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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Linda Colley

Ranging over a quarter of a millennium and four continents, Captives uncovers the experiences and writings of those tens of thousands of men and women who took part in Britain's rise to imperial pre-eminence, but who got caught and caught out. Here are the stories of Sarah Shade, a camp follower imprisoned alongside defeated British legions in Southern India; of Joseph Pitts, white slave and pilgrim to Mecca; of Florentia Sale, captive and diarist in Afghanistan; of those individuals who crossed the cultural divide and switched identities, like the Irishman George Thomas; and of others who made it back, like the onetime Chippewa warrior and Scot, John Rutherford. Linda Colley uses these tales of ordinary individuals trapped in extraordinary encounters to re-evaluate the character and diversity of the British Empire. She explores what they reveal about British responses to, relations with, and frequent dependence upon different non-European peoples. She shows how British attitudes to Islam, slavery, race, and American Revolutionaries look different once the captive's perspective is admitted. And she demonstrates how these individual captivities illuminate the limits of Britain's global power over time - as well as its extent. Richly illustrated and evocatively written, Captives is both a magnificent and compelling work of history, and a powerful and original reappraisal of the significance and survivals of empire now.

Captives

Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850

John Prebble

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Rebellion, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. There is little in this book about Bonnie Prince Charlie and other principals of the last Jacobite Rising of 1745. Culloden recalls them by name and action, presenting the battle as it was for them, describing their life as fugitives in the glens or as prisoners in the gaols and hulks, their transportation to the Virginias or their deaths on the gallows at Kennington Common. The book begins in the rain at five o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 16 April 1746, when the Royal Army marched out of Nairn to fight the clans on Culloden Moor. It is not a partisan book, its feeling is for the 'Common Men' on both sides - John Grant charging with Clan Chatten and seeing the white gaiters of the British infantry suddenly as the east wind lifted the cannon smoke, and Private Andrew Taylor in a red coat waiting for Clan Chatten to reach him, likening them to 'a troop of hungry wolves'. Culloden reminds us, too, that many of the men who harried the glens as ruthlessly as the Nazis in Occupied Europe were in fact Scots themselves. It recalls the fact that many men in Prince Charles' army had been forced to join him. It shows that a British foot-soldier's wish for a sup of brandy on a cold morning before battle is as much a reality as a Prince's pretensions to a throne. The detail for the story told in Culloden has come from regimental Order Books and manuals, from contemporary newspapers and magazines, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, eye-witness accounts of atrocity and persecution, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

Culloden

Lauro Martines

In April 1478, a plot to murder the two heads of the powerful Medici family dramatically miscarried. The younger of the two brothers was killed, but Lorenzo the Magnificent, the brilliant poet and connoisseur escaped. A bloodbath followed and all of Italy was at once affected as it emerged that the Pope, the King of Naples, and the Duke of Urbino were deeply implicated in the plot, and that binding treaties required Milan and Venice to assist Florence. 
 
If the conspirators had succeeded and Lorenzo had been killed the future of the Medici family and, indeed, of the Florentine state would have been utterly transformed.

April Blood

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

Alan Stewart

Courtier, poet, soldier, diplomat - Philip Sidney was one of the most promising young men of his age. Son of Elizabeth I's deputy in Ireland, nephew and heir to her favourite, Leicester, he was tipped for high office - and even to inherit the throne. But Sidney soon found himself caught up in the intricate politics of Elizabeth's court and forced to become as Machiavellian as everyone around him if he was to achieve his ambitions. Against a backdrop of Elizabethan intrigue and the battle between Protestant and Catholic for predominance in Europe, Alan Stewart tells the riveting story of Philip Sidney's struggle to suceed. Seeing that his continental allies had a greater sense of his importance that his English contamporaries, Philip turned his attention to Europe. He was made a French baron at seventeen, corresponded with leading foreign scholars, considered marriage proposals from two princesses and, at the time of his tragically early death, was being openly spoken of as the next ruler of the Netherlands.

