ADAM HAMDY is a bestselling author and screenwriter. His most recent novel, The Other Side of Night, was an NPR best book of 2022 and a New York Times best thriller of the year, and has been described as ingenious and deeply moving. He is the author of the Scott Pearce series of modern spy thrillers, Black 13, Red Wolves and White Fire, and the Pendulum trilogy. Keep up to date with his latest books and news at www.adamhamdy.com.

Adam Hamdy

Adam Hart-Davis

Adam Haslett is the author of the story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here and the novels Imagine Me Gone and Union Atlantic. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and his books have been translated into over thirty languages. His journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He lives in New York City.

Adam Haslett

Adam Henson is perhaps the best-known farmer in the UK, presenting on BBC's Countryfile to millions of viewers each Sunday evening. He's also appeared on Lambing Live, Secret Britain, Coast and Inside Out. Adam also runs the award-winning Cotswold Farm Park in Gloucestershire, which welcomes family visitors all year round and is home to many rare breeds. He has a monthly column in Countryfile magazine, as well as the Cotswold Life magazine. He has written several books including the Sunday Times bestseller Like Farmer, Like Son. This is his first children's book and it is the perfect introduction to the farm.

Adam Henson

Adam Henson presents Countryfile, often from his 650-hectare farm in the Cotswolds. Having studied Agriculture at college, Adam took over Bemborough Farm from his father, Joe. The farm now grows wheat, spring barley and oilseed rape, runs a flock of 400 commercial ewes and has the UK's leading collection of rare breeds, many of which are in demand for film sets and advertisements. Cotswold Farm Park (www.cotswoldfarmpark.co.uk) offers a total countryside experience for all the family, welcoming more than 100,000 visitors each year. 
 
Adam presented Lambing Live with Kate Humble, writes for Countryfile magazine and has appeared on Radio 4's On Your Farm and Farming Today. He is the author of three previous books, Adam’s Farm: My Life on the Land, the Sunday Times bestseller, Like Farmer, Like Son and A Farmer and His Dog.

Adam Higginbotham has written for magazines including The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Wired and Smithsonian. He is also the author of Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, which was awarded the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York City.

Adam Higginbotham

Adam Hills is an internationally recognised comedian and host of award-winning Channel 4 show The Last Leg. His collection of stories from a life in comedy, Best Foot Forward, was a Times bestseller.

Adam Hills

Adam Howling

Adam J. Kurtz

Adam Jacot de Boinod

ADAM JOHNSON won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for his second novel, the New York Times bestseller The Orphan Master’s Son (‘Excavates the very meaning of life’ New York Times). His short story 'Nirvana' won the prestigious Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award. He is the author of acclaimed story collections, Fortune Smiles and Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and lives with his family in San Francisco.

Adam Johnson

Adam Kay is a former doctor who has written five million books and sold seven copies. No, hang on – he’s written seven books and sold five million copies. His debut book, This is Going to Hurt, is a literary sensation: a Sunday Times number one bestseller for over a year, winning a record-breaking four National Book Awards and selling over 3 million copies. Kay adapted This is Going to Hurt as a BAFTA-winning comedy-drama series for the BBC. Adam Kay’s children’s books have been translated into 32 languages and sold over 1 million copies, making him one of the UK’s bestselling children’s authors. Kay’s Anatomy became the fastest-selling children’s general non-fiction hardback of the decade. His first picture book, Amy Gets Eaten, was published in 2023, and his first children’s novel, Dexter Procter the Ten-Year-Old Doctor, was published in September 2024.

Adam Kay

Adam studied illustration and animation, and received a BA followed by an MA from the Edinburgh College of Art. As a student he won a competition to create a short film for MOMI and Channel 4, and once his career producing animated commercials was under way, he became an illustrator as well. He has regular columns in the UK and the US.

