5ive Guys FC

82ASK

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

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Michael Levey

In this evocative memoir Michael Levey recreates a between-the-wars English childhood outwardly ordinary and undramatic, but inwardly rich, stirring, sometimes bewildering, and altogether far from typical, not least in its pervasive Catholic ethos. An only child, intensely self-aware, devout, yet questioning, as well as imaginative, drawn to Shakespeare and the theatre, and to all things visual, he grew up in Leigh-on-Sea on the Essex coast.  He attended a succession of Catholic schools, before joining the Army at the very end of the War.  Notably entertaining is his account of service life, spent partly in Egypt, as is the final chapter, which finds him arriving at the National Gallery in London, to begin a career that would culminate in his being appointed Director.With its precise evocation of a child's relationship with the world around him and with his parents - a couple united in reticent affection and intelligence, but totally opposed in temperament - The Chapel is on Fire will surely become a classic in the literature of childhood.

The Chapel is on Fire

J.C. Drummond

Anne Wilbraham

Medieval gardens; cookshops; spices; ale, beer, wine and spirits; the food of peasants, labourers, townspeople, the wealthy, the poor and the country gentleman; fish, meat and game; the feeding of infants, children; dairy products; vitamins, proteins, fat and fibre; the adulteration of food; the four bottle man; bread; poaching; tea, coffee and chocolate; food in schools and institutions; sugar and sweetmeats; root crops; the agricultural revolution; the importance of 'white meats', the vegetarian diet; menus and recipes. . . 
 
The Englishman's Food was first published in 1939, fully revised in 1957 and now appears with a new updating introduction. A ground-breaking book, it is a fascinating and authoritative survey of food production, consumption, fashions and follies over a period of five hundred years. 
 
Reprinted with a new introduction by food editor Tom Jaine.

The Englishman's Food

Five Centuries of English Diet

Robin Blake

Far more than a fine horse portraitist, George Stubbs was a painter and a printmaker of the highest importance, on a par with his great contemporaries, Hogarth, Reynolds and Gainsborough. An artist-scientist who emulated Leonardo da Vinci, Stubbs tirelessly explored the natural world, and new ways of representing it. 
 
Born the son of a Liverpool tradesman, Stubbs was self-taught and at first struggled in obscurity as a northern provincial painter. Robin Blake's book uncovers Stubbs's origins and some of the secrets of his youth: sympathy with the Jacobite rebels and Catholicism; and a previously undocumented wife and family in York. 
 
A 'niece', Mary, became his mistress and lifelong companion, working alongside him as he dissected the carcasses of horses. In 1776 he published these investigations as The Anatomy of the Horse, which was his breakthrough, leading to commissions from the most powerful men in Georgian Britain. By tracing the network of patronage and friendship through which George Stubbs operated, Robin Blake reveals the remarkable succession of animals, people and ideas which inspired him. 
 
Stubbs emerges as a man of huge energy and complex sensibility whose artistry was informed by science, politics, literature, classical art and - above all - nature itself.

George Stubbs And The Wide Creation

Animals, People and Places in the Life of George Stubbs 1724-1806

David Blackbourn

The modern idea of 'mastery' over nature always had its critics, whether their motives were aesthetic, religious or environmentalist. By investigating how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power, The Conquest of Nature explores how over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. 
 
From Frederick the Great of Prussia to Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century to Otto Intze, 'master dambuilder' of the years around 1900, to the Nazis who set out to colonise 'living space' in the East, this groundbreaking study shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it has often come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.

The Conquest Of Nature

Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany

Geoffrey Lewis

This is the authorized life of one of the most powerful and controversial Tory politicians of the post-war era. Lord Hailsham - statesman, orator, writer, Christian and patriot - had earned Mrs Thatcher's tribute, when he finally retired in 1987, that there were few people in public life who had provided such service to his country over a span of forty years. 
 
As Quintin Hogg, Hailsham started his public career in the famous Oxford by-election of 1938. He joined the government just before the Suez crisis in 1956 and remained a strong presence in every Tory goverment until his retirement, holding a varitety of important posts, including Party Chairman when he famously rang the bell to toll the death of the Labour Party. The extraordinary drama of the 1963 succession to Macmillan is comprehensively revealed in this book, as is Hailsham`s highly influential career in the law, where he was Lord Chancellor for twelve years after 1970.

Lord Hailsham

A Life

David J Bercuson

Holger H Herwig

Late in the morning of 27 May 1941, the German battleship Bismarck was sunk by an overwhelming British armada in a fierce battle that lasted ninety minutes. Admiral Gunther Lutjens, Captain Ernst Lindemann and 2,206 men of her crew were lost, only 115 survived. 
 
