Alastair Fothergill studied zoology and joined the BBC Natural History Unit in 1983, working on The Really Wild Show, Wildlife on One and David Attenborough's The Trials of Life. He was appointed head of the Unit in 1992, and during his tenure he produced Attenborough's award-winning series Life in the Freezer. He was awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Cherry Kearton Medal and Award in 1996. 
In June 1998, he stood down as head of the Natural History Unit to concentrate on his work as series producer, initially on the multi-award-winning The Blue Planet,. In 2006 he completed his next major series Planet Earth, which won the Cinema for Peace Clean Energy Award at the Cinema for Peace Gala Berlin in 2008. He was executive producer of Frozen Planet (2011) and The Hunt (2015). He has also presented several television programmes, including The Abyss. 
In 2008, he signed a multi-picture deal with newly formed Disneynature. In 2012 he left the BBC to co-found Silverback Films, which makes landmark natural history series for various clients including Netflix and the BBC. 
In 2016, Alastair was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society for his work in natural history programming. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for services to film.

Alastair Fothergill

Alastair Gunn is an experienced magazine journalist. The Advent Killer was his first novel in the series featuring DCI Antonia Hawkins, followed by My Bloody Valentine and The Keeper, which was published in April 2017. 
 
Alastair lives in Hertfordshire with his fiancée, Anna.

Alastair Gunn

Alastair Jessiman

Alastair Panton

Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Sooke is the author of the biographies Henri Matisse: A Second Life and Roy Lichtenstein: How Modern Art was Saved by Donald Duck, both published by Penguin. He is art critic for the Daily Telegraph and is a popular BBC broadcaster. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Alastair Sooke

Alayo Akinkugbe graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA in History of Art in 2021 and graduated with an MA in Curating the Art Museum from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2023. She runs the Instagram platform @ABlackHistoryofArt, which highlights Black artists, sitters, curators and thinkers from art history and the present day; and hosts the podcast A Shared Gaze. Alayo is a contributing editor and writes the column ‘Black Gazes’ for AnOther Magazine. She was awarded a curatorial research grant by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for the exhibition Entangled Pasts: Art Colonialism and Change at the Royal Academy of Arts. 
Alayo was on the advisory panel and contributed to the book African Artists: From 1882 to Now, published by Phaidon in 2021, and has written for publications including Dazed, Tate Etc. and The World of Interiors. Reframing Blackness is her first book.

Alayo Akinkugbe

Alba De Zanet

Albert Camus (1913-60) grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. He studied philosophy at the University of Algiers, and became a journalist. His most important works include The Outsider, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague and The Fall. After the occupation of France by the Germans in 1941, Camus became one of the intellectual leaders of the Resistance movement. He was killed in a road accident, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

Albert Camus

Albert Cohen

Albert Costa was Research Professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona and director of the Speech Production and Bilingualism Group at the Centre for Brain and Cognition. His research focused on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language processing.

Albert Costa

Regarded as the founder of modern physics, Albert Einstein was born in 1879, in Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, German Empire. He completed his Ph.D. from the University of Zürich in 1905 and published four papers in the scientific journal named Annalen der Physik. These papers on photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence (E = mc2) were significant contributors to the foundation of modern physics. In the next few years, Einstein came to be recognized as a major scientist. 
He developed the general theory of relativity between 1907 and 1915. It was published in 1915. In 1916, Einstein published Relativity: The Special and the General Theory in German. Its first English translation was published in 1920. In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect." He published numerous scientific and non-scientific works. 
Einstein died on 18 April 1955, aged seventy-six, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Albert Einstein

Albert Espinosa

Albert French

Albert Jack

Albert Reynolds

Albert Roux

Alberto Granado

Alberto Polverosi was born in Montelupo Fiorentino, Tuscany and has been writing for Corriere dello Sport since 1977. He has covered eight World Cups and seven European Championships. He lives in Florence.

Alberto Polverosi

Alberto Villoldo

Aldo Leopold

Aldo Zilli

Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early 20s, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) – bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along the Road (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932, this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop,1944, and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945; Grey Eminence, 1941; and the account of his first mescaline experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.

Aldous Huxley

Alec Baldwin is a multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning actor, producer, comedian and philanthropist. He has also been nominated for an Oscar and a Tony Award and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Promise to Ourselves.

Alec Baldwin

Alec Ross is the New York Times bestselling author of The Industries of the Future and one of the world's leading experts on innovation. Now Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bologna Business School of l'Universitá di Bologna, he served in the Presidential Administration of Barack Obama for four years as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He is also Board Partner at Amplo, a global venture capital firm and has been named a Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine.

Alec Ross

Alec Russell

Alec Vidler

Alec Wilkinson

Aled Jones

Aleesha Nandhra

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Richard Barber

The destruction of the French army at Crécy in 1346 and the subsequent siege and capture of Calais marked a new era in European history. The most powerful, glamorous and respected of all western monarchies had been completely humiliated by England, a country long viewed either as a chaotic backwater or a mere French satellite. 
 
The young Edward III's triumph would launch both countries, as we now know, into a grim cycle of some 90 years of further fighting ending with English defeat, but after Crécy anything seemed possible - Edward's claim to be King of France could be pressed home and, in any event, enormous rewards of land, treasure and prestige were available both to the king and to the close companions who had made the victory possible. It was to enshrine this moment that Edward created one of the most famous of all knightly orders, the Company of the Garter. 
 
Barber writes about both the great campaigns and the individuals who formed the original membership of the Company - and through their biographies makes the period tangible and fascinating. This is a book about knighthood, battle tactics and grand strategy, but it is also about fashion, literature and the privates lives of everyone from queens to freebooters. Barber's book is a remarkable achievement - but also an extremely enjoyable one.

Edward III and the Triumph of England

The Battle of Crécy and the Company of the Garter

Mark Bostridge

The Fateful Year is the story of England in 1914. War with Germany, so often imagined and predicted, finally broke out when people were least prepared for it. 
 
Here, among a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, are suffragettes armed with axes, and celebrity aviators thrilling spectators by looping the loop. 
 
With the coming of war, England is beset by spy hysteria and fears of invasion. Patriotic women hand out white feathers to men who have failed to rush to their country's defence. 
 
And as 1914 fades out, England prepares itself for the prospect of a war of long duration.

The Fateful Year

England 1914

Lucy Inglis

Travel back to the eighteenth century as Lucy Inglis brilliantly recreates the age of love, sex, intellect, art, great ambition and fantastic ruin. 
 
This book is about the Georgians who called London their home, from dukes and prostitutes to rent boys and hot air balloonists, dog-nappers and foundlings. Georgian London reveals their daily lives: quickie marriages outside Fleet Prison, clandestine visits to Covent Garden, the terror of serial killers and lawless highwaymen and days out at the Tower Zoo. 
 
Here, amongst a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, discover the making of the capital millions know and love today.

Georgian London

Into the Streets

Roger Knight

For more than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in continental Europe. How was it that despite multiple changes of government and the assassination of a Prime Minister, Britain survived and eventually won a generation-long war against a regime which at its peak in 1807 commanded many times the resources and manpower? 
 
This book looks beyond the familiar exploits (and bravery) of the army and navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It shows the degree to which, because of the magnitude and intensity of hostilities, the capacities of the whole British population were involved: industrialists, farmers, shipbuilders, gunsmiths and gunpowder manufacturers. The intelligence war was also central; but no participants were more important, Knight argues, than the bankers and international traders of the City of London, without whom the armies of Britain's allies could not have taken the field.

Britain Against Napoleon

The Organization of Victory, 1793-1815

Paul Kennedy

In January 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt met in Casablanca to review the Allies' war aims. To achieve unconditional surrender they had to overcome some formidable hurdles, from winning air command to 'hopping' across the Pacific islands. Eighteen months later, they had done what seemed impossible. 
 
Here Paul Kennedy reveals the role of the problem-solvers and middle-men who made it happen - like Major-General Perry Hobart, who invented the 'funny tanks' which flattened the D-Day beaches; or Captain 'Johnny' Walker, who worked out how to sink U-boats with a 'creeping barrage'. This book shows the conflict in an entirely new light.

Engineers of Victory

The Problem Solvers who Turned the Tide in the Second World War

Jeremy Paxman

Life for the British during the First World War was not at all what you think... 
 
Using a wealth of first-hand source material and his characteristic flair for story-telling, Jeremy Paxman brings to life the day-to-day experience of the British over the entire course of the war, from politicians, newspapermen, campaigners and Generals, to Tommies, factory-workers, nurses, wives and children, explaining why we fought it so enthusiastically, how we endured it so doggedly and how it transformed everything, such as women's suffrage, new surgery techniques, lower-class 'officer gentlemen', a powerful press, sexually transmitted diseases and British Summer Time.

Great Britain's Great War

Vic Gatrell

The colourful, salacious and sumptuously illustrated story of Covent Garden - the creative heart of Georgian London - from Wolfson Prize-winning author Vic Gatrell 
 
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE HESSELL TILTMAN PRIZE 2014 
 
In the teeming, disordered, and sexually charged square half-mile centred on London's Covent Garden something extraordinary evolved in the eighteenth century. It was the world's first creative 'Bohemia'. The nation's most significant artists, actors, poets, novelists, and dramatists lived here. From Soho and Leicester Square across Covent Garden's Piazza to Drury Lane, and down from Long Acre to the Strand, they rubbed shoulders with rakes, prostitutes, market people, craftsmen, and shopkeepers. It was an often brutal world full of criminality, poverty and feuds, but also of high spirits, and an intimacy that was as culturally creative as any other in history. Virtually everything that we associate with Georgian culture was produced here.

The First Bohemians

Life and Art in London's Golden Age

Barbara Tuchman

War pressed against every frontier. Suddenly dismayed, governments struggled and twisted to fend it off. It was no use . . . 
 
Barbara Tuchman's universally acclaimed, Pulitzer prize-winning account of how the first thirty days of battle determined the course of the First World War is to this day revered as the classic account of the conflict's opening. From the precipitous plunge into war and the brutal and bloody battles of August 1914, Tuchman shows how events were propelled by a horrific logic which swept all sides up in its unstoppable momentum.

The Guns of August

The Classic Bestselling Account of the Outbreak of the First World War

The last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895 . . . 
 
In this now classic work, Pulitzer prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman explores the quarter century leading up to the First World War, from the dying embers of the British aristocracy to the fitful eruptions of the anarchist movement. She provides a compelling portrait of the key figures and conflicting ideologies of this time, giving an intimate view of an epoch that was soon to be swept away by the tide of history.

The Proud Tower

A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

Charles Townshend

A gripping narrative of the most critical years in modern Ireland's history - from Charles Townshend, author of Easter 1916 
 
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
 
The protracted, terrible fight for independence pitted the Irish against the British and the Irish against other Irish. It was both a physical battle of shocking violence against a regime increasingly seen as alien and unacceptable and an intellectual battle for a new sort of country. The damage done, the betrayals and grim compromises put the new nation into a state of trauma for at least a generation, but at a nearly unacceptable cost the struggle ended: a new republic was born. 
 
Charles Townshend's Easter 1916 opened up the astonishing events around the Rising for a new generation and in The Republic he deals, with the same unflinchingly wish to get to the truth behind the legend, with the most critical years in Ireland's history. There has been a great temptation to view these years through the prisms of martyrology and good-and-evil. The picture painted by Townshend is far more nuanced and sceptical - but also never loses sight of the ordinary forms of heroism performed by Irish men and women trapped in extraordinary times. 
 
'The author has devoted his life to the study of Irish history and this huge work is the pinnacle of his labours' John Banville on Easter 1916

The Republic

The Fight for Irish Independence, 1918-1923

Laurie Lee

'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 
 
'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

Red Sky at Sunrise

Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War

Catherine Merridale

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON PRIZE 2013 
 
HERALD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
 
The extraordinary story of the Kremlin - from prize-winning author and historian Catherine Merridale 
 
Both beautiful and profoundly menacing, the Kremlin has dominated Moscow for many centuries. Behind its great red walls and towers many of the most startling events in Russia's history have been acted out. It is both a real place and an imaginative idea; a shorthand for a certain kind of secretive power, but also the heart of a specific Russian authenticity. Catherine Merridale's exceptional book revels in both the drama of the Kremlin and its sheer unexpectedness: an impregnable fortress which has repeatedly been devastated, a symbol of all that is Russian substantially created by Italians. The many inhabitants of the Kremlin have continually reshaped it to accord with shifting ideological needs, with buildings conjured up or demolished to conform with the current ruler's social, spiritual, military or regal priorities. In the process, all have claimed to be the heirs of Russia's great historic destiny.

Red Fortress

The Secret Heart of Russia's History

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

There is the guard who delivers blows with no visible traces. The fraudster stitched up by the police for murder. The man who refuses to lie for a packet of cigarettes. The abandoned teenager, the down-and-out, the grass... He describes a hidden world of brutality and corruption, yet one where moments of humanity still manage to shine through. 
 
One in ten Russian men pass through prison at some point in their lives. This book is a denunciation of an entire system of bureaucratic criminality, and a passionate call to recognise a human tragedy.

My Fellow Prisoners

Brendan Simms

Brendan Simms's formidable, game-changing history of Europe 
 
In this marvelously ambitious and exciting book, Brendan Simms tells the story of Europe's constantly shifting geopolitics and the peculiar circumstances that have made it both so impossible to dominate, but also so dynamic and ferocious. It is the story of a group of highly competitive and mutually suspicious dynasties, but also of a continent uniquely prone to interference from 'semi-detached' elements, such as Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Britain and (just as centrally to Simms's argument) the United States.

Europe

The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present

Neil MacGregor

The Elizabethan age was a tumultuous time, when long-cherished certainties were crumbling and life was exhilaratingly uncertain. Shakespeare's Restless World uncovers the extraordinary stories behind twenty objects from the period to re-create an age at once distant and yet surprisingly familiar. From knife crime to belief in witches, religious battles to the horizons of the New World, Neil MacGregor brings the past to life in a fresh, unexpected portrait of a dangerous and dynamic era.

Shakespeare's Restless World

An Unexpected History in Twenty Objects

Ruth Goodman

Step into the skin of your ancestors . . . We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Dress in whalebone and feed opium to the baby? Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living . . . 
 
How To Be A Victorian by Ruth Goodman is a radical new approach to history; a journey back in time more intimate, personal and physical than anything before. Moving through the rhythm of the day, from waking up to the sound of a knocker-upper man poking a stick at your window, to retiring for nocturnal activities, when the door finally closes on twenty four hours of life, this astonishing guide illuminates the overlapping worlds of health, sex, fashion, food, school, work and play. Drawing on Ruth's unique first-hand experience, gained from living for a year on a Victorian farm, as well as a life devoted to practical historical study and experimentation, this book will teach you everything you need to know about 19th century living.

How to be a Victorian

David Abulafia

For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of civilization. David Abulafia's The Great Sea is the first complete history of the Mediterranean, from the erection of temples on Malta around 3500 BC to modern tourism. Ranging across time and the whole extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa, Genoa to Tunis, and bringing to life pilgrims, pirates, sultans and naval commanders, this is the story of the sea that has shaped much of world history.

The Great Sea

A Human History of the Mediterranean

Deborah Cohen

On a Liverpool railway platform a heartbroken mother hands over her eight-year-old illegitimate son for adoption . . . 
 
The one-year-old daughter committed to an institution and barely visited or referred to by her family ever again . . . 
 
In Family Secrets Deborah Cohen explores the extraordinary choices British families made in the past to protect their good name. Whether it is hiding an adopted son's origins or the tangled attempts to prevent a divorce, Family Secrets exposes how we dealt with our shame - publicly and in our hearts.

Family Secrets

The Things We Tried to Hide

Rosemary Goring

A vivid, wide-ranging and engrossing account of Scotland's history, composed of eye-witness accounts by those who experienced it first-hand. Contributors range from Tacitus, Mary Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell to Adam Smith, David Livingstone and Billy Connolly. 
 
These include key historic moments - ranging from Bannockburn and Flodden to the SNP parliamentary victory in 2007 - along with a vast array of wonderfully readable insights into the everyday life of Scotland through the millennia. This is living, accesible history told by crofters, criminals, servants, house-wives, poets, journalists, nurses, politicians, novelists, prisoners, comedians, sportsmen and many more.

Scotland: The Autobiography

2,000 Years of Scottish History by Those Who Saw it Happen

Oliver Bullough

'Wonderful ... These are the chronicles of a writer who truly knows Russia' New York Times 
 
Award-winning writer Oliver Bullough travels the country from crowded Moscow train to empty windswept village, following in the footsteps of one extraordinary man, the dissident Orthodox priest Father Dmitry. His moving, terrifying story is the story of a nation: famine, war, the frozen wastes of the Gulag, the collapse of communism and now, a people seeking oblivion. Bullough shows that in a country so willing to crush its citizens, there is also courage, resilience and flickering glimmers of hope.

The Last Man in Russia

And The Struggle To Save A Dying Nation

Helga Weiss

In 1941, aged 12, Helga Weiss and her parents were interned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezin. Here she began to document her experiences in a diary. Three years later, they were sent to Auschwitz. Forced to abandon all of her belongings, Helga hid the diary in a wall. Of the fifteen thousand children from Prague sent to Auschwitz, Helga was one of only a hundred who survived. When she finally returned home, she managed to retrieve her diary and completed her account of her experiences. The result is one of the most compelling testimonies written during the Holocaust ever to have been recovered.

Helga's Diary

A Young Girl's Account of Life in a Concentration Camp

Ian Kershaw

'It is now time that something was done. But the man who has the courage to do something must do it in the knowledge that he will go down in German history as a traitor. If he does not, however, he will be a traitor to his own conscience' Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, July 1944 
 
The July 1944 Plot to kill Adolf Hitler was a desperate attempt by a group of senior officers to redeem Germany's honour and end the Second World War. They were heroic because they knew their chances of success were slight and that the result of their failure would undoubtedly be a terrible death. They wanted to leave a message for later generations: that there were Germans who understood the evils of Nazism and were willing to act against it. 
 
This extraordinary story is the basis for Bryan Singer's major new film Valkyrie, due to be released in February 2009. Published for the first time as a separate book, Luck of the Devil is taken from Ian Kershaw's bestselling Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis and is a brilliant account of just what happened in those fateful days at Hitler's Wolf's Lair headquarters, when his opponents came so astonishingly close to assassinating what is one of the modern era's most terrible figures.

Luck of the Devil

The Story of Operation Valkyrie

Lyn Macdonald

'There was hardly a household in the land'. writes Lyn Macdonald, 'there was no trade, occupation, profession or community, which was not represented in the thousands of innocent enthusiasts who made up the ranks of Kitchener's Army before the Battle of the Somme...' 
 
The year 1916 was one of the great turning-points in British history: as the youthful hopes of a generation were crushed in a desperate struggle to survive. On paper, few battles have ever been so meticulously planned. Yet while there were good political reasons to launch a joint offensive with a French Army demoralised by huge casualties at Verdun, the raw troops on the ground knew nothing of politics. A hundred and fifty thousand were killed in the punishing shellfire, the endless ordeal of attack and counter-attack; twice that number were wounded. 
 
Here, Lyn Macdonald lets the men who were there give their own testimony. Their stories are vivid, harrowing, sometimes terrifying - yet shot through with humour, immense courage and an astonishing spirit of resilience.

Somme

Robert Skidelsky

Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes has been acclaimed as the authoritative account of the great economist-statesman's life. Here, Skidelsky has revised and abridged his magnum opus into one definitive book, which examines in its entirety the intellectual and ideological journey that led an extraordinarily gifted young man to concern himself with the practical problems of an age overshadowed by war. John Maynard Keynes offers a sympathetic account of the life of a passionate visionary and an invaluable insight into the economic philosophy that still remains at the centre of political and economic thought.

John Maynard Keynes

1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman

John Darwin

A both controversial and comprehensive historical analysis of how the British Empire worked, from Wolfson Prize-winning author and historian John Darwin 
 
The British Empire shaped the world in countless ways: repopulating continents, carving out nations, imposing its own language, technology and values. For perhaps two centuries its expansion and final collapse were the single largest determinant of historical events, and it remains surrounded by myth, misconception and controversy today. 
 
John Darwin's provocative and richly enjoyable book shows how diverse, contradictory and in many ways chaotic the British Empire really was, controlled by interests that were often at loggerheads, and as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength.

Unfinished Empire

The Global Expansion of Britain

Christopher Clark

The pacy, sensitive and formidably argued history of the causes of the First World War, from acclaimed historian and author Christopher Clark 
 
FINANCIAL TIMES BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014 
SUNDAY TIMES and INDEPENDENT BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2012 
Winner of the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize 2014 
 
The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination? 
 
In The Sleepwalkers Christopher Clark retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'Formidable ... one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
'Easily the best book ever written on the subject ... A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis and elegant prose. The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement and awe ... Academics should take note: Good history can still be a good story' Washington Post 
 
'A lovingly researched work of the highest scholarship. It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations' Niall Ferguson 
 
'[Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason ... [Clark] demolishes the standard view ... The brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue ... In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece' Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review 
 
'Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written ... a model of scholarship' Sunday Times Books of the Year 
 
'Superb ... effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin ... It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history' Mail Online 
 
'A monumental new volume ... Revelatory, even revolutionary ... Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable' Boston Globe 
 
'Superb ... One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I ... This is the single best book I have read on this important topic' Fareed Zakaria 
 
'A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account' Military History 
 
'Clark is a masterly historian ... His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them ... A magisterial work' Wall Street Journal 
 
'This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject' Foreign Affairs 
 
'A brilliant contribution' Times Higher Education 
 
'Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject ... He provides vivid portraits of leading figures ... [He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war' Irish Times 
 
'In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. Clark strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war' Stephen Howe, Independent Books of the Year 
 
About the author: 
 
Christopher Clark is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Iron Kingdom. Widely praised around the world, Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

The Sleepwalkers

How Europe Went to War in 1914

Anne Applebaum

Chosen 16 times as a 'Book of the Year' - the top non-fiction pick of 2012 
 
'The best work of modern history I have ever read' A. N. Wilson, Financial Times 
 
At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system: Communism. Anne Applebaum's landmark history of this brutal time shows how societies were ruthlessly eviscerated by Communist regimes, how opposition was destroyed and what life was like for ordinary people who had to choose whether to fight, to flee or to collaborate. 
 
A haunting reminder of how fragile freedom can be, Iron Curtain is an exceptional work of historical and moral reckoning. 
 
 
ANNE APPLEBAUM is a historian and journalist, a regular columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, and the author of several books, including Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. She is the Director of Political Studies at the Legatum Institute in London, and she divides her time between Britain and Poland, where her husband, Radek Sikorski, serves as Foreign Minister. 
 
'The outstanding book of the year ... a masterpiece' Oliver Kamm, The Times, Books of the Year 
 
'Exceptionally important, wise, perceptive, remarkably objective' Antony Beevor 
 
'Explains in a manner worthy of Arthur Koestler what totalitarianism really means ... it is a window into a world of lies and evil that we can hardly imagine' Edward Lucas, Standpoint 
 
'At last the story can be told ... a magisterial history' Orlando Figes, Mail on Sunday

Iron Curtain

The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56

Halik Kochanski

In Halik Kochanski's extraordinary book, the untold story of Poland and the Poles in the Second World War is finally heard 
 
By almost every measure the fate of the inhabitants of Poland was the most terrible of any group in the Second World War. Following the destruction of its armed forces in the autumn of 1939, the Republic of Poland was partitioned between Nazi and Soviet forces and officially ceased to exist. As the war progressed millions of Poles were killed, with each phase unleashing a further round, from the industrialised genocide of Treblinka to the crushing of the Warsaw Rising. Polish Jews were all to be murdered, Christians reduced to a semi-literate slave class. This powerful and original new book is perhaps the most important 'missing' work on the whole conflict, describing both the fate of those trapped within occupied Poland and of the millions of Poles who were able to escape. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'A remarkable book ... [Kochanski] brings to the subject not only an impressive grasp of the military and political context, but also a balance, neutrality and honesty few could manage, combined with the intelligence, imagination and empathy necessary to grasp the true depth of the experience she recounts ... This book is history at its best. It tells the whole story, and tells it well, with just the right mixture of detachment and empathy, in crisp, readable prose. But it also speaks to the imagination and makes the reader think - and not just about the subject in hand' Standpoint 
 
'Until Halik Kochanski's The Eagle Unbowed nobody had written a comprehensive English-language history of Poland at war ... She uncovers details that will surprise even history geeks ... Ms Kochanski marshals an impressive and comprehensive array of English and Polish material' Economist 
 
'Poland's war was so terrible as to almost defy summary ... this book is opinionated, fluid and forceful' Oliver Bullough, New Statesman 
 
'An informative, authoritative and wide-ranging account of the tragedy that befell Poland and its inhabitants, Gentiles and Jews, during the war and its aftermath ... An engaging and important book' Hubert Zawadzki (author of A Concise History of Poland) 
 
About the author: 
 
Halik Kochanski read Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford and then completed a PhD at King's College London. She has taught at both King's College London and University College London and presented papers to a number of military history conferences. She has written a number of articles and is the author of Sir Garnet Wolseley: Victorian Hero (1999). She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has been a member of the councils of the Army Records Society and Society for Army Historical Research and remains a member of both societies. She is also a member of the British Commission for Military History and the Institute for Historical Research. She is currently a judge for the Templer Medal book prize.

The Eagle Unbowed

Poland and the Poles in the Second World War

Stephen Alford

The acclaimed and enthralling story of the dark side of Elizabethan rule, from Stephen Alford 
 
Elizabeth I's reign is known as a golden age, yet to much of Europe she was a 'Jezebel' and heretic who had to be destroyed. The Watchers is a thrilling portrayal of the secret state that sought to protect the Queen; a shadow world of spies, codebreakers, agent provocateurs and confidence-men who would stop at nothing to defend the realm. 
 
Reviews: 
 
'Forget Le Carré, Deighton and the rest - this is more enthralling than any modern spy fiction' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Absorbing and closely documented ... Alford vividly evokes this murky world of codes, ciphers, invisible ink, intercepted letters, aliases, disguises, forgeries and instructions to burn after reading ... flowing narrative [and] crisp judments ... engrossing' Guardian 
 
'[Alford] has brought a dash of le Carré to the 16th century' The Times (Book of the Week) 
 
'A vivid and staggeringly well-researched portrait of the sinister side of Elizabethan England ... This is a spectacular book. It sheds new light on plots that most historians have ceased to explore and brings less famous conspiracies to the attention of the general reading public' Herald 
 
'Fascinating ... If you want to know the inside story of this struggle, the dark heart of calculation and the fight for survival, then this is the book to read. I know no better' Spectator 
 
About the author: 
 
Stephen Alford is the author of the acclaimed biography Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He taught for fifteen years at Cambridge University, where he was a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of History and a Fellow of King's College. He is now Professor of Early Modern British History in the University of Leeds.

The Watchers

A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I

Keith Lowe

The end of the Second World War saw a terrible explosion of violence across Europe. Prisoners murdered jailers. Soldiers visited atrocities on civilians. Resistance fighters killed and pilloried collaborators. Ethnic cleansing, civil war, rape and murder were rife in the days, months and years after hostilities ended. Exploring a Europe consumed by vengeance, Savage Continent is a shocking portrait of an until-now unacknowledged time of lawlessness and terror.

Savage Continent

Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

Georgian Romance

From one of the most distinguished English authors of historical fiction comes a series that explores the lives of eleven Georgian figures. Beginning with the beautiful Sophia Dorothea, darling of Celle, and ending with Victoria's rise to become Queen of England.

Georgian Series

Ghost Detectives

Girl Heart Boy

The #1 bestselling series by Zoe Sugg, aka Zoella, following the life, loves and laughs of Penny, an ordinary blogger, who meets an extraordinary boy...

Girl Online

Maxine is a little girl full of big ideas. She loves solving problems, and can usually be found with her twin brothers in tow causing all kinds of mischief. Whether it is solving the mystery of the tooth fairy, building the biggest snowball ever or just causing trouble, they always have the best time together. This selection of fantastically funny short stories is perfect for spring boarding younger readers into the world of reading via an endearing heroine who has a lot of fun.

Girl Wonder

Being a teenager is tough, but having your two best friends around you can make it easier. Sometimes. Thirteen year old Ellie narrates this quartet of books as three girls navigate their way through their early teenage years, finding their first loves, testing the boundaries with their parents, falling out, making new friends, working out what they really want and realising how lucky they are to have each other. Jaqueline Wilson deals with the pressures surrounding teenage girls with her usual style, creating a series that is in equal measure heartwrenching and uplifting.

Girls

Gladiator

Glenn Moore’s Almanac

Global Icons Series

Glory Gardens

Glow-in-the-dark Dinosaurs

Gods Beyond the Skies

Gods and Warriors

Goodnight

Grandville Series

Set in rural Georgia, and starring Dr. Sara Linton, the town’s pediatrician and coroner, Jeffrey Tolliver, her wayward ex-husband and chief of police, and Lena Adams, the county’s only female detective.

Grant County

Starring Detective Inspector Will Grayson and Detective Sergeant Helen Walker – a police partnership like no other.

Grayson & Walker

Great British Classics

Great Kerouac

Great Plains Trilogy

Green Ideas

Green Puffin Classics

Greg the Sausage Roll

Grumpy Monkey

Guillermo Downes Thriller

Guru Guru Pon Chan

Hairy Maclary and Friends

Meet Nathan Byrn. 
 
He's half White Witch, half Black Witch 
His mother was a healer, his father is a killer 
He's been kept in a cage since he was fourteen. 
 
If White Witches are good 
And Black Witches are evil... 
What happens if you are both?

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