Adam Larkum

Adam Lashinsky

Adam Macqueen

Adam Mars-Jones

Adam O'Riordan was born in Manchester in 1982, where he currently lives. In 2008 he became the youngest Poet-in-Residence at The Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism. His first collection In the Flesh (2010) win a Somerset Maugham Award. He is the Academic Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Adam O'Riordan

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Adam Phillips

Adam Rackley

Adam Richardson is the UK's top trending health and fitness coach with a rapidly growing audience across both TikTok and Instagram. Adam is passionate about removing barriers to exercise and movement, a philosophy that is key to his work as a Personal Trainer in which he strives to help his clients feel more confident, as well as more fit and healthy.

Adam Richardson

Adam Roberts is the author of The Amateur Gourmet and Secrets of the Best Chefs, and coauthor of Give My Swiss Chards to Broadway. He started his food blog, The Amateur Gourmet, in 2004 and currently writes The Amateur Gourmet Newsletter on Substack. Roberts has also written for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and for film and television. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband and their dog, Winston. Food Person is his first novel.

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is acknowledged as the senior scholar of international relations in the UK. He was Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University 1986-2007, and President of the British Academy 2009-13 - the head of humanities in Britain. He was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2002-08), a member of the UK Defence Academy Advisory Board (2003-15) and is now on the Board of Advisers of the Lieber Institute for Law and Land Warfare at the United States Military Academy, West Point.

Adam Robinson is based in the Middle East and is a regular contributor to newspapers in the Arab world and also to the British media. He is the author of numerous books on the region, including Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.

Adam Robinson

Adam Ross

Adam Rutherford

Adam Rutherford is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and geneticist at University College London. His books include A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans, and the Sunday Times bestseller How to Argue with a Racist. He has written and presented numerous documentaries for BBC radio and television, including Inside Science and The Cell. Adam has also worked as a science advisor on many films, including the Oscar-winning Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018).

Adam Smith

Adam Smyth runs the 39 Step Press, an experiment in printing, from a cold barn in Oxfordshire. He is also Professor of English Literature and the History of the Book at Balliol College, University of Oxford.

Adam Smyth

Adam Sweeting

Adam Tandy

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Beatrice Heuser

Clausewitz's On War, first published in 1832, remains the most famous study of the nature and conditions of warfare. Contemporaries found him 'endearing' or 'totally unpalatable', while later generations called him 'the father of modern strategical study', whose tenets have 'eternal relevance', or dismissed him as outdated. Was it really he who made the discovery that warfare is a continuation of politics? Was he the 'Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre', in part responsible for the mass slaughter of the First World War, as Liddell Hart contended? Can the idea of total war be traced back to him? Complex and often misunderstood, Clausewitz has fascinated and influenced generations of politicians and strategic thinkers. 
 
Beatrice Heuser's study is the first book, not only on how to read Clausewitz, but also on how others have read him - from the Prussian and German masters of warfare of the late nineteenth century through to the military commanders of the First World War, through Lenin and Mao Zedong to strategists in the nuclear age and of guerrilla warfare. The result is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the work and influence of the greatest classic on the art of war.

Reading Clausewitz

David Gates

By July 1807, following his spectacular victories over Austria, Prussia and Russia, Napoleon dominated most of Europe.  The only significant gap in his continental system was the Iberian Peninsula.  He therefore begun a series of diplomatic and military moves aimed at forcing Spain and Portugal to toe the line, leading to a popular uprising against the French and the outbreak of war in May 1808. Napoleon considered the war in the Peninsula, which he ruefully called 'The Spanish Ulcer', so insignificant that he rarely bothered to bring to it his military genius, relying on his marshals instead, and simultaneously launching his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.  Yet the war was to end with total defeat for the French.  In late 1813 Wellington's army crossed the Pyrenees into the mainland of France.  This is the first major military history of the war for half a century.  Combining scholarship with a vivid narrative, it reveals a war of unexpected savagery, of carnage at times so great as to be comparable to the First World War.  But it was also a guerilla war, fought on beautiful but difficult terrain, where problems of supply loomed large.  The British Navy, dominant at sea after Trafalgar, was able to provide crucial support to the hard-pressed, ill-equipped and often outnumbered forces fighting the French. Dr Gates' history can claim to be the first to provide a serious assessment of the opposing generals and their troops, as well as analysing in detail the social and political background.  The Peninsular war is particularly rich in varied and remarkable campaigns, and his book will fascinate all those who enjoy reading military history.