Five days earlier, an RAF reconnaissance plane flying low off the coast of Norway spotted four large warships in the sea below. At 19,000 tons fully loaded, the sight of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen was shocking enough; even more so was the sight of the 50,000 ton battleship Bismarck - the pride of the German navy - a ship shrouded in myth, an awesome and mysterious behemoth of destruction. Their purpose in these waters was obvious and chilling: the German navy was sending this powerful four-battleship task force to seize control of the North Atlantic sea lanes. 
 
The survival of free Britain was at stake. With almost all of Europe under Hitler's thumb, and the United States still frustratingly neutral, Britain was left alone to fight Nazi Germany. The only hope lay in the convoy route across the North Atlantic from the United States. The fate of Britain and the United States hung in the balance, and all knew that the destruction of the Bismarck would be a dramatic turning point in the war. 
 
Noted historians Bercuson and Herwig have uncovered much new information on the Bismarck, including a close examination of classified British and United States diplomatic files, only recently opened, revealing secret diplomatic manoeuvrings between Churchill and Roosevelt. They tell the full story of the Bismarck for the first time, from the key strategic decisions of the national leaders, to the gripping hour-by-hour account of the battle. This is the definitive account of one of the most dramatic and momentous events of the Second World War.

Bismarck

The Story Behind the Destruction of the Pride of Hitler’s Navy

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 Davies

Collected here for the first time are some of the numerous essays and lectures by Norman Davies, author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Europe, The Isles and Rising '44. Spanning more than fifteen years of his remarkable career, this highly accessible collection addresses many of the issues that continue to dominate the political and cultural climate of Europe today. 
 
From the classical origins of the idea of Europe to the division between East and West during the Cold War; from the Jewish and Islamic strands in European history to the expansion of Europe to other continents; from the misunderstood Allied victory in 1945 to Britain's place in Europe; from reflections on the use and abuse of history to personal recollections on learning languages - this companion volume to the bestselling Europe looks at European history from a variety of unusual and entertaining angles in an equally stimulating and accessible way.

Europe East and West

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

Jonathan Miles

In June 1816, the Medusa, flagship of a French expedition to repossess the colony of Senegal from the British, set sail but ran aground off the desolate West African coast. The evacuation of the frigate was chaotic and cowardly - 146 men and one woman were herded aboard a makeshift raft which was then abandoned in mid-ocean, cut loose by the convoy of lifeboats which had pledged to tow it to safety. The drifting raft carried those who survived to the very frontiers of human experience. Crazed, parched and starving, the diminishing band slaughtered mutineers, ate their dead companions and organized a tactical extermination of the weakest among them. 
 
 Among the handful of survivors from the raft were two men whose written account of the tragedy catalogued the trail of government incompetence, indifference, and cover-up. Their book became a best-seller which rocked Europe and inspired the promising artist, Théodore Géricault. Reeling from an illicit affair with his attractive young aunt, he threw himself into an exhaustive study of the Medusa tragedy. 
 
Set in the politically fragile world of Restoration France, the murk of Georgian London and along the dangerous West African coast where the French were covertly regenerating the outlawed slave trade, Medusa witnesses error and outrage turned into a bestseller, and that bestseller transformed into one of the masterpieces of Western art.

Medusa

The Shipwreck, The Scandal, The Masterpiece

Timothy Mowl

William Kent (1685-1748) was great without a hint of gravitas, a con man who became one of the artistic geniuses of his age. He was a high camp Yorkshire bachelor, brought back by Lord Burlington from an artistic apprenticeship in Rome where he had painted for a cardinal and won prizes from a pope. In London he charmed the surly old Hanoverian King George I, redecorated Kensington Palace for him with a clumsy bravura, and survived the subsequent critical storm - just. England was in stylistic chaos after rejecting its lawful Stuart rulers and Burlington was imposing a chaste and dreary Palladianism on a philistine island people. Kent saw his chance and never looked back. 
 
Queen Caroline, the real ruler, used him to project in sensational garden buildings by the Thames at Richmond her vision of a new scientific Britain. Sir Robert Walpole paid him to turn Houghton Hall in Norfolk into an imperial palace, outshining anything the German monarchs could raise. Another prime minister, the virtuous Henry Pelham, built with Kent a revolutionary suburban bolt-hole in Surrey. Between them they invented the Gothic Revival out at Esher, but have never been given the credit. 
 
