5ive Guys FC

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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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Anthony Delaney

'In this moving and revelatory book, Anthony Delaney gives a voice to women and men whose lives have been written out of history. At heart, Queer Georgians is about the triumph of love in adversity' Hallie Rubenhold 
 
‘A fascinating story, beautifully told . . . I was utterly enthralled from the first page to the last’ Tracy Borman 
 
‘Anthony Delaney is a superb public historian’ Dan Snow 
 
 
In this dazzling work of restorative history, Dr Anthony Delaney has traced the stories of people daring to challenge society's expectations, unearthing archives and court records to reveal the tragedies and the joys of queer life three centuries ago. From Mother Clap’s Holborn coffee house to the Ladies of Llangollen’s utopian homestead, Delaney breathes new life into the forgotten and offers radical new interpretations of celebrated figures such as Anne Lister and the Chevalier d'Éon. Queer Georgians is an invitation to view our shared history in a whole new light.

Queer Georgians

A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers

N A M Rodger

At the end of the French and Napoleonic wars, British sea-power was at its apogee. But by 1840, the Admiralty was full of ‘intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’. How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the course of the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, the culmination of one of the most admired British historical works in recent decades. 
 
The book is based on a lifetime’s learning, and refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses. Naval specialists will find much that is new, and will be invigorated by the originality of Rodger’s judgements; but everyone who is interested in the one of the central threads in British history will find it rewarding.

The Price of Victory

A Naval History of Britain: 1815 – 1945

Ciarán Murphy

Hurling is Ireland’s national game – a source of fascination and pride, even to people who have never played it. Ciarán Murphy, a lifelong club footballer, used to be one of those people. Then he spent a summer trying to play hurling with a tiny club in the West Waterford Gaeltacht. Along the way he embarked on a quest to understand the history, geography and mystique of this extraordinary sport. 
 
Old Parish is the club of Ciarán’s father, a club where relatives of his are still deeply involved, and possibly the only place brave (or stupid) enough to take on a forty-one-year-old newcomer to the game. Predictably (and at times hilariously), Ciarán finds out just how difficult a sport hurling is to pick up when you’re in your sporting dotage, up against men who’ve played it since childhood. 
 
Ciarán also explores why hurling is played in only half the country; he investigates the origins of hurling clubs’ antipathy to football and the difficulties of establishing hurling in new areas; he looks into the mysteries of hurley-making; and he seeks to understand why, when a hurling legend refers to the sport as ‘the greatest game ever played by any man’, he has to be taken seriously. 
 
Anyone who has ever watched hurling knows that it is something unique and extraordinary. Old Parish explains why.

Old Parish

Notes on Hurling

Steven Lovatt

A moving, powerful quest for belonging through the forsaken landscapes of Britain 
 
When Steven Lovatt’s grandmother died, he lost not only a beloved family member but also his last link to the way of life she had represented: rooted in place, socially democratic, ecologically rich. Cut loose from the past and confronted with a present missing even the birds of his childhood, Steven’s mind cracked. 
 
Drawing on field work, local library archives and oral history, as well as dreams, diaries and visions, Enchanted Ground charts a fractured course from breakdown to belonging. For if he is to survive, Steven realises he must set out, like a pilgrim, across the motorways and monoculture wastes of Britain in search of enchanted ground – and those who have begun to rebuild it.

Enchanted Ground

Growing Roots in a Broken World

Dan Cruickshank

This is the story of the superbly elegant early eighteenth-century Pallant House in Chichester. It’s the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitafields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, ultimately a synagogue. It’s also the story of – among others – a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, a block of flats in London’s East End, and what Ideal Home’s magazine described in 1926 as Britain’s ‘first modern house’ – in Northampton. 
 
Together these buildings reveal the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries. At the same time, as Dan Cruickshank shows, they have much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants: their aspirations, their struggles, their place within society and relationship with their local community. The English House brilliantly weaves these two strands together, blending architectural and social history to create a series of brilliantly observed portraits of fascinating buildings.