The Spanish Ulcer

A History of the Peninsular War

John Noble Wilford

An updated edition of the classic, much praised history of cartography. It traces the adventures, discoveries, and feats of technical ingenuity by which mapmakers, over the centuries, have succeeded in charting first the surface of the globe, then the earth's interior and the ocean floors, and finally the moon and the planets of our solar system. The author has added three new chapters, as well as many updates and amplifications, to reflect the great changes that have taken place in mapmaking in the past two decades. The Mapmakers will continue to be the definitive book on this fascinating subject.

The Mapmakers

Philip Ziegler

In 1939 London was not merely the greatest city in the world, it was the most tempting and vulnerable target for aerial attack.  For six years it was the frontline of the free world's battle against Fascism.  It endured the horrors of the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, the V1s, the V2s.  Other cities suffered more intensely; no other city was so constantly under attack for so long a time. This is the story of London at war - or, perhaps, of Londoners at war, for Philip Ziegler, known best as a biographer, is above all fascinated by the people who found their lives so suddenly and violently transformed: the querulous, tiresome yet strangely gallant housewife from West Hampstead; the turbulent, left-wing retired schoolmaster from Walthamstow, always having a go at the authorities; the odiously snobbish middleclass lady from Kensington, sneering at the scum who took shelter in the Underground; the typist from Fulham, the plumber from Woolwich.  It was their war, quite as much as it was Churchill's or the King's, and this is their history. Through a wealth of interviews and unpublished letters and diaries, as well as innumerable books and newspapers, the author has built up a vivid picture of a population under siege.  There were cowards, there were criminals, there were incompetents, but what emerges from these pages is above all a record of astonishing patience, dignity and courage.  'I hope,' Ziegler writes, 'we will never have to endure again what they went through between 1939 and 1945.  I hope, if we did, that we would conduct ourselves as well.'

London At War

1939 - 1945

Ben Shephard

'I wish you could be here," the Oxford Professor of Medicine wrote to a friend in 1915, "in this orgy of neuroses and psychoses and gaits and paralyses. I cannot imagine what has got into the central nervous system of the men.' 
 
A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century - an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers and official records. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of mental medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of 'shell-shock', combat fatigue and 'post-traumatic stress disorder'. 
 
At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, it tells the full story of 'shell-shock'; explains the disastrous psychological aftermath of Vietnam; and shows how psychiatrists kept men fighting in Burma. But it also tries to answer recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology or simple biochemistry? It explores the ethical dilemmas of the military psychiatrist - the 'machine gun behind the front', as Freud called him. Finally, it looks at the modern culture of 'trauma' and compensation spawned by the Vietnam War. 
 
A War of Nerves offers the general reader an indispensable guide to an important and controversial subject.

A War Of Nerves

A G Hopkins

Globalisation was the buzzword of the 1990s; it promises to become even more important in the first decade of the new century. There is now a flood of literature on the economics, politics and sociology of globalization, and regular commentary in the serious daily and weekly press. 
 
Virtually all of this discussion makes assumptions, and frequently explicit claims, about the novelty of globalisation. According to one view, the globalisation is a new phenomenon that can be dated from the 1980s. A second view holds that globalisation has a long history that can be traced back to the nineteenth century, if not earlier. The importance of these themes scarcely needs elaborating. Yet they have still to attract significant attention from historians. This volume is the first by a team of historians to address these issues. 
 
Globalisation in World History has two distinctive features. First, it offers a categorisation of types and stages of globalisation that existed before the late twentieth century, No such taxonomy exists at present. Secondly, it emphasises a feature that the current debate greatly underestimates: the fact that globalisation has non-Western as well as Western origins. Globalisation is much more than the 'rise of the West' presented in new terminology. The contributors bring their expertise to bear on themes that give prominence to China, South Asia, Africa and the world of Islam as well as to Europe and the United States, and span the last three centuries while also showing an awareness of more distant antecedents. The result is a coherent and thought-provoking collection of essays. Globalisation will become a major theme of historical research during the next decade; this book will help to set the new agenda.