Philip Sidney

A Double Life

Russell Miller

Compiled from interviews, diaries, letters and contemporaneous first-person accounts - many never before published - this oral history follows the adventures of the courageous men and women who volunteered for service with Britain's Special Operations Executives and the United States' Office of Strategic Services. They parachuted behind enemy lines, often alone, with orders to cause mayhem. Arrest almost always resulted in torture and emprisonment; sometimes in execution. In occupied France, equipped with false identities, they played a deadly game of cat and mouse with the Gestapo; in the Balkans they discovered that the fiery politics of the region were as dangerous as the enemy; in the Burmese jungle they led native marauders in surprise attacks against the Japanese. Supported by a team of back-room boffins who dreamed up ingenious devices like exploding rats and invisible ink, the special agents of World War Two really were a breed apart. This is their extraordinary story, in their own words.

Behind The Lines

The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II

Norman Longmate

Although nearly 90% of the population of Great Britain remained civilians throughout the war, or for a large part of it, their story has so far largely gone untold. In contrast with the thousands of books on military operations, barely any have concerned themselves with the individual's experience. The problems of the ordinary family are barely ever mentioned - food rationing, clothes rationing, the black-out and air raids get little space, and everyday shortages almost none at all. 
 
This book is an attempt to redress the balance; to tell the civilian's story largely through their own recollections and in their own words.

How We Lived Then

History of Everyday Life During the Second World War, A

Roger Sawyer

Born in Ireland in 1864 Roger Casement acted as British Consul in various parts of Africa (1895-1904) and Brazil(1906-11) where he denounced atrocities among Congolese and Putumayo rubber workers. knighted in 1911, He returned to Ireland, where as an ardent nationalist he attempted to enlist German help for the cause. He was hanged for high treason in London in 1916. A compulsive diary writer, his so-called 'Black' Diaries were finally released into the public domain in 1994. At the time of his trial, these diaries-detailing his promiscuous homosexual activities in Brazil-were used to condemn him and, subsequently, to poison his reputation. Published here for the first time-as are his more public 'White' Diaries of the same year-they not only offer the reader the opportunity to judge their authenticity-still a matter of heated debate-but they also take us deep into the mind of the bravest, most selfless and practical humanitarian of the Edwardian age.

Roger Casement's Diaries

1910:The Black and the White

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

The word Darien is a scar on the memory of the Scots, and the hurt is still felt even where the cause of the wound is dimly understood. Three hundred years ago the Parliament of Scotland, in one of its last acts before the nation lost its political identity, defied the King and the persistent hostility of the English to establish a noble trading company, to settle a colony, and to recover its people from a century of despair, privation, famine and decay. 
 
The site of the colony, Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, was the enduring dream of William Paterson, the erratically brilliant Scot who had helped to found the Bank of England. He called it 'the door of the seas, and the key of the universe', and believed that it would become a bridge between East and West, an entrepot through which would pass the richest trade in the world. 
 
The first attempt to make the Company a joint Scots and English venture was crushed by the English Parliament. The Scots created it by themselves, in a wave of almost hysterical enthusiasm, subscribing half of the nation's capital. Three years later the 'noble undertaking', crippled by the quarrelsome stupidity of its leaders, deliberately obstructed by the English Government, and opposed in arms by Spain, had ended in stunning disaster. Nine fine ships owned by the Company had been sunk, burnt or abandoned. Over two thousand men, women and children who went to the fever-ridden colony never returned. It was a tragic curtain to the last act of Scotland's independence. 
 
John Prebble's book is the first detailed account of the Darien Settlement, drawn from original sources in the records of the Company, the journals, letters and memoirs of those who tried to turn William Paterson's dream into reality.

Darien Disaster

Nicholas Roe

Leigh Hunt is the forgotten giant of English Romanticism. The man Virginia Woolf called the 'spiritual grandfather' of the modern world was descended from black Caribbeans and grew up a child of the American and French revolutions. A poet and radical journalist, he threw off the shackles of the old order and campaigned tirelessly for Irish freedom and the abolition of slavery. Unwilling to see the Prince of Wales as an 'Adonis of Loveliness', Hunt was jailed for 'diabolical libel' that presented the prince as he was: a corpulent fifty-year-old, sodden with drink and drugs. 
 
Hunt was the centre of a charismatic generation. In prison, he drew the homage of Lord Byron, and soon afterwards discovered the Romantic geniuses Keats and Shelley. He was also a man riven by contradicitons, enjoying a controversial public role while battling with private demons. Hunt's own poetry glows with the sexual frankness that characterised all his relationships, male and female. 
 
Written with flair and brilliant imaginative insight, and using a wealth of unpublished manuscript sources, Fiery Heart: The First Life of Leigh Hunt overturns existing accounts and presents a sparkling new portrait of Leigh Hunt and the English Romantics.

Fiery Heart

The First Life of Leigh Hunt

Richard Aldous

‘Engaging and highly entertaining’ Sunday Times 
 
 The dramatic confrontation between the two 'mighty opposites' of the Victorian age, brilliantly recreated by a talented young historian. 
 
 Gladstone and Disraeli were the fiercest political rivals of the modern age. Their intense hatred was ideological and deeply personal. Victorian Britain ruled the oceans and vast territories 'on which the sun never set'. The vitriolic duel between Gladstone and Disraeli was nothing less than a battle to lead the richest and most powerful nation on earth. 
 
 To Disraeli, his antagonist was an 'unprincipled maniac' characterised by an 'extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition'. For Gladstone, his rival was 'The Grand Corrupter' whose destruction he plotted 'day and night, week by week, month by month'. Victorians were electrified by the confrontation. No wonder that when Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass appeared in 1871, so many readers recognised the great adversaries as the warring lion and unicorn 'fighting for the crown'. 
 
 Richard Aldous gives us the first modern telling of this dramatic story of an intense and momentous rivalry. His vivid narrative style - at turns powerful, witty, stirring and theatrical - breathes new life into a familiar, half-remembered tale that is pivotal in Britain's island history. The Lion and the Unicorn is a brilliant rethinking of the Gladstone and Disraeli story for a new generation. 
 
Richard Aldous confirms a perennial truth: in politics, everything is personal.

The Lion and the Unicorn

Gladstone vs Disraeli

Ladislaus Löb

Two months after his eleventh birthday, on 9 July 1944, the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp closed behind Ladislaus Löb. Five months later, with the Second World War still raging, he crossed the border into Switzerland, cold and hungry, but alive and safe. He was not alone, but part of a group of some 1,670 Jewish men, women and children from Hungary, who had been rescued from the Nazis as a result of a deal made by a man called Rezso Kasztner - himself a Hungarian Jew - with Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust. Twelve years and a miscarriage of justice later Kasztner was murdered by an extremist Jewish gang in his adopted home of Israel. 
 
To this day he remains a highly controversial figure, regarded by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. He was accused of betraying the bulk of the Hungarian Jewry by hand-picking only those who were politically and personally dear to him, or those from whom he could benefit financially, and the judge of his post-war trial concluded that he had 'sold his soul to Satan'. 
 
Rezso Kasztner tells his story - and also the story of a child who lived to grow up after the Holocaust thanks to him. A compelling combination of history and memoir, it is also an examination of one individual's unique achievement and a consideration of the profound moral issues raised by his dealings with some of the most evil men ever known.

Rezso Kasztner

The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews: A Survivor's Account

A wealthy lawyer, debonair ladies' man, consummate actor, and courageous gambler, Dusko Popov played the role of playboy amongst the top echelons of British society to become one of Germany's most trusted spies. In fact, he was one of Britain's most successful double agents, and, some say, the inspiration for James Bond. With full access to FBI and MI5 records, along with private family papers, his incredible adventures can now be told authoritatively for the first time. 
 
Recruited by the Abwehr in 1940, 27-year-old Popov immediately offered his services to the British. His code-name was Tricycle. Throughout the war he fed the Germans with a constant stream of military 'intelligence', all vetted by MI5, and came to be viewed as their most important and reliable agent in Britain. But when he was ordered by the Abwehr to the United States to report on the defences at Pearl Harbor, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, failed to heed his warnings, distrusting all spies and detesting Popov in particular, whom he considered to be 'a moral degenerate'. 
 
Facing the danger of exposure, arrest and execution on a daily basis, Tricycle went on to build up a network known as the Yugoslav Ring, which not only delivered a stream of false information to Berlin but also supplied vital intelligence to the Allies on German rocketry, strategy and security. After the war Dusko Popov was granted British citizenship and awarded an OBE. The presentation was made, appropriately, in the cocktail bar at the Ritz.

Codename Tricycle

The true story of the Second World War's most extraordinary double agent

Kate Chisholm

Dr Johnson is often thought of as a strident, overbearing conversationalist, a man who famously asserted that 'Women have all the liberty they should wish to have'. But in this revealing book Kate Chisholm argues it is time to consider how Johnson lived his life, not just what he said. She proposes that the heart of the man, the truth of his character, can more clearly be seen via his many - close, generous, equal - relationships with women. 
 
At one end of the spectrum were Johnson's mother Sarah; his 'painted poppet' wife Tetty; and the women, like the prostitute Poll Carmichael and the blind poetess Anna Williams, he took in when they had nowhere else to go. At the other end were Mary Wollstonecraft, who refers to Johnson in Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Hester Thrale, renowned wit and Johnson's 'dear mistress'; Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus was an instant bestseller; and many more besides. 
 
By looking again at this controversial figure through the eyes of this extraordinary cast of female characters, we can discover the essential and unexpected Johnson.

Wits and Wives

Dr Johnson in the Company of Women

Sarah Wise

Towards the end of 1831, the authorities unearthed a series of crimes at Number 3, Nova Scotia Gardens in East London that appeared to echo the notorious Burke and Hare killings in Edinburgh three years earlier. After a long investigation, three bodysnatchers were put on trial for supplying the anatomy schools of London with suspiciously fresh bodies for dissection.They later became known as The London Burkers, and their story was dubbed 'The Italian Boy' case. The furore which led directly to the passing of controversial legislation which marked the beginning of the end of body snatching in Britain. 
 
In The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise not only investigates the case of the London Burkers but also, by making use of an incredibly rich archival store, the lives of ordinary lower-class Londoners. Here is a window on the lives of the poor - a window that is opaque in places, shattered in others but which provides an unprecedented view of low-life London in the 1830s.

The Italian Boy

Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London

Nigel Tattersfield

`I pray people will read this richly detailed and absorbing book, with its vivid renaissance of a matter most of us English seem to have wished into oblivion. ' John Fowles Meticulously kept by Walter Prideaux, the log of the Daniel and Henry provides an astonishing record of a trading venture in the year 1700. Two years earlier, the Guinea trade had been prised loose by an Act of Parliament from the monopoly of the Royal African Company, and respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized what they saw as an opportunity for quick rewards from the slave trade. Few of these merchants knew anything of trading in Africa, nor of the unscrupulous tribalchiefs who readily offered men, women and children in hard bargaining for beads, alcohol, weapons and gunpowder. In the second part of this book, Tattersfield went in search of long-forgotten documents to chart how small provincial ports fared both economically and morally in the early years of slave trading.

The Forgotten Trade

Comprising the Log of the Daniel and Henry of 1700 and Accounts of the Slave Trade From the Minor Ports of England 1698-1725

Ian Gilmour

Britain in the eighteenth century was deeply divided; riots over politics, food and religion were endemic. Despite the relative liberty of English institutions; the penal code was the harshest in Europe - stealing a hankerchief was a capital offence. In this brilliant history of the hidden side of the eighteenth century, Ian Gilmour argues that violence usually stemmed from the incompetence or arrogance of the ruling class. He tells the story of the great rebellions - of Scotland in 1715 and 1745, of Ireland in 1798 - and the famous episodes of Wilkes and Gordon. But he also paints a vivid picture of the vicious discipline of the army, skulduggery at elections, the class violence of industrial struggles, the ritual violence of duelling and the swingeing punishment of poachers.

Riots, Rising And Revolution

Governance and Violence in Eighteenth Century England

Piers Brendon

In his account of four characters, each of whose importance was global, each of them, in their different ways, 'monsters', Piers Brendon writes wittily, sharply and succinctly - and brilliantly illuminates an age. His cast is as follows: Lord Northcliffe, the creator of modern journalism; Arthur Balfour, at the centre of the British political stage for half a century, and inspirer of the Balfour Declaration which changed the face of the Middle East; Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Suffragettes, whose personal gentility contrasted so oddly with her violent activities; and Baden-Powell, the Boy Scout who never really grew up, but who created a movement that spread to almost every country in the world. Piers Brendon maintains that the Edwardian era has been obfuscated by huge biographies. With four shafts of superb irony he penetrates the mists.

Eminent Edwardians

Four figures who defined their age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell

Richard Bourke

Peace in Ireland is a classic study of the Northern Ireland Troubles which examines the events of 1968–2003 in broad historical perspective, including an exploration of the ideological roots of the conflict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It covers the decisive episodes that marked the trajectory of the Troubles, from the Civil Rights Movement, Bloody Sunday and the Sunningdale Agreement, to the hunger strikes, the paramilitary ceasefires and the Good Friday Agreement. 
 
The book exposes the assumption that the conflict was a product of imperialism, and challenges the idea that the descent into violence was brought about by atavistic regression or ethnic solidarity. Its central argument is that the Northern Ireland debacle was a distinctly modern conflict, fought over rival aspirations to popular sovereignty. Accordingly, the book places opposing conceptions of democratic legitimacy at the centre of the dispute. From this angle, it analyses both Nationalism and Republicanism as well as Unionism and Loyalism with the aim of providing a sustained investigation of the impact of political ideas on modern Ireland.

Peace In Ireland

The War of Ideas

Samuel Hynes

The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors. His book is a portrait of a tumultuous time - out of which contemporary England was made.

Edwardian Turn Of Mind

Peter J Gwyn

Proud, greedy, corrupt and driven by overwhelming personal ambition. Such is the traditional image of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop if Tournai and Papal Legate. It is an image which Peter Gwyn examines, challenges and decisively overturns in this remarkable book. 
 
From exceedingly humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any other British commoner. Peter Gwyn explores every aspect of the Cardinal's career - not least his relationship with Henry VIII - and sets it firmly in a vividly recreated Tudor world. The Wolsey who emerges is a man of prodigious energy and ability, a tireless dispenser of justice, an enlightened reformer wholly dedicated to his king and country - a man who has been consistently misrepresented and maligned for four-and-a-half centuries.

The King's Cardinal

The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey

Roger Osborne

In late eighteenth-century Britain a handful of men brought about the greatest transformation in human history. Inventors, industrialists and entrepreneurs ushered in the age of powered machinery and the factory, and thereby changed the whole of human society, bringing into being new methods of social and economic organisation, new social classes, and new political forces. The Industrial Revolution also dramatically altered humanity's relation to the natural world and embedded the belief that change, not stasis, is the necessary backdrop for human existence. 
 
Iron, Steam and Money tells the thrilling story of those few decades, the moments of inspiration, the rivalries, skulduggery and death threats, and the tireless perseverance of the visionaries who made it all happen. Richard Arkwright, James Watt, Richard Trevithick and Josiah Wedgwood are among the giants whose achievements and tragedies fill these pages. In this authoritative study Roger Osborne also shows how and why the revolution happened, revealing pre-industrial Britain as a surprisingly affluent society, with wealth spread widely through the population, and with craft industries in every town, village and front parlour. The combination of disposable income, widespread demand for industrial goods, and a generation of time-served artisans created the unique conditions that propelled humanity into the modern world. 
 
The industrial revolution was arguably the most important episode in modern human history; Iron, Steam and Money reminds us of its central role, while showing the extraordinary excitement of those tumultuous decades.

Iron, Steam & Money

The Making of the Industrial Revolution

Isabelle Tombs

Robert Tombs

From Blenheim and Waterloo to 'Up Yours, Delors' and 'Hop Off You Frogs', the cross-Channel relationship has been one of rivalry, misapprehension and suspicion. But it has also been a relationship of envy, admiration and affection. 
 
In the nearly two centuries since the final defeat of Napoleon, France and Britain have spent much of that time as allies - an alliance that has been almost as uneasy, as competitive and as ambivalent as the generations of warfare. Their rivalry both on peace and war, for good and ill, has shaped the modern world, from North America to India in the eighteenth century, in Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is still shaping Europe today. 
 
This magisterial book, by turns provocative and delightful, always fascinating, tells the rich and complex story of the relationship over three centuries, from the beginning of the great struggle for mastery during the reign of Louis XIV to the second Iraq War and the latest enlargement of the EU. It tells of wars and battles, ententes and alliances, but also of food, fashion, sport, literature, sex and music. Its cast ranges from William and Mary to Tony Blair, from Voltaire to Eric Cantona; its sources from ambassadorial dispatches to police reports, from works of philosophy to tabloid newspapers, from guidebooks to cartoons and films. 
 
It's a book which brings both British humour and Gallic panache to the story of these two countries, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, in victory and in defeat, in dominance and in decline.

That Sweet Enemy

The British and the French from the Sun King to the Present

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

Stephen Anderton

Christopher Lloyd (Christo) was one of the greatest English gardeners of the twentieth century, perhaps the finest plantsman of them all. His creation is the garden at Great Dixter in East Sussex, and it is a tribute to his vision and achievement that, after his death in 2006, the Heritage Lottery Fund made a grant of £4 million to help preserve it for the nation. This enjoyable and revealing book - the first biography of Christo - is also the story of Dixter from 1910 to 2006, a unique unbroken history of one English house and one English garden spanning a century. 
 
It was Christo's father, Nathaniel, who bought the medieval manor at Dixter and called in the fashionable Edwardian architect, Lutyens, to rebuild the house and lay out the garden. And it was his mother, Daisy, who made the first wild garden in the meadows there. Christo was born at Dixter in 1921. Apart from boarding school, war service and a period at horticultural college, he spent his whole life there, constantly re-planting and enriching the garden, while turning out landmark books and exhaustive journalism. Opinionated, argumentative and gloriously eccentric, he changed the face of English gardening through his passions for meadow gardening, dazzling colours and thorough husbandry. 
 
As the baby of a family of six - five boys and a girl - Christo was stifled by his adoring mother. Music-loving and sports-hating, he knew the Latin names of plants before he was eight. This fascinating book reveals what made Christo tick by examining his relationships with his generous but scheming mother, his like-minded friends (such as gardeners Anna Pavord and Beth Chatto) and his colleagues (including his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, a plantsman in Christo's own mould).

Christopher Lloyd

His Life at Great Dixter

Anthony Read

The Nazi regime was essentially a religious cult, relying on the hypnotic personality of one man, Adolf Hitler, and it was fated to die with him. But while it lasted, his closest lieutenants competed ferociously for power and position as his chosen successor. This deadly contest accounted for many of the regime's worst excesses, in which millions of people died, and which brought Western civilization to its knees. The Devil's Disciples is the first major book for a general readership to examine those lieutenants, not only as individuals but also as a group. It focuses on the three Nazi paladins closest to Hitler - Goring, Goebbels and Himmler - with their nearest rivals - Bormann, Speer and Ribbentrop in close attendance. Others who were removed in various ways - like Gregor Strasser, Ernst R-hm, Heydrich and Hess - play supporting roles. Perceptive and illuminating, The Devil's Disciples is above all a powerful chronological narrative, showing how the personalities of Hitler's inner circle developed and how their jealousies and constant intrigues affected the regime, the war, and Hitler himself.

The Devil's Disciples

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

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time. England after the war was a different place; the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different. 
 
Samuel Hynes examines the process of that transformation. He explores a vast cultural mosaic comprising novels and poetry, music and theatre, journalism, paintings, films, parliamentary debates, public monuments, sartorial fashions, personal diaries and letters. 
 
Told in rich detail, this penetrating account shatters much of the received wisdom about the First World War. It shows how English culture adapted itself to the needs of killing, how our stereotypes of the war gradually took shape and how the nations thought and imagination were profoundly and irretrievably changed.

A War Imagined

The First World War and English Culture

Donald R Morris

In 1879, armed only with their spears, their rawhide shields, and their incredible courage, the Zulus challenged the might of Victorian England and, initially, inflicted on the British the worst defeat a modern army has ever suffered at the hands of men without guns. 
 
This is the definitive account of the rise of the Zulu nation under the great ruler Shaka and its fall under Cetshwayo. The story is studded with tales of drama and heroism: the Battle of Isandhlwana, where the Zulu army wiped out the major British column; and Rorke's Drift, where a handful of British troops beat off thousands of Zulu warriors and won eleven Victoria Crosses. 
 
Acclaimed for its scholarship, its monumental range, and its spellbinding readability, The Washing of the Spears is a gripping portrait of not just the Zulu War of 1879, but also of Britain’s colonial policy at this moment.

The Washing Of The Spears

The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879

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