Late in life, while raising an alabaster temple to Jupiter at Holkham Hall, also in Norfolk, and the sexiest interiors in London on Berkeley Square, Kent was discovering his true genius, laying out casually at Esher, Stowe in Buckinghamshire and Rousham near Oxford, the Arcadian image of the 'English Garden' that would take the continent, even France, by storm as England's only original contribution to European culture.

William Kent

Architect, Designer, Opportunist

John Campbell

The son of a carpenter, Edward Heath broke the patrician mould of Tory leaders. He pioneered free enterprise Conservatism ahead of Thatcher. He committed Britain to Europe. With accomplishments outside politics - in music and international sailing - he is the most multi-talented Prime Minister this century. Yet his period in office, which began with such high hopes in June 1970, collapsed in chaos and humiliation after only three-and-a-half years. 
 
In this powerful, bestselling biography, John Campbell shows us a nation undergoing a social and psychological revolution and, at its centre, a man of vision and integrity whose legacy will shape British history for decades to come.

Edward Heath

A Biography

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

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

Nigel Saul

The world of medieval chivalry is at once glamorous and violent, alluring yet alien. Our popular views of the period are largely inherited from the nineteenth-century romantics, for whom chivalry evoked images of knights in shining armour, competing for the attention of fair ladies - with pennons and streamers fluttering from castle battlements. 
 
But what is the reality? Were the rituals and romance of chivalry designed to provide an escape from the brutal facts of almost continuous warfare? Or did they instead help regulate the conduct of war and moderate its violent excesses? 
 
Nigel Saul charts the introduction of chivalry by the Normans, the rise of the knightly class as a social elite, the fusion of chivalry with kingship in the fourteenth century and the influence of chivalry on literature, religion and architecture. He shows us a world of kings and barons, castles and cathedrals - a world shaped by Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades, by Magna Carta and the rule of law, by battles like Bannockburn and Crecy, by the Black Death and by tournaments, round tables and the cult of Arthurianism.

For Honour and Fame

Chivalry in England, 1066-1500

D R Thorpe

Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was both complex as a person and influential as a politican. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in the First World War and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebel - an outspoken backbencher, opposing the economic policies of the 1930s and the appeasement policies of his own government. 
 
Churchill gave him responsibility during the Second World War with executive command as 'Viceroy of the Mediterranean'. After the War, in opposition, Macmillan was one of the principal reformers of the Conservatives, and after 1951, back in government, served in several important posts before becoming Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis. 
 
Supermac examines key events including the controversy over the Cossacks repatriation, the Suez Crisis, You've Never Had It So Good, the Winds of Change, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo Scandal. The culmination of thirty-five years of research into this period by one of our most respected historians, this book gives an unforgettable portrait of a turbulent age. 
 
Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

Supermac

The Life of Harold Macmillan

Edward Pearce

Charles Greville (1794-1865) made his first occasional diary entries in 1814, but the diary only became a regular habit in the mid-1820s, continuing with occasional breaks, about which he is self-reproachful, through the reigns of George IV, William IV and Victoria. Finally, in 1860, after shaking his head over the worrying triumphs of Garibaldi, he closed it, once and for all. The grandson of a duke, Greville looked with a level and scornful eye upon royalty. George was 'the most worthless dog that ever lived'; William 'the silliest old gentleman in his own dominions, but what can be expected of a man with a head like a pineapple?' The diaries roused Queen Victoria - 'an odd woman' - from the lethargy of her widowhood.She spoke of Greville's 'indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude toward friends, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty'. 
 
Greville's circle included Talleyrand, Wellington, Macaulay, Sydney Smith, Princess Lieven, Lord Grey, Melbourne, Guizot and Disraeli, as well as 'jockeys, bookmakers and blackguards'.As Clerk of the Privy Council, Greville works for a compromise on the Reform Bill.He witnesses Covent Garden theatre burning down.His closest friend, Lord De Ros, is caught cardsharping. Visiting Balmoral, he finds Albert and Victoria living 'not merely like small gentlefolks, but like very small gentlefolks'. When cholera comes, he writes laconically of 'Mrs Smith, young and beautiful, taken ill while dressing for Church and dead by nightfall.' Not a chatterbox, Charles Greville brilliantly assembles everyone else's chatter. This is the intelligent voice of another age, an uneasy aristocrat catching history on the turn and looking dubiously at the future.

The Diaries Of Charles Greville

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

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

Jonathan Clark

Scholarship on the history of the British Isles is currently experiencing a golden age. The breakdown of modernism and the eclipse of both the Marxist tradition and the 'Whig interpretation' that sees all history as progress, combined with the trajectories of nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, have generated unprecedented intellectual activity. 
 