Globalisation In World History

Gregor Dallas

The seventeen months from April 1814 to August 1815 were an extraordinary period in European history; a period which saw two sieges of Paris, a complete revision of Europe's political frontiers, an international Congress set up in Vienna, civil war in Italy and international war in Belgium.Gregor Dallas tells the story of these days through the perspectives of three very different European cities: the great metropolis of London, post-revolutionary Paris and baroque Vienna.  The writing is almost cinematic in its power to evoke and bring to life the Europe of Tolstoy: the ebb and flow of power, of armies and of peoples across Europe's northern plains.  Working essentially from primary sources, Dallas is as interested in the weather conditions before battle as in the way cartoonists reacted to court intrigues and fashions.It is also Europe seen through the eyes of its central players: Talleyrand, who has served nearly every French regime since the Revolution of 1789; Metternich, who devises new plans for a 'Germany' that does not yet exist and for a 'Europe' that remains devided; Wellington, who reveals himself a diplomat as well as a soldier; Tsar Alexander, an idealist seeking to impose a uniform plan for all Europe; and 'Boney' himself, who has his own ideal of Europe and, though banished to Elba, does not abandon his dream to realise it.

1815

The Roads to Waterloo

Clive Ponting

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation and concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire and the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India and Japan, and therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters and gatherers and their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica and Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them and how technologies, ideas and the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China and of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations and social and economic change.

World History

A New Perspective

Martin Gilbert

When Hitler announced that the result of the war in Europe would be 'the complete annihilation of the Jews', he did so in 1942, not only in public, but before an enormous crowd in Berlin. The Allies heard, but, astonishingly, they did not listen. 
 
In 1944, Allied reconnaissance pilots, searching out industrial targets in the area, repeatedly photographed Auschwitz. The pictures, apparently overlooked by the Allies, were routinely filed in government archives and not examined until 1979. 
 
First-hand reports on the horrors of the death camps came to the West by 1944 in the person of two escaped Auschwitz prisoners. Their testimonies, and those of subsequent escapees, were either ignored or dismissed. 
 
Despite the fact that, the same year, Churchill himself had ordered feasibility studies for air strikes on Auschwitz, the RAF not only did nothing, but eventually passed the buck to the Americans, who also did nothing. This book explains the reasons why.

Auschwitz And The Allies

Norman Rose

Lloyd George once spoke of 'a very powerful combination - in its way the most powerful in the country'. Its proceedings were invariably conducted at Cliveden, the country estate of the fabulously wealthy Nancy and Waldorf Astor. Collectively dubbed 'God's Truth Ltd', the group included leading politicians, academics, writers and newspaper editors. Its pedigree impeccable, its social standing beyond reproach, its persuasive powers permeated the clubs and institutions of London, the senior common rooms of Oxbridge colleges, the quality press and the great country houses of England. Suddenly, in the late 1930s, the 'Cliveden Set' was catapulted into uncalled-for notoriety. It had been identified as a cabal that sought to manipulate, even determine, British foreign policy in order to uphold its narrow class interests. It would use any means, however devious - even negotiate a humiliating, dishonourable settlement with Nazi Germany - to maintain its privileges, those of a decaying ruling class. But was the 'Cliveden Set' a traitorous cabal, challenging 'the constitutional structures of British democracy', or simply an unstructured think-tank of harmless do-gooders? Norman Rose discerningly probes this fascinating tale, brilliantly disentangling fact from fiction, and setting this privileged clique in the wider perspective of its times.

The Cliveden Set

Evan S Connell

The year is 1095.  The most prominent leaders of the Christian world have assembled in a meadow in France near Clermont.  Pope Urban appeals for the liberation of Jerusalem and cries out Deus lo volt!, God Wills It!  The cry is taken up, echoes forth and is carried on.Wave upon wave of Christian pilgrims rush to assault the growing power of Muslims in the Holy Land and will do so for the next two hundred years.  Most able men become soldiers of the Cross, and when a man is prevented by old age or ill health, he sends his son.  Women, too, go to fight alongside the men.  It is a time of great adventure, of great exploration and cultural change.  Uniting Christian Europe in a common cause, the crusades defined forever the spirit of the West.A magisterial recounting of this great and terrible campaign, Deus lo Volt! tells with stunning immediacy one soldier's first-hand experience of the defining war of Christendom.

Deus Lo Volt!

A Chronicle of the Crusades

David Miller

From 1949 to 1991 the world was overshadowed by the Cold War. Repeatedly it seemed that in days, even hours, global nuclear conflict would sweep away much of the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe. They would be obliterated in what President Carter described as 'one long, final and very bleak afternoon'. When the Cold War ended, the Warsaw Pact was wound up and the vast military forces which had flourished for over forty years were disbanded. As with all wars, however, it was only then that the realities of what had been involved began to emerge; indeed, much has remained hidden until now.In The Cold War, David Miller discloses not only the vast scope of the military resources involved, but also how nearly threat came to terrible reality. Most chillingly of all, he reveals that while the menace of nuclear war predominated, it was actually little understood even by the experts. The book examines each military area in turn, covering the formation of the two great alliances, and the strategies and major weapons in the rival navies, armies and air forces. That the Cold War ended without a conflict was due to professionalism on both sides. The result, Miller suggests, would have impressed the Chinese military strategist, Sun Tsu, who, writing in the fifth century BC, said that 'to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill'.

The Cold War

A Military History

Christopher Hill

This illuminating collection of essays assesses the seventeenth century, interpreting what used to be called 'The Puritan Revolution', the ideas which helped to produce it and resulted from it, and the relation between these ideas and the political and economic events of the day. Each essay approaches the subject from a different angle, looking at aspects of the revolution - whether religious, constitutional, economic or biographical - in conjunction with a lively sympathy for the men who lived in that revolutionary time. Analysing the writings of Marvell, Hobbes, Harrington and Samuel Richardson, as well as less 'respectable' writers, Professor Hill examines the legacy of the Reformation and the inspiration provided by ideals like the Brotherhood of Man and the desire to re-create a pre-Norman Golden Age. A book that no serious student of our history should miss; it is a treasury of interesting detail and strong ideas, CV Wedgwood.

Puritanism & Revolution

Piers Brendon

Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark, dishonest decade - child of one world war and parent of the next - that determined the course of the twentieth century. 
 
Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia - Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, The Dark Valley brings the 1930's back to life through meticulous scholarship. 
 
Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-Tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then.

The Dark Valley

Robert Remini

In 1815 Britain's crack troops, fresh from the victories against Napoleon, were stunningly defeated near New Orleans by a ragtag army of citizen-soldiers under the commander they dubbed 'Old Hickory', Andrew Jackson. It was this battle that defined the United States as a military power to be reckoned with and an independent democracy here to stay. 
 
A happenstance coalition of militiamen, regulars, untrained frontiersmen, free blacks, pirates, Indians and townspeople - marching to 'Yankee Doodle' and 'La Marseillaise' - inhabit The Battle of New Orleans in a rich array of colourful scenes. Swashbuckling Jean Lafitte and his privateers. The proud, reckless British General Pakenham and his miserable men ferried across a Louisiana lake in a Gulf storm. The agile Choctaw and Tennessee 'dirty shirt' sharpshooters who made a sport of picking off redcoat sentries by night. And Jackson himself - tall, gaunt, shrewd, by turns gentle and furious, declaring 'I will smash them, so help me God!' 
 
Robert Remini's vivid evocation of this glorious, improbable victory is more than a masterful military history. It proves that only after the Battle of new Orleans could Americans say with confidence that they were Americans, not subjects of a foreign power. It was the triumph that catapulted a once-poor, uneducated orphan boy into the White House and forged a collection of ex-colonies and dissenters into a nation.

