Alex Kirk grew up in the seaside town of Cleethorpes, which has brilliant beaches and the best fish and chips in the entire world. 
 
He has worked in a fish finger factory, as a plumber, a gardener, an English teacher, and for the last twenty-five years as a screenwriter, actor and comedian. Alex has written comedy shows for both radio and television, as well as being part of the writing team behind the wonderful Paddington 2 and Wonka. As an actor he has appeared in many TV productions such as My Family, Fresh Meat, The Detectorists and Coronation Street. 
 
He now lives in London with his family and a cat called Jonesey. This is his very first book.

Alex Kirk

Alex Laird is a medical herbalist with more than 20 years' experience. Trained in biomedicine and plant pharmacology, she treats patients in the only NHS herbal clinic based in a UK hospital at Whipps Cross. Alex is a visiting lecturer, and has published clinical research, and is the co-founder of the charity Living Medicine.

Alex Laird

Alex Latimer is an author and illustrator living in Cape Town, which is why he regularly has to shoo baboons out of his lounge. 
 
Alex's book Lion VS Rabbit won the Hampshire Picture Book Award 2014

Alex Latimer

Alex Livingston

Alex Manson-Smith is a journalist and copywriter. She has written lifestyle features for The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard and Observer, as well as award-winning commercials for Google, YouTube and Nike.

Alex Manson-Smith

Alex Marshall grew up in the area where London sinks into Essex. He's an award-winning journalist who has been writing about music and politics for over a decade, and who has been published in the Guardian and by the BBC, amongst others. He started investigating national anthems back in 2008. This is his first book.

Alex Marshall

Alex Maunder

Alex McBride is a criminal barrister. He is the author of the 'Common Law' column in Prospect magazine and has contributed to the New Statesman and various BBC programmes, including From Our Own Correspondent.

Alex McBride

Alex McCarthy was born in Cardiff and grew up in South Wales. An alumna of London Contemporary Dance School, she worked as a dancer and choreographer for a number of years on stage, TV and film. In 2017, following a career change and several years of writing, Alex began to write this novel. She has a daughter and stepdaughter, and lives in Wales.

Alex McCarthy

Alex Michaelides was born in Cyprus to an English mother and a Greek-Cypriot father. He has an M.A. in English from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and an M.A. in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. 
 
The Silent Patient, his first novel, was a Sunday Times bestseller, and debuted at no. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide. The rights have been sold in a record-breaking 50 countries and it has been optioned for film by Plan B. His second novel, The Maidens, was an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and has been optioned for television by Miramax Television and Stone Village. His third thriller, The Fury, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller, and a Waterstones Thriller of the Month pick.

Alex Michaelides

Alex Montgomery

Alex Morris

Alex North was born in Leeds, where he now lives with his wife and son. He studied Philosophy at Leeds University, and prior to becoming a writer he worked there in their sociology department. The Whisper Man was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, and is being published in more than 30 languages.

Alex North

Alex O. Imas is Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago School’s Booth School of Business. He is the recipient of the 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award, the New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Alex O. Imas

Alex Owen

Alex Patrick was born in the Kentish town of Dartford in the South-East of England and has been drawing for as long as he can remember. His lifelong love for cartoons, picture books and comics has shaped him into the passionate children’s illustrator he is today. Alex loves creating original characters - he brings an element of fun and humour to each of his illustrations and is often found laughing to himself as he draws.

Alex Patrick

Alex Pavesi lives in Surrey, where he writes full time. He previously worked as a software engineer and before that obtained a PhD in Mathematics. He enjoys puzzles, long walks and recreational lock picking. His debut novel Eight Detectives has been published in more than twenty languages, and was picked by the Sunday Times and the New York Times as one of their books of the year.

Alex Pavesi

Alex Pellew

Alex Pole

Alex Renton is an award-winning writer and reporter whose career has ranged from theatre criticism, food writing and the investigation of child abuse to work as a political correspondent and war reporter in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is also the author of Planet Carnivore and Blood Legacy.