The English House

A History in Eight Buildings

Gyles Brandreth

This is the intimate biography of our beloved Queen Elizabeth II, which tells the story of her remarkable life, reign and times, based upon unrivalled access to royal circles and from a perspective unlike any other. Gyles Brandreth writes the Queen's tale candidly with grace and sensitivity as someone close to the monarch, her husband Philip and the wider Royal family. 
 
Told with a refreshing dose of humour and moving honesty, Elizabeth is the must-have biography of the longest-serving monarch in English history, now complete with exclusive content about the 2023 coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.

Elizabeth

An intimate portrait from the writer who knew her and her family for over fifty years

Rob Cowen

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2025 
 
‘A dazzlingly inventive work of literature’ Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways'A wonderful, epic braiding of history, geography and personal memoir' James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral____________________________________________________________________At the heart of this book is a highway. The A1; The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. 
 
In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves. 
 
Written in kaleidoscopic prose, The North Road is an unforgettable exploration of Britain’s great highway. 
_________________________________________________________________________ 
 
'Stunning and utterly unique. The North Road sits in a genre of one' Benjamin Myers, author of The Gallows Pole 
 
'A dazzling, dogged, layered account of one road’s passage through place, time and an ordinary family’s history, The North Road truly is a trip' Melissa Harrison, author of All Among The Barley 
 
'Thought-provoking and beautiful' Matt Gaw, author of Under The Stars 
 
'A beautifully woven and mesmerising book' Tom Bullough, author of Sarn Helen 
 
'Sweeping, sensitive and enduring' Tristan Gooley, author of How To Read A Tree 
‘Rob has given the A1 an entirely new sense of life’ Luke Turner, author of Out Of The Woods

The North Road

Christopher de Hamel

The assassination of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 is one of the most famous events in European history. It inspired the largest pilgrim site in medieval Europe and many works of literature from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and Anouilh's Becket. 
 
In a brilliant piece of historical detective work, Christopher de Hamel here identifies the only surviving relic from Becket's shrine: the Anglo-Saxon Psalter which he cherished throughout his time as Archbishop of Canterbury, and which he may even have been holding when he was murdered. 
 
This is an exciting rediscovery of one of the most evocative artefacts of medieval England.

The Book in the Cathedral

The Last Relic of Thomas Becket

Helen Carr

From the bestselling author Helen Carr, a thrilling new history of the fourteenth century – a time of catastrophe and conflict that shaped England for centuries to come. 
 
***THE TOP TEN BESTSELLER*** 
 
'A sparkling popular history which brings the Middle Ages' most terrible century to life for a new generation' 
Dan Jones 
 
'Tells the story of the 14th-century Plantagenets with verve' 
The Times 
 
'A highly engaging re-evaluation of a tumultuous century' 
Observer 
 
 
The death of Edward I in 1307 marked the beginning of a period of intense turmoil and change in England. The fourteenth century ushered in the beginning of the bloody Hundred Years’ War with France, an epic conflict with Scotland that would last into the sixteenth century, famine in Northern Europe and the largest human catastrophe in known history, the Black Death. 
Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the prolonged spectre of bubonic plague, religious antagonism, revolt and the end of a royal dynasty, this book tells the story of the fourteenth century via the lives of Edward II, Edward III and Richard II – three very different monarchs, each with their own egos and ambitions, each with their own ideas about England and what it meant to wield power. 
 
Alongside the lives of the last Plantagenets, it also uncovers lesser-known voices and untold stories to give a new portrait of a fractured monarchy, the birth of the struggle between Europeanism and nationalism, social rebellion and a global pandemic. 
 
Sceptred Isle is a thrilling narrative account of a century of revolution, shifting power and great change – social, political and cultural – shedding new light on a pivotal period of English history and the people who lived it. 
 