Battle of New Orleans

Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory

Brian Masters

The origins of the non-royal dukes in the British peerage divide nicely into Tudor looters, Royal bastards, opportunist generals, territorial, metropolitan or Scottish magnates. Lloyd George said that a duke, fully equipped, cost more than a dreadnought to maintain and with their palaces, possessions and retinues, they are nearly all splendid. Some of them are, of course, now poor; some of them have great wealth; some of them hit every headline and others are obscure. But within each duchy, Brian Masters tells the story of quaint grandees determined to survive. 
 
The Dukes is an essential guide that provides vital biographical information and explores the history of the dukes in unprecedented depth. This revised edition includes new information which was not available on first publication, and brings up to date the accounts of families whose titles have passed to a subsequent generation in the intervening years.

The Dukes

Jonathan Glover

This book is about history and morality in the twentieth century. It is about the psychology which made possible Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and many other atrocities. 
 
In modern technological war, victims are distant and responsibility is fragmented. The scientists making the atomic bomb thought that they were only providing a weapon: how it was used was to be the responsibility of society. The people who dropped the bomb were only obeying orders. The machinery of the political decision-taking was so complex that no one among the politicians was unambiguously responsible. No one thought of themselves as causing the horrors of Hiroshima. 
 
Jonathan Glover examines tribalism: how, in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, people who once lived together became trapped into mutual fear and hatred. He investigates how, in Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and in Cambodia, systems of belief made atrocities possible. The analysis of Nazism explores the emotionally powerful combination of tribalism and belief which enabled people to commit acts otherwise unimaginable. 
 
Drawing on accounts of participants, victims and observers, Jonathan Glover shows that different atrocities have common patterns which suggest weak points in our psychology. The resulting picture is used as a guide for the ethics we should create if we hope to overcome them. The message is not one of pessimism or despair: only by looking closely at the monsters inside us can we undertake the project of caging and taming them.

Humanity

the Recent Moral History

Garrett Mattingly

Garrett Mattingly's thrilling narrative sets out the background of the sixteenth-century European intrigue and religious unrest that gave rise to one of the world's most famous maritime crusades and the naval battles that decided its fate.                                                                                                               In putting the naval campaign of 1588 back into the context of the first great international crisis of modern history, Mattingly builds up, like the movements of a symphony, a broad picture of how events of the time affected men's actions, plans and hopes. He brilliantly connects a series of scenes or episodes, shifting the point of focus from England to the continent and from courts to ships and cities. The feeling of tension mounts to a crescendo throughout Europe as the great drama of the Armada is approached. The battle itself and the aftermath are so vividly and poignantly described that they might be happening in our world today.                                                                                                                               'A rare and wonderful book, as readable and exciting as a novel, amazingly fresh and stimulating in its approach to a great subject, and impressive for the wide range and authority of its scholarship.' J.E. Neale

The Defeat Of The Spanish Armada

David Kynaston

Illusions of Gold, the third volume of David Kynaston's magnificent quartet, The City of London, sweeps us from 1914 to 1945, through years of fluctuating fortunes that began with the City at an all-time high, and ended with the 'Square Mile' ravaged by bombs, at its lowest ebb ever. 
 
With unerring judgement and story-telling verve, Kynaston takes us through the City's vain attempt to recover the glory days before the First World War, in the return to the Gold Standard. He follows its tussles with government over control of monetary policy, investigates its increasingly important links with British industry and gives a pioneering account of its controversial role in the politics of appeasement. 
 
Kynaston's great strength is his combination of vivid narrative with meticulous scholarship, based on an unparalleled variety of unpublished sources. The City of London is now hailed as one of the most ambitious and rewarding historical projects of recent times.

The City Of London Volume 3

Illusions of Gold 1914 - 1945

R M Ogilvie

To undestand the success of the Romans you must understand their piety. Dionysius of Halicarnassus. For over a thousand years, Roman religion satisfied the spiritual needs of a wide range of peoples throughout the empire, because is offered an intelligent and dignified interpretation of how the world functions. It was a firm, yet tolerant, religion whose adherents committed very few crimes in its name and who were healthily free of neuroses. In this short, perceptive study of Roman religious life between 80 BC and AD 69, Professor Ogilvie shows how intimately involved were the Roman gods with human activities. Drawing widely on original material (all of it quoted in translation), he tells us how the Romans prayed, what happened at a sacrifice, what sort of gods they believed in, and how seriously they took their religion - a religion in which actions, , not dogma, was paramount.

The Romans And Their Gods

Marie Vassiltchikov

Marie `Missie' Vassiltchikov as a White Russian émigrée caught with her family in Hitler`s Germany at the outbreak of the war. She was a Bright Young Thing, part of the cosmopolitan set who managed to maintain a trance-like normality until as late as 1941 - picnics, house-parties, dinners at the Eden... 
 
Before long, however, Missie became sickened by the brutal and repressive nature of Nazi rule which overshadowed every aspect of her life. Through Adam Von Trott, for whom she worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, she became involved in the Resistance and the diaries vividly describe her part in the drama of July 1944 and its appalling aftermath. 
 
Living among the ruins of Berlin during Allied bombing raids, she grows us to be strong-minded, committed and courageous woman as she daily displays uncommon bravery in the face of the Gestapo and the detestable Dr Six of the SS. Having survived the Nazis, Missie ends the diaries as she flees from Vienna, where she has been working as a nurse, before the advancing Red Army.

The Berlin Diaries 1940-45

Frank McLynn

Everyone knows what William the Conqueror won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, but in recent years is has become customary to assume that the victory was virtually inevitable, given the alleged superiority of Norman military technology. In this new study, underpinned by biographical sketches of the great warriors who fought for the crown of England in 1066, Frank McLynn shows that this view is mistaken. The battle on Senlac Hill on 14 October was a desperately close-run thing, which Harold lost only because of an incredible run of bad fortune and some treachery from the Saxon elite in England. Both William and Harold were fine generals, but Harold was the more inspirational of the two. 
 
Making use of all the latest scholarship, McLynn shows that most of our 'knowledge' of 1066 rests on myths or illusions: Harold did not fight at Hastings with the same army with which he had been victorious at Stamford Bridge three weeks earlier; the Battle of Senlac was not won by Norman archery; Harold did not die with an arrow in the eye. In overturning these myths, McLynn shows that the truth is even more astonishing than the legend. An original feature of the book is the space devoted to the career and achievements of Harald Hardrada, who usually appears in such narratives as the shadowy 'third man'. McLynn shows that he was probably the greatest warrior of the three and that he, in turn, lost a battle through unforeseen circumstances.

1066

The Year of The Three Battles

Lord Colin Renfrew

The refinement of radiocarbon dating using the information form tree-ring counts has raised serious doubts about the accepted theoretical frameowkr of European prehistory. Monuments in Central and Western Europe have proved to be considerably older than their supposed Near-Eastern forerunners, and the record must be almost completely rewritten in the light of these new dates. Before Civilsation is a preliminary attempt to do this with the help of analogies from more recent and well-documented primitive societies. The more glaring inconsistencies in the old theory are re-examined and Professor Renfrew shows convincingly how the baffling monuments of prehistoric Europe, like Stonehenge, could have been built without recourse to help from the 'more civilized' Near East.

Before Civilization

General Hackett

John Hackett

Badly wounded at the battle of Arnhem, and then spirited from his hospital bed by the Dutch Resistance, Brigadier John Hackett spent the winter of 1944 in Nazi-occupied Holland, hidden by a Dutch family, at great risk to their own lives, in a house a stone's throw from a German military police billet. After four months in hiding, Hackett was at last well enough to strap a battered suitcase to an ancient bicycle and set out on a high adventure which would, he hoped, lead him to freedom.