Alex Renton

Alex Richie

Alex Riley is an award-winning science writer and the author of A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It, his first book. He received a best feature award at the 2019 Association of British Science Writers Awards for his reporting on The Friendship Bench, a project that began in Zimbabwe in 2006 and has since provided mental health care to thousands of people in New York. Since leaving academia in 2015, he began writing popular science articles for magazines such as New Scientist, PBS's NOVA Next, BBC Future, Mosaic Science, Aeon, and Nautilus Magazine. He lives in Bristol.

Alex Riley

Alex Scarrow used to be a rock guitarist, then he became a graphic artist, then he decided to be a computer games designer. Finally, he grew up and became an author. He has written a number of successful thrillers and several screenplays, but it's YA fiction that has allowed him to really have fun with the ideas and concepts he was playing around with designing games. Alex lives in Norwich.

Alex Scarrow

Alex Scott MBE is an award-winning broadcaster and former professional footballer. She helped Arsenal in their historic 'quadruple' season, in which they won all of their trophy competitions, and was later appointed as the team's captain. She represented England in 140 appearances with the Lionesses, retiring as the second most-capped England player across the men's and women's game. 
 
Alex is one of the UK's most in-demand presenters, appearing on The One Show, Children in Need, Sport Relief and ITV's The Games. In 2021, she made history as the first permanent female host of BBC's Football Focus. She is an ambassador for the BBC's mental health platform, Headspace, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of East London and University of Hertfordshire.

Alex Scott

Alex Sharp

Alex Shearer

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, PhD, has spent two decades studying people, technology, and the worlds they make. A Silicon Valley-based futurist and consultant, he has worked with governments and Fortune 500 companies; spoken at venues ranging from CIA headquarters to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to the Googleplex; and held academic positions at Stanford and Oxford universities. His is the author of the bestselling Rest and Shorter, a guide for companies on how to work less and get more done. Follow @askpang on Twitter and Instagram, or visit strategy.rest.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Alex Stone

Alex Tapscott

Alex Thompson

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Hugh Thomas

Inspired by hopes of both riches and of converting native people to Christianity, the Spanish adventurers of the fifteenth century convinced themselves that an earthly paradise existed in the Caribbean. This is the story of the hundreds of conquistadors who set sail on the precarious journey across the Atlantic - taking with them wheat, the horse, the guitar and the wheel as well as guns, malaria and slaves - to create an empire that made Spain the envy of the world. In this epic history Hugh Thomas brings Spain's rise to empire vividly to life, capturing the spirit of an ebullient age.

Rivers of Gold

The Rise of the Spanish Empire

Robert Ferguson

For those living outside Scandinavia, the Viking Age effectively began in 793 with an attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne, a characteristically violent harbinger of what was in store for Britain and much of Europe from the Vikings for the next 300 years, until the final destruction of the heathen temple to the Norse gods at Uppsala around 1090. 
 
Robert Ferguson is a sure guide across what he calls 'the treacherous marches which divide legend from fact in Viking Age history'. His long familiarity with the literary culture of Scandinavia - the eddas, the poetry of the skalds and the sagas - is combined with the latest archaeological discoveries and the evidence of picture-stones, runes, ships and objects scattered all over northern Europe, to make the most convincing modern portrait of the Viking Age in any language. The Hammer and the Cross ranges from Scandinavia itself to Kievan Rus and Byzantium in the east, to Iceland, Greenland and the north American settlements in the west. Beyond its geographical boundaries the book takes us on a journey to a misty region inhabited by Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Eyvind the Plagiarist, in which literature, history and myth dissolve into one another.

The Hammer and the Cross

A New History of the Vikings

Richard Overy

In the course of human history there has probably been no more terrible place than Eastern Europe in 1941-5. Estimates of total Soviet military and civilian deaths in the period now stand at more than 25 million. In Russia's War, Richard Overy re-creates the Soviet Union's apocalyptic struggle against Germany from the point of view both of the troops and of the ordinary civilians.