Praise for Sceptred Isle 
'A sweeping look at an era of upheaval, panic and change. Gripping, powerful history' 
Hallie Rubenhold 
 
'A cannily timed new history... [Sceptred Isle] tells the story of the 14th-century Plantagenets with verve' 
The Times 
 
'A highly engaging re-evaluation of a tumultuous century' 
Observer 
 
'Informative, anecdotal and entertaining... So many of the events of that tumultuous century find echoes today' 
Financial Times 
 
'Gripping... Carr is an eloquent guide to the human realities of a century that often has a hallucinatory quality: vivid, desperate and haunting in its glories and its terrors' 
Spectator 
 
'Fast-paced and thrilling... a remarkably evocative account of the high drama, excessive bloodshed and significant societal change during this tumultuous age... hugely enjoyable' 
Country Life 
 
'Excellent' 
Clive Anderson, Loose Ends (BBC Radio4) 
 
'In this vivid, finely researched book, Helen Carr takes us deep into England’s deadly fourteenth century and finds life and human colour. This is a sparkling popular history which brings the Middle Ages' most terrible century to life for a new generation' 
Dan Jones 
 
'Full of colour, with headlong energy, Sceptred Isle brings England’s calamitous fourteenth century to life vividly. While Fortune’s Wheel turns through cycles of famine, plague and war, Helen Carr’s engrossing narrative never loses sight of the complexity, and hope, of human experience' 
Helen Castor

Sceptred Isle

A New History of the Fourteenth Century

Owen Hatherley

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

The Alienation Effect

How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

Joanne Paul

Thomas More is one of the most famous – or infamous – figures in English history. Is he a saintly scholar and an inspiration for statesmen, socialists and intellectuals even today? Or is he the stubborn zealot famously portrayed in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall? 
 
Here is the definitive biography of this hypnotic, flawed figure. Overturning many interpretations of the sixteenth century, Joanne Paul shows More to have been an intellectual and political giant of his age, central to the making of modern Europe. Drawing on new archival discoveries and over a decade's research into More's life and work, this is a richly-told story of family, faith and politics.

Thomas More

A Life and Death in Tudor England

Jackie Wullschläger

Based on thousands of never-before translated letters and unpublished sources, Jackie Wullschläger's enthralling biography is the first account of Monet's turbulent private life and how it determined his expressive, sensuous, sensational painting. Deeply moving, it immerses us in that passionate experience, transforming our understanding of the man, his art and the fullness of his achievement.

Monet

The Restless Vision

Minoo Dinshaw

At the Inns of Court, the intellectual, literary, and social heart of early 17th century London, many pivotal friendships were forged: few closer than that of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward (Ned) Hyde. Both young men were lively characters, industrious, well-connected, principled and optimistic. They dreamed of reforming the government of Charles I, a young court with age-old problems, by restoring the traditional harmony of Crown and Parliament. This is the story of how their hopes climbed, overreached, and fell into an abyss of relentless civil war. 
 
This highly original, vivid and engaging book recreates the atmosphere, drama, players and ideas of what is arguably England’s (and Britain’s) most crucial and traumatic formative period. Through the stories of his two protagonists, Minoo Dinshaw shows how subtle religious and political differences, careful personal judgments, and mere happenstance combined to place these two friends, most reluctantly, on opposite sides in the English Civil Wars. They would both survive, unlike many thousands of others, into old age; both would become influential historians, shaping how we still understand the conflicts of their age. But their friendship, like the once hopeful country in which it had first flourished, would be forever changed: permanently marred by what both men believed to be senseless and unnecessary civil strife.

Friends in Youth

Choosing Sides in the English Civil War

Helen Castor

Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their lives were from the beginning entwined. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king. Yet they soon grew up to be opposites: Richard was the white hart, a thin-skinned narcissist, and Henry the eagle, a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty where Richard inspired only fear. Increasingly threatened by his charismatic cousin, Richard became consumed by the need for total power, and the stage was set for a final confrontation. This is a story about a nation brought to the brink of catastrophe – and two men whose lives were played out in parallel, to devastating effect.

The Eagle and the Hart

The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

Helen Charman

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo. 
 
In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. 
 
Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Mother State

A Political History of Motherhood

Richard Whatmore

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure. 
 
By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states &ndash; and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife and liberty itself turned fanatic. 
 
The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent colonialism. 
 
Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured - especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.

The End of Enlightenment

Empire, Commerce, Crisis

Stephen Alford

Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. 
 
Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley, for Cecil there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies. 
 
All His Spies is a wonderfully engaging and original work of history. Many readers are familiar with the great events of this tumultuous time, but All His Spies shows how easily these dramas could have turned out very differently. Cecil’s sureness of purpose, his espionage network and good luck all conspired to keep England uninvaded and to create a new ‘British’ monarchy which has endured to the present day.

All His Spies

The Secret World of Robert Cecil

Andrew Hindmoor

Vladimir Lenin, an occasional resident of North London who went on to other things, has been credited with once saying that there are decades where nothing happens but weeks when decades happen. The first two and a half decades of this century in Britain have had plenty of those weeks. Indeed, our recent history has at times resembled an episode of Casualty, the long-running BBC hospital drama in which every hedge trimmer slips, every gas pipe leaks, every piece of scaffolding collapses and everyone ends up in intensive care. 
 
In Haywire Andrew Hindmoor makes sense of the deluge of events which have rained down on Britain since 2000, from the Iraq War to financial collapse, austerity to Brexit, as well as more easily forgotten moments such as the MP’s expenses scandal. He shows not simply how one crisis has quickly followed another, but how each crisis has compounded the next, so that disaster feels like the new normal. Has Britain simply been the victim of a particularly prolonged run of bad luck which will, sooner or later, come to an end? No. Hindmoor argues that the way the British state is organised has, time and again, made a crisis out of a drama – and that it is time to find an alternative before we all go haywire.

Haywire

A Political History of Britain since 2000

Lisa Hilton

There are few labels not attached to Aphra Behn - playwright, poet, a spy, a starlet woman condemned for loose morals. And yet, for all her notoriety Aphra Behn is an enigma. 
 
 Born in around 1640, her early life isn't well recorded and facts about her are continually disputed. Her birth name may have been Eaffrey Johnson and she could have been the daughter of a Canterbury barber, although neither fact is certain. And, just after the Restoration she probably briefly lived in the English colony of Surinam in South America, where she was perhaps embroiled in political espionage. Whatever the truth, Behn was in London by 1664 and six years later was writing for the stage. 
 
 For a decade, Behn's work dominated the London stage. Then, suddenly in 1682, she was charged with libel. Her plays could not be produced and by the time of the trial of the century Behn was broke. She decided that writing would be her way out and began to write a novel based on the most notorious adultress of a notoriously adulterous age - Lady Henrietta Berkeley.

The Scandal of the Century

Martin Clunes

Inspired by Martin Clunes' own adoption of a former guide dog, Meetings With Remarkable Animals celebrates the fascinating, moving and sometimes astonishing ways animals have enriched our lives. From search and rescue dogs to mine-sniffing rats, and life-saving dolphins to therapy horses and medal-winning cats and pigeons, the stories brought to life will charm, surprise and astonish in equal measure. 
 
Together with his own life-changing encounters with animals around the world, Martin has celebrated the intelligence, loyalty, and companionship of some truly extraordinary creatures whose lives have been entwined with our own. By turns heart-warming, inspiring and always fascinating, Meetings With Remarkable Animals gives us a chance to meet them too.

Meetings With Remarkable Animals

Ben Macintyre

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. 
A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod. 
 
Drawing on unpublished source material, exclusive interviews with the SAS, and testimony from witnesses including hostages, negotiators, intelligence officers and the on-site psychiatrist, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes readers on a gripping journey from the years and weeks of build-up on both sides, to the minute-by-minute account of the siege and rescue. 
 
Recreating the dramatic conversations between negotiators and hostages, the cutting-edge intelligence work happening behind-the-scenes, and the media frenzy around this moment of international significance, The Siege is the remarkable story of what really happened on those fateful six days, and the first full account of a moment that forever changed the way the nation thought about the SAS – and itself.

The Siege

The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama

Corinne Fowler

The countryside is almost sacred to many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together, with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. 
 
Empire transformed rural lives: whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to link the lives of their descendants now. 
 