I Was A Stranger

Pam Hirsch

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was the most unconventional and influential leader of the Victorian women's movement. Enormously talented, energetic and original, she was a feminist, law-reformer, painter, journalist, the close friend of George Eliot and a cousin of Florence Nightingale. As a painter, Barbara is now recognised as a vital figure among Pre-Raphaelite women artists. As a feminist she led four great campaigns: for married women's legal status, for the right to work, the right to vote and to education. Making brilliant use of unpublished journals and letters, Pam Hirsch has written a biography that is as lively and powerful as its subject, recreating the woman in all her moods, and placing her firmly in the context of women's struggle for equality.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon

Feminist, Artist and Rebel

How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century hgas meant to people throughout the world. THE PIMLICO HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. it traces the rise and full of empires, the impact of nationalism, examines domestic politics from all political persepctives, and considers the darker side of history in the growing repressive power of states across the world and the most terrible of twentieth-century crimes - genocide. THE PIMLICO HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is a provocative and challenging analysis of the whole world in the twentieth century, combining a global sweep with an eye for detail and individual experiences.

Pimlico History Of 20th Century

Elspeth Huxley

In this sequel to The Flame of Thika, Elspeth Huxley takes up her story after the family returns to Kenya after the First World War. Her family and friends, their home and their travels, the glorious wildlife and scenery, described in rich and loving detail, all spring to life in this enchanting book. 'She knows East Africa and she loves it. . . with a critical and understanding sympathy. ' The Times 'What a marvellous writer. . . and what a Kenya it was. ' Financial Times

The Mottled Lizard

Tsering Shakya

Based entirely on unpublished primary sources, this remarkable book -the first authoritative history of modern Tibet - is also the first to provide detailed accounts of: * The covert political manoeuverings in Tibet and the role of the Tibetan, Chinese and British governments; * The Dalai Lama's escape in 1959; * The CIA's involvement and the establishment of a secret military base in the Nepalese Himalayas; * The British government lying to the UN and Douglas Hurd's role in that process; * The power struggles during th Cultural Revolution and the mass uprising against the Chinese that has remained secret until now.

Dragon In The Land Of Snows

The History of Modern Tibet since 1947

Nigel Bagnall

The Punic Wars (264-146BC) sprang from a mighty power struggle between two ancient civilisations - the trading empire of Carthage and the military confedoration of Rome. It was a period of astonishing human misfortune, lasting over a period of 118 years and resulting in the radical depletion of Rome's population and resources and the complete annihilation of Carthage. 
 
All this took place more than 2,000 years ago, yet, as Nigel Bagnall's comprehensive history demonstrates, the ancient conflict is remarkable for its contemporary revelance.

The Punic Wars

Rome, Carthage and the Struggle for the Mediterranean

Napoleon Bonaparte's character and achievements have always divided critics and commentators. In this compelling new biography Frank McLynn draws on the most recent scholarship and throws a brilliant light on this most paradoxical of men - as military leader, lover and emperor. 
 
Tracing Napoleon's extraordinary career, Mc Lynn examines the Promethean legend from the Corsican roots, through the years of the French Revolution and the military triumphs, to the coronation in 1804 and ultimate defeat and imprisonment. Napoleon the man emerges as an even more fascinating character than previously imagined, and McLynn brilliantly reveals the extent to which he was both existential hero and plaything of Fate; mathematician and mystic; intellectual giant and moral pygmy; Great Man and deeply flawed human being.

Napoleon

Black Heart Blue

Black Lace Book Of Women Sexual Fantasies

Black Star Series

Blacklist

Set inside Blandings Castle, this comedy series follows Lord Emsworth and his pig Empress as they meet with his dysfunctional family and friends, and the havoc that follows.

Blandings

Blandings Castle

Blood City Rollers

Bloodlines

Blossom Street

Blue Ant

Bluey

Bodyguard

Bodyguard Series

Bollocks to Alton Towers

Book of Dust Series

Borderlands

Born Wicked

Boudica: the last defender of the Celtic culture; the only woman openly to have led her warriors into battle; the only British warrior to have stood against the might of Imperial Rome - and triumphed. 
 
This is her story.

Boudica

Boy Soldier

Brain Chemicals

Brave Bunnies

Bridge

Bridget Jones's Diary

Brief Encounters

Bright Young Things

Brotherband

Arthur Bryant and John May are Golden Age detectives living in the modern world. Together they head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, ready to solve any of the weird and wonderful crimes that fall across their desks.

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