: The Biography has a cast of characters that includes some of British history’s most famous names: the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher. Its recurring theme is reform and innovation, but it also lays bare obsessive respect for the past and a dedication to evolution rather than revolution, which has left us with a fudged constitution still perilously dependent on custom, convention and gentlemen’s agreements. 
This is riveting, flawlessly researched and accessible popular history for anyone with an interest in why modern Britain is the nation it is today.

Parliament: The Biography (Volume II - Reform)

Stephen Clarke

NEW UPDATED EDITION 
 
 Was the Battle of Hastings a French victory? 
Non! William the Conqueror was Norman and hated the French. 
 
Were the Brits really responsible for the death of Joan of Arc? 
Non! The French sentenced her to death for wearing trousers. 
 
Did the French write "God Save the Queen"? 
Non! But that's what they claim. 
 
Ten centuries' worth of French historical 'facts' bite the dust as Stephen Clarke looks at what has really been going on since 1066 ... 
 
Featuring new annoyances – both historical and recent – inflicted on the French, including Napoleon's "banned" chamber pot, Louis XIV's painful operation, Anglo-French jibes during the 2012 London Olympics, French niggles about William and Kate's royal wedding, and much more ...

1000 Years of Annoying the French

Brian Masters

Born of a preoccupation with saints and sinners, The Evil That Men Do is Brian Masters' investigation into the nature of good and evil, and the different ways in which they can be manifested. It examines the fundamental questions of why we are as we are: why we are good, why we care for one another, why we can be altruistic and kind as well as selfish and cruel. 
 
According to science, we are prisoners of our genetic inheritance. Are our impulses therefore to some extent inescapable, compelling us to behave in a certain manner, irrespective of the guidelines imposed by instinct or civilization? Or can we determine our individual patterns of behaviour? Do we really have a choice? 
 
Using a diverse multitude of examples, from St. Francis of Assisi, Audrey Hepburn, Bruce Chatwin and Bob Geldof to the Marquis de Sade, Adolf Hitler and Peter Sutcliffe, from the Spanish Inquisition to Nazi Germany to the Vietnam War, Brian Masters examines this age-old yet intensely contemporary subject. At a time when civilization seems on the verge of meltdown, he has produced an incisive, thoughtful and provocative meditation on a fundamental human question.

The Evil That Men Do

The history of Parliament is the history of the United Kingdom itself. It has a cast of thousands. Some were ambitious, visionary and altruistic. Others were hot-headed, violent and self-serving. Few were unambiguously noble. Yet their rowdy confrontations, their campaigning zeal and their unstable alliances framed our nation. 
 
This first of two volumes takes us on a 500-year journey from Parliament's earliest days in the thirteenth century through the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses and the upheavals of the Civil Wars, and up to 1801, when Parliament – and the United Kingdom, embracing Scotland and Ireland – emerged in a modern form. 
 
Chris Bryant tells this epic tale through the lives of the myriad MPs, lords and bishops who passed through Parliament. It is the vivid, colourful biography of a cast of characters whose passions and obsessions, strengths and weaknesses laid the foundations of modern democracy.

Parliament: The Biography (Volume I - Ancestral Voices)

David Belton

'Tremendous. A moving and haunting tribute to the human spirit' WILLIAM BOYD 
 
Into the heart of a genocide that left a million people dead 
 
6 April 1994: In the skies above Rwanda the president’s plane is shot down in flames. 
 
Near Kigali, Jean-Pierre holds his family close, fearing for their lives as the violence escalates. 
 
 In the chapel of a hillside village, missionary priest Vjeko Curic prepares to save thousands of lives 
 
The mass slaughter that follows – friends against friends, neighbours against neighbours - is one of the bloodiest chapters in history 
 
 
Twenty years on, BBC Newsnight producer David Belton, one of the first journalists into Rwanda, tells of the horrors he experienced at first-hand. Now following the threads of Jean-Pierre and Vjeko Curic’s stories, he revisits a country still marked with blood, in search of those who survived and the legacy of those who did not. This is David Belton's quest for the limits of bravery and forgiveness.

When The Hills Ask For Your Blood: A Personal Story of Genocide and Rwanda

In summer 1927, America had a booming stock market, a president who worked just four hours a day (and slept much of the rest), a devastating flood of the Mississippi, a sensational murder trial, and an unknown aviator named Charles Lindbergh who became the most famous man on earth. 
 
It was the summer that saw the birth of talking pictures, the invention of television, the peak of Al Capone’s reign of terror, the horrifying bombing of a school in Michigan, the thrillingly improbable return to greatness of over-the-hill baseball player Babe Ruth, and an almost impossible amount more. 
 
In this hugely entertaining book, Bill Bryson spins a tale of brawling adventure, reckless optimism and delirious energy. With the trademark brio, wit and authority that make him Britain’s favourite writer of narrative non-fiction, he brings to life a forgotten summer when America came of age, took centre stage, and changed the world.

One Summer

America 1927

Brian Castner

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. He and his team – his brothers – disarmed bombs. Sometimes they used robots and remote controls. Sometimes they set off controlled explosions. Sometimes one of the team would have to put on the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk, and disarm the device by hand. Often they were simply too late; arriving just in time to pick up the pieces. 
 
In a hailstorm of bullets, bomb fragments, body parts and the endless wailing of innocent civilians, the days rolled into nights, yesterday turned into tomorrow, and today never even happened. But after the tour, the celebrations and the long plane ride home, the real war was just beginning. The war against the fear, the confusion, the guilt and the memory loss. The war against the Crazy. 
 
This exhilarating, heartbreaking, searingly honest memoir exposes two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror, excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within.

The Long Walk

A Story of War and the Life That Follows

The mountain paths are as treacherous as they are steep – the more so in the dark and in winter. Even for the fit the journey is a formidable challenge. Hundreds of those who climbed through the Pyrenees during the Second World War were malnourished and exhausted after weeks on the run hiding in barns and attics. Many never even reached the Spanish border. 
 
Today their bravery and endurance is commemorated each July by a trek along the Chemin de la Liberté – the toughest and most dangerous of wartime routes. From his fellow pilgrims Edward Stourton uncovers stories of midnight scrambles across rooftops and drops from speeding trains; burning Lancasters, doomed love affairs, horrific murder and astonishing heroism. 
 
The lives of the men, women and children who were drawn by the war to the Pyrenees often read as breathtakingly exciting adventure, but they were led against a background of intense fear, mounting persecution and appalling risk. Drawing on interviews with the few remaining survivors and the families of those who were there, Edward Stourton’s vivid history of this little-known aspect of the Second World War is shocking, dramatic and intensely moving.

Cruel Crossing

Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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