To give an honest account, to offer both affection and criticism, is a matter of respect: we should not knowingly tell half a history. This new knowledge of our island stories, once gained, can only deepen Britons' relationship with their beloved landscape.

Our Island Stories

Ten Walks through Rural Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire

Country Walks through Colonial Britain

Andy Beckett

In the great revolutionary year of 1968, Tony Benn was a respectable Labour minister in his forties, and he was restless. While new social movements were shaking up Britain and much of the world, Westminster politics seemed stuck. It was time, he decided, for a different approach. 
 
Over the next half century, the radicalized Benn helped forge a new left in Britain. He was joined by four other politicians, who would become comrades, collaborators and rivals: Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn. 
 
For Andy Beckett, the story of these admired and loathed political explorers - both their sudden breakthroughs and long stretches in the wilderness - is the untold story of British politics in modern times. As he reveals, their project to create a radically more equal, liberal and democratic Britain has been much more influential than electoral history might suggest, and can be seen from the shape of our city life to the causes of our culture wars. 
 
For their many detractors, this influence was and remains dangerous: a form of extremism that must be stamped out. But as these five searchers believed, in politics there is no total victory - nor total defeat.

The Searchers

Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies

Terry Deary

The surprisingly sadistic Boudica would be forgotten if it weren't for the Ninth Legion, Elizabeth I a minor royal without the Spanish Armada, and Churchill an opposition windbag without the Nazis. Britain loves its heroes so much we have been known to pickle them in brandy to keep them fresh. And after all, every nation sometimes needs a bit of unifying Blitz spirit (although in an ideal world, we wouldn’t have accidentally let Corporal Hitler go in the first place). 
 
Britain and the British have a proud history of choosing their enemies, from the Romans to the Germans. You might even say they made Britain what it is today...

A History of Britain in Ten Enemies

Liam O’Callaghan

Liam O'Callaghan's revelatory Blood and Thunder shows that the rise of Irish rugby is inextricable from the tensions, debates and divisions – of politics, religion and class – that have defined modern Irish history. 
 
Despite the political partition of the island, Ireland competes at rugby internationally with an all-island team – and with a bespoke anthem that nobody loves but everyone tolerates. Ireland has become a leading rugby nation despite its tiny population and the fact that the sport is only the fourth most popular team game on the island by participation. 
 
In Blood and Thunder, O’Callaghan traces the dramatic evolution whereby a rugby nation that was deeply attached to amateurism has made such a dramatic success of professionalism. From the sequence of events that led Ireland's private Catholic secondary schools to embrace rugby, to the controversies and crises that have shaken Irish rugby – including the Northern Troubles, the Belfast rape trial, and the rising toll of head injuries – Blood and Thunder tells the rich and fascinating story of Irish rugby. 
 
Blood and Thunder is more than a social and political history of Irish rugby. It is also a shadow-history of modern Ireland, rooted in brilliant original research and packed with terrific stories.

Blood And Thunder

Rugby and Irish Life: A History

Jack Cornish

Hundreds of thousands of miles of paths reach into, and connect, communities across England and Wales. More than just a practical way for us to walk, ride and cycle around, they are an inheritance from the past, revealing how our ancestors interacted with and shaped their landscapes. But thousands of miles are still missing from our maps. 
 
Exploring the deep history of these pathways, Jack Cornish uncovers how this millennia-old network was created and has evolved - from prehistoric trackways to the modern creation of towns - reflecting the contours of the past and the changing fortunes of society.

The Lost Paths

A History of How We Walk From Here To There

Stephen Fisher

'With his wealth of knowledge and exacting eye for detail, [Fisher's] book on D-Day is sure to impress a vast audience' Dan Snow 
'Stephen Fisher... is a very rare beast - a man who can bring stunning research and scholarship hand-in-glove with the gifts of a fine storyteller' James Holland 
'Written with verve and panache... It’s a brilliant evocation of one of the greatest days in history, and Fisher has done it proud. Bravo!' Robert Lyman, author of Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-1940 
_________ 
 
6th June 1944 saw the largest seaborne assault in human history: D-Day. The landings on the five Normandy beaches, Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, will go down in legend as the first footsteps on the journey to end the war in northern Europe. 
 
While much has been written about the operation as a whole, little detailed attention has been paid to the battle for Sword Beach itself, the easternmost of the amphibious attack areas. For the first time, historian and archaeologist Stephen Fisher puts the British landing under the spotlight and using previously unseen research, documents and personal testimonies pieces together the buildup, the day itself and its aftermath in such a way as to uniquely bring the operation to vivid life. 
 
Following a massive air and naval bombardment that began before the sun had even risen, the stage was set for the first of tens of thousands of troops to come ashore on Sword that day. It was to be a day of triumph and tragedy as the Allies pushed forward to the key objective of Caen against German defenders who were, uniquely on D-Day, backed up by an armoured division. 
 
Never before has this campaign been afforded such insightful and detailed scrutiny. Stephen Fisher brings his considerable knowledge and expertise to paint a thrilling picture of how the deep beachhead was established and pays tribute to the heroism and sacrifices that were made on that fateful day.

Sword Beach

The Untold Story of D-Day’s Forgotten Victory

Anthony Powell

**The abridged memoirs of Anthony Powell, with a new introduction from Louisa Young** 
 
'Powell can offer many of the rewards of comic creation we find in a Dickens or a Jane Austen' TLS 
 
Anthony Powell earned a reputation as a literary giant within the generation of Waugh, Orwell and Greene, best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time. 
 
These memoirs reveal Powell - the man and author - providing an insider's view of the British literary scene and social elite from the 1920s to the 1980s. In these pages, Powell observes the obscenity trial sparked by Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Shirley Temple's libel suit after Graham Greene reviewed Wee Willie Winkie with 'more than his usual verve'. Throughout, Powell paints vivid, witty and superbly written portraits of his contemporaries, other authors including Kingsley Amis, V.S. Naipaul, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. 
 
Featuring an illuminating new introduction by Louisa Young, TO KEEP THE BALL ROLLING is the abridged version of Anthony Powell's four volumes of memoir, first published between 1976 and 1982.

To Keep The Ball Rolling

Diane Abbott

From challenging expectations as a bright and restless child of the Windrush generation to making history as the first elected Black female MP in the UK, Diane Abbott has seen it all. 
 
A Woman Like Me takes readers through Diane&rsquo;s incredible journey, painting a vivid picture of growing up in 1960s North London with her working-class Jamaican parents, before entering the hallowed halls of Cambridge University to study history. Ever since the day she first walked through the House of Commons as the first Black woman MP, she has been a fearless and vocal champion for the causes that have made Britain what it is today, whether it&rsquo;s increasing access to education for Black children and speaking out against the Iraq war or advocating tirelessly for refugees and immigrants. 
 
A unique figure in British public life, Diane has often had nothing but the courage of her convictions to carry her through incredibly hostile environments, from torrential abuse in the mainstream media and on social media, to being shunned by the political establishment, including by her own party. Written with frankness and wry humour, A Woman Like Me is an inspirational account that celebrates how one woman succeeded against massive odds and built an extraordinary legacy.

A Woman Like Me

A Memoir

Mick Clifford

October 1971. Nineteen-year-old Una Lynskey vanishes near her home in Co. Meath. In the weeks that follow, and on flimsy grounds, gardaí identify three young local men as suspects. Within days of her body being found, one of the three is beaten to death by members of Una&rsquo;s family. 
 
The entire sequence of events is a tragedy in a quiet rural community - the wrong men jailed, no one ever facing justice - and becomes one of the most notorious failures in Irish policing and judicial history.In Who Killed Una Lynskey?, award-winning journalist Mick Clifford has built a compelling portrait of the case from interviews with the surviving main players, as well as exclusive access to the files of a private investigator who uncovered information the gardaí missed - or ignored. 
 
A timely, humane and compulsive read, this is a ground-breaking account of the botched investigation and its devastating consequences for not just four devastated families, but also the reputation of the gardaí.

Who Killed Una Lynskey?

A True Story of Murder, Vigilante Justice and the Garda ‘Heavy Gang’

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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