Nor has the world stood still: the collapse of communism, the issue of integration into the EU, and the advance of multiculturalism have led more and more people in the English speaking world as a whole to sense that their collective landscape now looks profoundly different from that inhabited by their ancestors even a few decades ago. 
 
In A World By Itself, six distinguished historians offer the most definitive and compelling history of the British Isles to date. Tracing the political, religious and material cultures from the Romans to the present day, this is at once an urgent reassessment of our shared past, and an inspirational celebration of British history. It focuses on the major themes and most dramatic moments of the last two millenia: the rise and fall of empires; reformation, revolution and restoration; wars both civil and global; and the enduring question of what it means to be British.

A World by Itself

A History of the British Isles

Philip Parker

The Roman Empire was the largest and most enduring of the ancient world. From its zenith under Augustus and Trajan in the first century AD to its decline and fall amidst the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, the Empire guarded and maintained a frontier that stretched for 5,000 kilometres, from Carlisle to Cologne, from Augsburg to Antioch, and from Aswan to the Atlantic. 
 
Far from being at the periphery of the Roman world, the frontier played a crucial role in making and breaking emperors, creating vibrant and astonishingly diverse societies along its course which pulsed with energy while the centre became enfeebled and sluggish. This remarkable new book traces the course of those frontiers, visiting all its astonishing sites, from Hadrian's Wall in the north of Britain to the desert cities of Palmyra and Leptis Magna. It tells the fascinating stories of the men and women who lived and fought along it, from Alaric the Goth, who descended from the Danube to sack Rome in 410, to Zenobia the desert queen, who almost snatched the entire eastern provinces from Rome in the third century. 
 
It is at their edges, in time and geographical extent, that societies reveal their true nature, constantly seeking to recreate and renew themselves. In this examination of the places that the mighty Roman Empire stopped expanding, Philip Parker reveals how and why the Empire endured for so long, as well as describing the rich and complex architectural and cultural legacy which it has bequeathed to us.

The Empire Stops Here

A Journey along the Frontiers of the Roman World

Jonathan Keates

Jonathan Keates original biography of Handel was hailed as a masterpiece on its publication in 1985. This fully revised and updated new edition - published to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the composers death - charts in detail Handel's life, from his youth in Germany, through his brilliantly successful Italian sojourn, to the opulence and squalor of Georgian London where he made his permanent home. 
 
For over two decades Handel was absorbed in London's heady but precarious operatic world. But even his phenomenal energy and determination could not overcome the public's growing indifference to Italian opera in the 1730s, and he turned finally to oratorio, a genre which he made peculiarly his own and in which he created some of his finest works, such as Saul, Messiah, Belshazzar and Jephtha. 
 
Over the last two decades a complete revolution in Handel's status has taken place. He is now seen both as a titanic figure in music, whose compositions have found a permanent place in the international repertoire, and as one of the world's favourite composers, with snatches of his work accompanying weddings, funerals and television commercials the world over. 
 
Skillfully interwoven with the account of Handel's life are commentaries on all his major works, as well as many less familiar pieces by this most inventive, expressive and captivating of composers. Handel was an extraordinary genius whose career abounded in reversals that would have crushed anyone with less resilience and will power, and Jonathan Keates writes about his life and work with sympathy and scrutiny.

Handel

The Man & His Music

Andrew Wheatcroft

In 1683, two empires - the Ottoman, based in Constantinople, and the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna - came face to face in the culmination of a 250-year power struggle: the Great Siege of Vienna. 
 
Within the city walls the choice of resistance over surrender to the largest army ever assembled by the Turks created an all-or-nothing scenario: every last survivor would be enslaved or ruthlessly slaughtered. The Turks had set their sights on taking Vienna, the city they had long called 'The Golden Apple' since their first siege of the city in 1529. Both sides remained resolute, sustained by hatred of their age-old enemy, certain that their victory would be won by the grace of God. 
 
Eastern invaders had always threatened the West: Huns, Mongols, Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and many others. The Western fears of the East were vivid and powerful and, in their new eyes, the Turks always appeared the sole aggressors. Andrew Wheatcroft's extraordinary book shows that this belief is a grievous oversimplification: during the 400 year struggle for domination, the West took the offensive just as often as the East. 
 
As modern Turkey seeks to re-orient its relationship with Europe, a new generation of politicians is exploiting the residual fears and tensions between East and West to hamper this change. The Enemy at the Gate provides a timely and masterful account of this most complex and epic of conflicts.

The Enemy at the Gate

Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe

Anthony Read

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Western leaders drafted a peace treaty that would punish German militarism and 'make the world safe for democracy' but the world itself was already fighting a new war, against terrorism. The great evil was now Bolshevism, which had burst onto the scene in 1917 and rapidly seared itself into the world's consciousness. 
 