Russia's War

Jacob Burckhardt

Pioneering art historian Jacob Burckhardt saw the Italian Renaissance as no less than the beginning of the modern world. In this hugely influential work he argues that the Renaissance's creativity, competitiveness, dynasties, great city-states and even its vicious rulers sowed the seeds of a new era. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The State as a Work of Art

Miranda Carter

Three cousins. Three Emperors. And the road to ruin. 
 
As cousins, George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the last Tsar Nicholas II should have been friends - but they happened also to rule Europe's three most powerful states. This potent combination together with their own destructive personalities - petty, insecure, bullying, absurdly obsessive (stamp collecting, uniforms) - led not only to their own dramatic fallouts and falls from grace, but also to the outbreak of the First World War. 
 
Miranda Carter's riveting account of how three men who should have known better helped bring down an entire world is a gripping story of abdication, betrayal and murder.

The Three Emperors

Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One

Peter H. Wilson

Winner of the Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2011 
 
The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618-48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. All the major European powers apart from Russia were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. At its end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price. 
 
Peter Wilson's book is a major work, the first new history of the war in a generation, and a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to explain a compelling series of events. Wilson's great strength is in allowing the reader to understand the tragedy of mixed motives that allowed rulers to gamble their countries' future with such horrifying results. The principal actors in the drama (Wallenstein, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu) are all here, but so is the experience of the ordinary soldiers and civilians, desperately trying to stay alive under impossible circumstances.

Europe's Tragedy

A New History of the Thirty Years War

Peter Hennessy

This updated edition of The Secret State revises Hennessy's picture of the Soviet threat that was presented to ministers from the last days of the Second World War to the 1960s. He maps the size and shape of the Cold War state built in response to that perceived threat, and traces the arguments successive generations of ministers, the military and civil servants have used to justify the British nuclear capability. He also adds new material exploring the threats presented by the IRA and radical Islamic terrorists post 9/11. In what circumstances would the Prime Minister authorize the use of nuclear force and how would his orders be carried out? What would the Queen be told and when? In this captivating new account, Peter Hennessy provides the best answers we have yet had to these questions.

The Secret State

Preparing For The Worst 1945 - 2010

Christopher Andrew

To mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has opened its archives to an independent historian. The Defence of the Realm, the book which results, is an unprecedented publication, It reveals the precise role of the Service in twentieth-century British history, from its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909 to root out 'the spies of the Kaiser' up to its present role in countering Islamic terrorism. It describes the distinctive ethos of MI5, how the organization has been managed, its relationship with the government, where it has triumphed and where it has failed. In all of this, no restriction has been placed on the judgements made by the author. 
 
The book also casts new light on many events and periods in British history, showing for example that though well-placed sources MI5 was probably the pre-war department with the best understanding of Hitler's objectives, and had a remarkable willingness to speak truth to power; how it was so astonishingly successful in turning German agents during the Second World War; and that it had much greater roles than has hitherto been realized during the end of the Empire and in responding to the recurrent fears of successive governments (both Conservative and Labour) and or Cold War Communist subversion. It has new information about the Profumo affair and its aftermath, about the 'Magnificent Five' and about a range of formerly unconfirmed Soviet contacts. It reveals that though MI5 had a file on Harold Wilson it did not plot against him, and it describes what really happened during the failed IRA attack in Gibraltar in March 1988.

The Defence of the Realm

The Authorized History of MI5

British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity. The Morbid Age opens a window on to this creative but anxious era, the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was facing a possibly terminal crisis of civilization. Ultimately, Overy shows, the coming of war was almost welcomed as a way to resolve the contradictions and anxieties of this period, a war in which it was believed civilization would be either saved or utterly destroyed.

The Morbid Age

Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919 - 1939

The Battle of Britain tells the extraordinary story of one of the pivotal events of the Second World War - the struggle between British and German air forces in the late summer and autumn of 1940. Exposing many of the myths surrounding the conflict, the book provides answers to important questions: how close did Britain really come to invasion? What were Hitler and Churchill's motives? And what was the battle's real effect on the outcome of the war? Told with great clarity and objectivity, this is a superb introduction to a defining moment in our history. 
 
'No individual British victory after Trafalgar was more decisive in challenging the course of a major war than was the Battle of Britain ... In his carefully argued, clearly explained and impressively documented book ... Richard Overy is at pains to dispose of the myths and expose the real history of what he does not doubt was a great British victory ... the best historical analysis in readable form which has yet appeared on this prime subject' Noble Frankland, The Times Literary Supplement

The Battle of Britain

Myth and Reality

Christopher Caldwell

'We need books like this' Literary Review 
 
'Western Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind.' 
 
Taking us from English suburbs to Parisian housing estates, this provocative, unflinching and engrossing book tackles uncomfortable questions about immigration and Islam head-on, and asks: why can't we face the truth?

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Immigration, Islam and the West

Brian Hanley

Scott Millar

The story of contemporary Ireland is inseparable from the story of the official republican movement, a story told here for the first time - from the clash between Catholic nationalist and socialist republicanism in the 1960s and '70s through the Workers' Party's eventual rejection of irredentism. A roll-call of influential personalities in the fields of politics, trade unionism and media - many still operating at the highest levels of Irish public life - passed though the ranks of this secretive movement, which never achieved its objectives but had a lasting influence on the landscape of Irish politics.

The Lost Revolution

The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party

David Horspool

The English have a rich and glorious history of making trouble for themselves. One hundred and forty years before the French Revolution, the English executed their king and instituted a radical revolutionary government. In 1215, more than 570 years before the United States ratified its Bill of Rights, England's barons forced King John to accept the Magna Carta. In 1926 over 1.5 million strikers brought the nation to its knees. 
 
From the Peasants' Revolt to the suffragettes, from Oliver Cromwell to Arthur Scargill, this ground-breaking and hugely enjoyable book describes a rich and continuous tradition of resistance, rebellion and radicalism, of violent and charismatic individuals with axes to grind, and of social eruptions and political earthquakes that have shaped England's whole culture and character.

The English Rebel

One Thousand Years of Trouble-making from the Normans to the Nineties

Andrew Roberts

On 2 August 1944 Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in the House of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War. 'Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler, of Corporal Hitler,' Churchill jibed. 'Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in his actions.' 
 
Andrew Roberts's previous book Masters and Commanders studied the creation of Allied grand strategy; The Storm of War now analyses how Axis strategy evolved. Examining the Second World War on every front, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-making process and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won. Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler after the war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their former Führer once he was safely beyond defending himself? The book is full of illuminating sidelights on the principle actors that bring their characters and the ways in which they reached decisions into fresh focus.

The Storm of War

A New History of the Second World War

Ian Kershaw

Now at last in a single, abridged paperback - the definitive life. 
 
Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of Hitler was greeted with universal acclaim as the essential work on one of the most malign figures in history. Now this landmark biography is available in one single, abridged edition, tracing the story of how a bitter, failed art student from an obscure corner of Austria rose to unparalleled power, destroying the lives of millions and unleashing Armageddon.

Hitler

Chris Wickham

'The Penguin History of Europe series ... is one of contemporary publishing's great projects' New Statesman 
 
The world known as the 'Dark Ages', often seen as a time of barbarism, was in fact the crucible in which modern Europe would be created. 
 
Chris Wickham's acclaimed history shows how this period, encompassing peoples such as Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, was central to the development of our history and culture. From the collapse of the Roman Empire to the establishment of new European states, and from Ireland to Constantinople, the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this landmark work makes sense of a time of invasion and turbulence, but also of continuity, creativity and achievement.

The Inheritance of Rome

A History of Europe from 400 to 1000

Richard J. Evans

In 1939 Hitler mobilized Germany into all-out war. Richard Evans's astonishing, acclaimed history conjures up a whole society plunged into conflict - from generals and front-line soldiers to Hitler Youth activists and middle-class housewives - tracing events from the invasion of Poland and the Battle of Stalingrad to Hitler's plans for genocide and his eventual suicide. The Third Reich at War is a historical masterpiece, showing how Germany rushed headlong into destroying itself and an entire continent.

The Third Reich at War

How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster

John Gribbin

From the bestselling author of Science: A History comes the enthralling story of a revolution that shook the world. Seventeenth-century England was racked by civil war, plague and fire; a world ruled by superstition and ignorance. A series of meetings of 'natural philosophers' in Oxford and London saw the beginning of a new method of thinking based on proof and experiment. John Gribbin's gripping, colourful account of this unparalleled time of discovery explores the impact of the Royal Society, culminating with Isaac Newton's revolutionary description of the universe and Edmund Halley's prediction of the return of a comet in 1759. This compelling book shows the triumph not as the work of one isolated genius, but of a Fellowship.

The Fellowship

The Story of the Royal Society and a Scientific Revolution

R.V. Jones

Reginald Jones was nothing less than a genius. And his appointment to the Intelligence Section of Britain's Air Ministry in 1939 led to some of the most astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs of the Second World War. 
 
In Most Secret War he details how Britain stealthily stole the war from under the Germans' noses by outsmarting their intelligence at every turn. He tells of the 'battle of the beams'; detecting and defeating flying bombs; using chaff to confuse radar; and many other ingenious ideas and devices. 
Jones was the man with the plan to save Britain and his story makes for riveting reading.

Most Secret War

George Psychoundakis

George Psychoundakis was a young shepherd boy who knew the island of Crete intimately when the Nazis invaded by air in 1941. He immediately joined the resistance and took on the crucial job of war-time runner. 
 
It was not only the toughest but the most dangerous job of all. It involved immense journeys carrying vital messages, smuggling arms and explosives and guiding Allied soldiers, agents and commandos through heavily garrisoned territory. And George did not escape capture and torture on his many forays. 
This brilliant account of George's activities across mountainous terrain, come blazing summer or freezing winter, is a gripping story of bravery against impossible odds.

The Cretan Runner

Ewen Southby-Tailyour

Andre Hue

Andre Hue was a daredevil. By the age of twenty the Anglo-Frenchman had survived shipwreck and years undercover in France, sabotaging German supply lines. Returning to Britain, he was recruited by SOE to parachute behind enemy lines on 5 June 1944, to unite resistance forces in Brittany and paralyse local German troops during the Allied invasion. 
 
Though Hue's mission was fraught with difficulty - he missed his landing site, his secret base camp became the site of a pitch battle and a band of Cossacks tried to hunt him down - he knew that thousands of lives depended on his success or failure . . .

The Next Moon

Robert Gildea

Nineteenth-century France was one of the world's great cultural beacons, renowned for its dazzling literature, philosophy, art, poetry and technology. Yet this was also a tumultuous century of political anarchy and bloodshed, where each generation of the French Revolution's 'children' would experience their own wars, revolutions and terrors. 
 
From soldiers to priests, from peasants to Communards, from feminists to literary figures such as Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, Robert Gildea's brilliant new history explores every aspect of these rapidly changing times, and the people who lived through them.

Children of the Revolution

The French, 1799-1914

Tim Robinson

The first volume of Tim Robinson's Connemara trilogy, Listening to the Wind, covered Robinson's home territory of Roundstone and environs. The Last Pool of Darkness moves into wilder territory: the fjords, cliffs, hills and islands of north-west Connemara, a place that Wittgenstein, who lived on his own in a cottage there for a time, called 'the last pool of darkness in Europe'. Again combining his polymathic knowledge of Connemara's natural history, human history, folklore and topography with his own unsurpassable artistry as a writer, Tim Robinson has produced another classic.

Connemara

The Last Pool of Darkness

Christopher Clark

King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important - and most controversial - figures in the history of twentieth-century Europe. But how much power did he really have? 
 
The acclaimed historian Christopher Clark follows Kaiser Wilhelm's political career from his youth at the Hohenzollern court through the turbulent decades of the Wilhelmine era into global war and the collapse of Germany in 1918, to his last days. He asks: what was his true role in the events that led to the outbreak of the First World War? What was the nature and extent of his control? What were his political goals and his success in achieving them? How did he project authority and exercise influence? How did the people view him? 
 
Through original research, Clark presents a fresh new interpretation of this contentious figure, focusing on how his forty-year reign from 1888 to 1918 affected Germany, and the rest of Europe, for years to come.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

A Life in Power

Masters and Commanders describes how four titanic figures shaped the grand strategy of the West during the Second World War. Each was exceptionally tough-willed and strong minded, and each was certain that he knew best how to win the war. Yet each knew that he had to win at least two of the others over in order to get his strategy adopted. The book traces the mutual suspicion and admiration, the rebuffs and the charm, the often explosive disagreements and wary reconciliations which resulted.

Masters and Commanders

The Military Geniuses Who Led The West To Victory In World War II

Ed Glinert

In the same format as the successful London Compendium, the Manchester Compendium relates the remarkable and diverse history of England's second city. Manchester's town hall and its Royal Exchange epitomise the city's architectural grandeur and its industrial heritage., Peterloo and Engel's treatise on the conditions of the working classes its political history and the Manchester Guardian and Factory Records its cultural and social history. From Thomas de Quincey to Alan Touring, Neville Cardus to Morrissey - all are part of the city's rich and fascinating past. Covering every area of human activity and incorporating all the great events and key moments in the city's history this will be a fresh and unique perspective on a great city.

The Manchester Compendium

A Street-by-Street History of England's Greatest Industrial City

Mark Mazower

Hitler's empire was the largest, most brutal and most ambitious reshaping of Europe in history. Inspired by the imperial legacy of those such as the British, the Third Reich cast its shadow from the Channel Islands to the Caucasus and ruled hundreds of millions. Yet, as Mark Mazower's groundbreaking new account shows, it was an empire built on an illusion. 
 
From Hitler's plans for vast motorways crossing an ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, to dreams of a German super-economy rivalling America's, Mazower reveals the lethal fusion of mass murder, modern managerialism and colossal incompetence that underpinned the Nazi New Order. Ultimately Hitler's empire ended up consuming its own, leaving destruction in its wake and finishing not just with the downfall of Germany, but an entire continent.

Hitler's Empire

Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe

Terry Brighton

'They should put Montgomery and Patton and Rommel in the same ring and take off the gloves and let 'em go at it' Bill Mauldin, American GI 
 
In the Second World War, Great Britain, the United States and Germany each had one commander who stood out from the rest: Bernard Montgomery, George Patton and Erwin Rommel. In Masters of Battle, all three are 'put in the same ring' and allowed to 'go at it' against a backdrop of the great armoured battles of North Africa, the invasions of Sicily and Italy, the Normandy landings and the push through France and Belgium into Germany. 
 
Through the mutual respect of the arch-enemies Monty and Rommel, and the mutual animosity of the allies Monty and Patton, Masters of Battle presents the Second World War as it was experienced by its three most flamboyant, controversial and influential commanders.

Masters of Battle

Monty, Patton and Rommel at War

Samuel. D Kassow

In the Autumn of 1940 the Jews of Warsaw were forced into a crowded ghetto, enduring unimaginable conditions until most were killed. Yet, amid this, one man, Emanuel Ringelblum, started an extraordinary clandestine organization dedicated to recording life under Nazi occupation. His aim: to ensure that, if he died, his people's history would still be written. 
 
Codenamed Oyneg Shabes, this underground group painstakingly gathered together an archive of some 35,000 documents - letters, poems, photographs, personal testimonies, menus, sketches, songs and official papers - which was buried in tin boxes and milk bottles just before the ghetto was razed to the ground. This secret cache lay deep beneath the rubble for years, long after most of the Oyneg Shabes's members had perished, until one of the few survivors led the way to its secret location. 
 
Only now can the story of this incredible historical record, and the people behind it, be fully told. It is a testament to an extraordinary act of defiance in the face of tyranny, and to the triumph of history.

Who Will Write Our History?

Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto

Michael Braddick

The sequence of civil wars that ripped England apart in the seventeenth century was one of the most devastating conflicts in its history. It destroyed families and towns, ravaged the population and led many, both supporters of Charles I and his opponents, to believe that England&rsquo;s people were being punished by a vengeful God. 
 
This masterly new history illuminates what it was like to live through a time of terrifying violence, religious fervour and radical politics. Michael Braddick describes how pamphleteers, armies, iconoclasts, witch-hunters, Levellers, protestors and petitioners were all mobilized in the chaos, as they fought over new ways to imagine their world.

God's Fury, England's Fire

A New History of the English Civil Wars

Inspector Maigret

DI Tony McLean of the Lothian and Borders Police knows Edinburgh like the back of his hand - an invaluable advantage when simultaneously pursuing depraved and dangerous criminals, and dodging overbearing superiors. Alongside a few trusted colleagues like DS 'Grumpy Bob' Laird and DS Kirsty Ritchie, McLean is an unorthodox force to be reckoned with . . .

Inspector McLean

Inspector Sejer

Inspector Taleb Series

Inspector Webb

Instinct Series

Intercrime

Invisible Series

Irish Classics

Iron Seas

Charismatic, handsome, and fiercely loyal, Isaac Bell is a no-nonsense private detective at the Von Dorn Detective Agency. Travelling all over early 20th century America in pursuit of justice for his clients, chasing down a steam train in a sports automobile is all in a day's work for Bell. And while he's on the trail of thieves, killers, and sometimes much worse, he'll have to use his every last wit to stay ahead of those he seeks, and to stay alive. . .

Isaac Bell

Witness the political struggles and tragedies of Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand and their children as ambitions take over in a time of civil war.

Isabella & Ferdinand Trilogy

It's Time to...

Izzy Dobson

I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again

Mo Hayder's Jack Caffery series is not for the faint-hearted. 
DI Jack Caffery specialises in the most gruesome, twisted and terrifying crimes. Against the clock to find the killer before the next murder is committed, Caffery is young, unshockable and driven.

Jack Caffery

Jack Reacher is a former major in the US Military Police who, since leaving the army, has drifted round the wide open spaces of America, hitchhiking or on buses, wherever the whim takes him. He has no permanent address, no job, no family ties, no car, no luggage, no mobile phone, no credit card - all he carries with him is a folding toothbrush. 
Reacher is never looking for trouble, but somehow trouble always find him. He is the ultimate hero for our troubled times, with a keen moral compass and sense of justice, even if he is often prepared to take the law into his own hands: he says he doesn't want to put the world to rights, he just doesn't like people who put it to wrongs.

Jack Reacher

Jack Reacher Short Stories

Jack Ryan

Jack Ryan Jr

Jack Slater

Jack Stalwart

Jack Tanner

Jack and Millie

Jackson Brodie is a private investigator, originally from Yorkshire. A former soldier and policeman he now makes his money working from investigating infidelity and finding missing cats. Jackson's tough-guy exterior belies a deeply empathetic heart. He's unable to resist coming to the rescue and increasingly he becomes a magnet for the bereaved, the lost and the dysfunctional. His ability to connect comes from his own tragic childhood that still haunts him. 
 
Jackson Brodie has appeared in four of Kate Atkinson's novels. Each can be read in isolation but are best enjoyed in order of publication: Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News?, Started Early, Took My Dog.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Series

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter