Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Clare Jackson

ames VI & I, who died 400 years ago, was one of Britain’s most consequential and interesting monarchs, not least in creating the British monarchy itself by joining the English and Scottish thrones. A major intellectual, James's preoccupations ranged from witchcraft and theological controversy to hunting, diplomacy, poetry and sartorial fashion. The 'Mirror of Great Britain' was a spectacular jewel that gave symbolic endorsement to James's vision of British union, but mirrors themselves — with their limitless capacity to magnify, illuminate and distort — supplied James with one of his favourite literary metaphors.Ruler of Scotland for nearly four decades before his accession to the English throne in 1603, James was a ‘cradle king’ whose long reigns encompassed extraordinary dramas, including his abduction in the ‘Ruthven Raid’ in 1582 and his attempted assassination in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In his lifetime, James often confounded contemporaries’ expectations while his posthumous reputation has been distorted by crude stereotypes.Closely attentive to James’s own words — in numerous publications, manuscript musings, topical verse and private correspondence — Clare Jackson's wonderful new book tells the story of this highly unusual monarch with great flair and insight.

The Mirror of Great Britain

A Life of James VI & I

Edmund King

The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I (1100-35) was never meant to be king, but he was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthlessness and intelligence and through the dynastic legacy of his daughter Matilda, who began the Plantagenet line that would rule England until 1485. A self-consciously diligent and thoughtful king, his rule was looked back on as the real post-invasion re-founding of England as a new realm, integrated into the continent, wealthy and stable. 
 
Edmund King's wonderful portrait of Henry shows him as a strikingly charismatic and thoughtful man. His life was dogged by a single great disaster, the death of his teenage heir William in the White Ship disaster. Despite astonishing numbers of illegitimate sons, Henry was now left with only a daughter. This fact would shape the rest of the 12th century and beyond.

Henry I (Penguin Monarchs)

The Father of His People

Sean Cunningham

Henry VII was one of England's unlikeliest monarchs. An exile and outsider with barely a claim to the throne, his victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field seemed to many in 1485 only the latest in the sequence of violent convulsions among England's nobility that would come to be known as the Wars of the Roses – with little to suggest that the obscure Henry would last any longer than his predecessor. To break the cycle of division, usurpation, deposition and murder, he had both to maintain a grip on power and to convince England that his rule was both rightful and effective. Here, Sean Cunningham explores how, in his ruthless and controlling kingship, Henry VII did so, in the process founding the Tudor dynasty.

Henry VII (Penguin Monarchs)

Treason and Trust

Edward White

For more than forty years, Diana, Princess of Wales, has been mythologized to the most extraordinary degree. Adored and lionized by some, ridiculed and traduced by others, Diana has always commanded a cultural presence unmatched by any other member of the royal family. 
 
In Dianaworld, Edward White offers both a portrait of the princess and a group portrait of those who existed in her orbit—from her royal in-laws, her servants, and the dilapidated ranks of the British aristocracy from which she rose, to drag performers, artists, Britain’s ethnic minorities, and the Gen Z superfans who maintain her status as a cultural icon. 
 
Drawing on a wide array of sources and perspectives, many never used in books about Diana or the royal family, White vividly recreates the world Diana lived in, explores the growth of her global reputation, and illuminates her lasting impact on the world she left behind.

Dianaworld

An Obsession

Nick Hayes

Early one September, Nick Hayes brought his houseboat up the Thames into rural Oxfordshire, mooring opposite a strange tree that towered over the surrounding meadowland. The tree, he would discover, was a hybrid of the eastern cottonwood, brought back from colonial Canada. The land was the Hardwick estate, whose apparently timeless tranquillity – like so much of the English countryside – masks a darker history. Yet Hardwick also tells another, quite different story. 
 
Over the following months, Hayes learns that its rolling hills and fertile valleys are on the front lines of a battle between ownership and belonging. Through a golden autumn, and the frosts and floods of winter and early spring, Hayes explores an estate that, acknowledging the colonial origins of its wealth, has become a haven for those who are both unable and unwilling to be part of a countryside geared towards profit at any cost. Living and working among this extraordinary community of farmers and craftspeople, Hayes contemplates what we have lost in England, as our sense of kinship with the land, and the deep knowledge that arose from it, was destroyed. 
 
Yet, Hayes suggests, if we can learn from the cultures we have exploited, and from the tentative roots being put down in this radical Oxfordshire estate, perhaps we can start to unpick – and even re-enchant – our relationship with the land. The Medicine Tree is a singular act of storytelling and recovery: of giants, gods, witches, trees, horror and hope, of entanglement, reparation and solidarity.

The Medicine Tree

Repairing the Rotten Roots of England

Nicholas Vincent

King John ruled England for seventeen and a half years. For most of that time he enjoyed, if not popularity, then great wealth and power. Yet to posterity his entire reign has come to be embodied in a single image. Furious, outmanoeuvred, crippled with vice, the King sits at Runnymede sealing or more often (and anachronistically) signing Magna Carta. No matter whether we approach this event as reactionaries wishing that the King would assert himself, as conservatives delighted by the restoration of constitutional 'rights', or as radicals longing for liberty and revolution, Runnymede changes everything in our perception of King John. Seventeen years of history are reduced to a picnic on the banks of the Thames. John is exposed as villainous and pathetic. The people triumph. Tyranny is righted. 
 
Nicholas Vincent's fascinating portrayal of a complex man unpicks the character behind one of England's most despised kings. Was he as evil as legend suggests? Or has he been unfairly misunderstood?

John (Penguin Monarchs)

An Evil King?

Catherine Nall

When Henry IV seized the throne from his cousin Richard II, people saw it as a hopeful new beginning for England. The first monarch to have English as his mother tongue since the Norman conquest, Henry seemed to embody the ideals of chivalric kingship: mercy, piety, military prowess and learning. 
 
Yet deposing a crowned monarch was not a stable foundation on which to build a reign. Henry IV found himself challenged from all sides, plagued by conspiracies, rebellions, assassination attempts and crippling debts, while his tense relationships with Parliament and with his own son, Shakespeare's Prince Hal, saw his grip on power falter. Nevertheless, he was the first king and founder of a Lancastrian dynasty which would go on to shape England for centuries to come. 
 
In this lively study, Catherine Nall reappraises a monarch who weathered upheaval and uncertainty and held on to the throne through sheer force of will.

Henry IV (Penguin Monarchs)

The Afflicted King

Stella Tillyard

George IV spent most of his life waiting to become king: as a pleasure-loving and rebellious Prince of Wales during the sixty-year reign of his father, George III, and for ten years as Prince Regent, when his father went mad. 
 
'The days are very long when you have nothing to do' he once wrote plaintively, but he did his best to fill them with pleasure - women, art, food, wine, fashion, architecture. He presided over the creation of the Regency style, which came to epitomise the era, and he was, with Charles I, the most artistically literate of all our kings. Yet despite his life of luxury and indulgence, George died alone and unmourned. 
 
Stella Tillyard has not written a judgemental book, but a very human and enjoyable one, about this most colourful of all British kings.

George IV (Penguin Monarchs)

King in Waiting

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