The Allied powers' attempts to destroy this threatening ideology at its source by intervening in the Russian civil war were both unsuccessful and controversial and the tremors of the Russian upheaval eighteen months earlier were being felt throughout the world, resurfacing in bloody revolutions and even bloodier counter-revolutions in Germany, Hungary and the Baltic States, as well as in the massive strikes, riots and civil unrest that paralyzed the rest of the world. 
 
Military revolts involving thousands of British personnel saw a group of sailors imprisoned for taking over their ship, hauling down the white ensign and hoisting the red flag in its place, while in Ireland Michael Collins and the IRA were conducting a successful terrorist campaign against the British; in Italy Benito Mussolini deserted the socialist camp and drew up the Fascist Manifesto; and in the United States a series of terrorist bombings, later labelled the Great Red Scare, created a wave of hysteria that shook the very foundations of a free and democratic society. 
 
Anthony Read's absorbing and revelatory book chronicles and examines the running battle with Bolshevism, insurgency and fear during the most revolutionary year since 1789.

The World On Fire

1919 and the Battle with Bolshevism

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

Charles Freeman

In AD 381, Theodosius, emperor of the eastern Roman empire, issued a decree in which all his subjects were required to subscribe to a belief in the Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This edict defined Christian orthodoxy and brought to an end a lively and wide-ranging debate about the nature of the Godhead; all other interpretations were now declared heretical. 
 
Moreover, for the first time in a thousand years of Greco-Roman civilization free thought was unambiguously suppressed. Yet surprisingly this political revolution, intended to bring inner cohesion to an empire under threat from the outside, has been airbrushed from the historical record. Instead, it has been claimed that the Christian Church had reached a consensus on the Trinity which was promulgated at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381. 
 
In this groundbreaking new book, Freeman argues that Theodosius's edict and the subsequent suppression of paganism not only brought an end to the diversity of religious and philosophical beliefs throughout the empire but created numerous theological problems for the Church, which have remained unsolved. The year AD 381, Freeman concludes, marked 'a turning point which time forgot'.

AD 381

Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State

Margarete Buber-Neumann

This book is a unique account by a survivor of both the Soviet and Nazi concentration camps: its author, Margarete Buber-Neumann, was a loyal member of the German Communist party. From 1935 she and her second husband, Heinz Neumann, were political refugees in Moscow. In April 1937 Neumann was arrested by the secret police, and executed by the end of the year. She herself was arrested in 1938. 
 
In Under Two Dictators Buber-Neumann describes the two years of suffering she endured in the Soviet prisons and in the huge Central-Asian concentration and slave labour camp of Karaganda; her extradition to the Gestapo in 1940 at the time of the Stalin-Hitler Friendship Pact; and her five years of suffering in the Nazi concentration and death camp for women, Ravensbrück. Her story displays extraordinary powers of observation and of memory as she describes her own fate, as well as those of hundreds of fellow prisoners. She explores the behaviour of the guards, supervisors, police and secret police and compares and contrasts Stalin and Hitler's methods of dictatorship and terror. 
 
First published in Swedish, German and English and subsequently translated and published in a further nine languages, Under Two Dictators is harrowing in its depiction of life under the rule of two of the most brutal regimes the western world has ever seen but also an inspiring story of survival, of ideology and of strength and a clarion call for the protection of democracy.

Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler

With an introduction by Nikolaus Wachsmann

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

Peter Marshall

In the late 16th century the greatest philosophers, alchemists, astronomers, painters, and mathematicians of the day flocked to Prague to work under the patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, an emperor more interested in the great minds of his times than in the exercise of his immense power. Rarely leaving Prague Castle, he gathered around him a galaxy of famous figures: among them the painter Arcimboldo, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, the mathematician Johannes Kepler, the philosopher Giordano Bruno and the magus John Dee. 
 
Fascinated by the new Renaissance learning, Rudolf found it nearly impossible to make decisions of state. Like Faust, he was prepared to risk all in the pursuit of magical knowledge and the Philosopher's Stone which would turn base metals into gold and prolong life indefinitely. But he also faced threats: religious discord, the Ottoman Empire, his own deepening melancholy and an ambitious younger brother. As a result he lost his empire and nearly his sanity. But he enabled Prague to enjoy a golden age of peace and creativity before Europe was engulfed in the Thirty Years' War. 
 
Filled with angels and devils, high art and low cunning, talismans and stars, The Mercurial Emperor offers a captivating perspective on a pivotal moment in the history of Western civilisation.

The Mercurial Emperor

The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague

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

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.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter