Born in 1986, Alexandra Zelman-Doring is a graduate of Brown, Columbia, and Oxford Universities. She is a poet, playwright, and actor, and recent co-founder of Throes Theater (www.throestheater.com). Based in New York City, she lives with her husband, clarinet player Naum Goldenstein.

Alexandra Zelman-Doring

Alexandre Antonelli is Director of Science of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where he leads the work of over 350 scientists. A botanist by training, he was made Full Professor of Biodiversity at University of Gothenburg in Sweden aged 36, and founded the Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre and served as Cisneros Visiting Scholar at Harvard University before joining Kew. He remains an active researcher at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Oxford in the UK. This is his first book.

Alexandre Antonelli

Alexander Dumas was born in 1802 at Villes-Cotterets. He received very little education but when he entered the household of the future king, Louis-Philippe, he began to read veraciously and then to write. In 1839 he began writing novels dealing with the wars of religion and the Revolution, but he is most remembered for his historical novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.

Alexandre Dumas

Alexandria Bellefleur is a bestselling and award-winning author of swoony contemporary romance often featuring loveable grumps and the sunshine characters who bring them to their knees. Her debut novel, Written in the Stars, was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award winner and a 2020 winner of The Ripped Bodice Awards for Excellence in Romantic Fiction.

Alexandria Bellefleur

ALEXEI NAVALNY was a Russian opposition leader, an anti-corruption campaigner, and political prisoner who won international recognition and respect. His many international honours included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize. He died in 2024.

Alexei Navalny

Alexei Sayle

Alexi Zentner

Alexia Casale is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, as well as a script consultant and specialist human rights editor. Her young adult novel, The Bone Dragon, was shortlisted for the Waterstone's Children's Book Prize and her first adult novel, The Best Way to Bury Your Husband, set the darkly comic stage for her adult fiction. This is her second adult novel.

Alexia Casale

Alexina Anatole is a chef, presenter, and writer based in London. After reaching the final of MasterChef in 2021, she made a brave career change from the trading floor to the food world. Her debut cookbook – Bitter – was published by Square Peg, Vintage in September 2023 to critical acclaim from the likes of Nigella Lawson, Rukmini Iyer, and Waterstones. Anatole also writes Small Wins, a Substack newsletter that enhances your cooking and your life in small, manageable ways. She has been featured on BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen, Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, and BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme as well as social media platforms including MOB and TopJaw. She also runs sell-out events, including Sel, London’s most intimate supper club, and Cocoa POP, a chocolate-themed pop-up with chocolatier Octavia Lamb. Alexina is of mixed heritage: the granddaughter of chicken farmers from Cambridgeshire and Saint Lucian grandparents who arrived in London during the Windrush.

Alexina Anatole

Alexis Calder writes sassy heroines and sexy heroes with a sprinkle of sarcasm. She lives in the Rockies and drinks far too much coffee and just the right amount of wine.

Alexis Calder

Alexis Deacon graduated from the University of Brighton, where he studied Illustration, gaining a first class honours degree. Alexis Deacon was one of Booktrust's ten Best New Illustrators in 2008, and Beegu was a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year and shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Alexis lives in London.

Alexis Deacon

Alexis G Aïnouz

Alexis Henderson is a speculative fiction writer with a penchant for dark fantasy, witchcraft and cosmic horror. Growing up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia, instilled in her a life-long love of ghost stories. When she doesn’t have her nose buried in a book, you can find her painting or watching horror movies with her feline familiar. Her acclaimed adult books include The Year of the Witching, House of Hunger and An Academy for Liars. Her debut YA novel, When I Was Death, publishes in March 2026.

Alexis Henderson

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Born and raised in Yorkshire, Alexis moved to Cardiff where she completed a degree in print-making. She went on to exhibit in and around Wales and Leeds and has had two art residencies. After a stint working as a cook, Alexis moved to London with her small, second-hand printing press and began print-making again. Alexis works in lino which she cuts by hand. For inspiration, she looks to old matchbox covers, record sleeves, tea boxes, postcards, explorers, the circus and films. She has since moved back to Yorkshire, where she works from her studio. Alexis has designed many book covers and illustrated Dr Who: Twelve Angels Weeping but The Bear in the Stars is her first book as an author-illustrator.

Alexis Snell

Alexis Soyer

Alexis Stickland is a midwife, antenatal teacher and mother of three children who has been supporting new mums and their families for over 12 years. She was motivated by her own personal experience to team up with her friend and colleague Beccy Hands to launch The Motherbox – a company that delivers beautiful boxes of nourishing treats and self-care advice to new mums.

Alexis Stickland

Alexis Tocqueville

Alexis Zegerman

Alexis de Tocqueville

Alf Proysen

Alfie Boe

Alfie Moore

Alfie Small is a keen explorer, just like his older cousin, Charlie. And just like Charlie, Alfie is fearless! He loves adventures, speedboats, dragons and sword-fighting. He does NOT like wrinkly old pirates and interfering puffins. Unlike Charlie, Alfie always makes sure he gets back home in time for tea!

Alfie Small

Alfie Teale

Alfred Assollant was born in 1827. He was a teacher, journalist, writer and outspoken opponent of Napoleon III. He wrote more than thirty books over thirty years, including historical fiction, collected essays and a treatise on the rights of women, but only The Marvellous (But Authentic) Adventures of Captain Corcoran, published in 1867, was a success. In the 1870s, his wife, son and daughter died in quick succession and Assollant found himself poverty-stricken. In 1886 he also died, all but forgotten despite the continuing success of Corcoran, in a paupers’ hospital in Paris. 
 
Sam Miller was born and brought up in London. He studied History at Cambridge University and Politics at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, before joining the BBC in 1986, for which he has worked, on and off, ever since. In the early 1990s he was the BBC World Service TV and radio correspondent in Delhi, and on his return to the UK in 1993 was the presenter of the BBC’s current affairs programme, South Asia Report. Later he became the head of the Urdu service and subsequently Managing Editor, South Asia. He was posted back to Delhi in 2002 and has remained there ever since. He is the author of Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity (2009), Blue Guide: India (2012) and most recently A Strange Kind of Paradise: India Through Foreign Eyes, which was published by Jonathan Cape in 2014.

Alfred Assollant

Alfred Döblin

Alfred Hayes

Alfred Hitchcock

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David Reynolds

Churchill fought the war twice over - as Prime Minister and again as its premier historian. In 1948-54 he published six volumes of memoirs which secured his reputation and shaped our understanding of the conflict to this day. 
 
Using the drafts and correspondence for The Second World War, David Reynolds opens our eyes to Churchill the author and to the research 'syndicate' on whom he depended. We see how the memoirs were censored by Whitehall to conceal secrets such as the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, and how Churchill himself censored them to avoid offending current world leaders. 
 
This book forces us to reconsider much received wisdom about the war and illuminates an unjustly neglected period of his life - the Second Wilderness Years of 1945-51, when Churchill, now over seventy, wrote himself into history, politicked himself back into Downing Street and delivered some of the most important speeches of his career.

In Command of History

Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War

Richard Overy

Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history. Yet millions of Germans and Russians enthusiastically supported them and the values they stood for. In this first major study of the two dictatorships side-by-side Richard Overy sets out to answer the question: How was dictatorship possible? How did they function? What was the bond that tied dictator and people so powerfully together? He paints a remarkable and vivid account of the different ways in which Stalin and Hitler rose to power, and abused and dominated their people. It is a chilling analysis of powerful ideals corrupted by the vanity of ambitious and unscrupulous men.

The Dictators

Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia

Andrew Jotischky

Caroline Hull

This new historical atlas - richly illustrated with photographs, artwork recreations and full-colour maps - explores the Middle Ages from the coming of the barbarian invasions in the fourth century to the first voyages to the New World in the sixteenth. Coverage of major events - the Hundred Years' War, the Christian Reconquest of Spain - is supplemented by discussion of such key topics as the medieval economy, the growth of towns and the spread of printing, resulting in a rich and multi-faceted introduction to Europe and its neighbours in the Middle Ages.

The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Medieval World

Donald Rayfield

Stalin, like Hitler and other tyrants, won and held power because he had collaborators - hangmen. Drawing on newly released archival material, Donald Rayfield gives us a fuller and more colourful picture of Stalin's inner circle than ever before. Stalin was not the sole author of Stalinism. What motivated his chiefs of police, Feliks Dzierzynski, Viacheslav Manzhinsky, Genrikh Iagoda, Nikolai Ezhov and Lavrenti Beria? What did they want? What were their relations with the regime and its ruler? How did their upbringing and experience mould them? And how does the terror they create connect with the terror they felt? Stalin and His Hangmen reconstructs the psychological mechanism of a whole regime and what it held together. The extent of the misery caused by Stalin and his Hangmen can be compared in Europe only to that brought about by Hitler and his henchmen. But Stalin's heritage is, if possible, even worse than Hitler's. His rule enslaved three generations, not one, the horror of what he did has not yet been fully understood and his countrymen have not yet found the strenth to disavow him. All the more important, then, that this diabolical tale should be told.

Stalin and His Hangmen

An Authoritative Portrait of a Tyrant and Those Who Served Him

Robert O. Paxton

Fascism was the major political invention of the twentieth century and the source of much of its pain. How can we try to comprehend its allure and its horror? Is it a philosophy, a movement, an aesthetic experience? What makes states and nations become fascist? 
 
Acclaimed historian Robert O. Paxton shows that in order to understand fascism we must look at it in action - at what it did, as much as what it said it was about. He explores its falsehoods and common threads; the social and political base that allowed it to prosper; its leaders and internal struggles; how it manifested itself differently in each country - France, Britain, the low countries, Eastern Europe, even Latin America as well as Italy and Germany; how fascists viewed the Holocaust; and, finally, whether fascism is still possible in today's world. 
 
Offering a bold new interpretation of the fascist phenomenon, this groundbreaking book will overturn our understanding of twentieth-century history.

The Anatomy of Fascism

Jane Smiley

In Iceland, the age of the Vikings is also known as the Saga Age. A unique body of medieval literature, the Sagas rank with the world&rsquo;s great literary treasures &ndash; as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. Set around the turn of the last millennium, these stories depict with an astonishingly modern realism the lives and deeds of the Norse men and women who first settled in Iceland and of their descendants, who ventured farther west to Greenland and, ultimately, North America.  Sailing as far from the archetypal heroic adventure as the long ships did from home, the Sagas are written with psychological intensity, peopled by characters with depth, and explore perennial human issues like love, hate, fate and freedom.

The Sagas of the Icelanders

Roy Porter

'As an introduction to early modern thinking and the impact of past ideas on present lives, this book can find few equals and no superiors. Porter is a witty, humane writer with an extraordinary vocabulary and a sparkling sense of fun. Whether he is quoting from obscure medical texts or analysing scabrous diaries, dishing the dirt on long-dead bigwigs or evoking sympathy for human suffering, his grasp is masterly and his erudition appealing. I wish I could read it again for the first time: you can.' Times Educational Supplement, Book of the Week 
 
In this startlingly brilliant sequel to the prize-winning ENLIGHTENMENT Roy Porter completes his lifetime's work, offering a magical, enthusiastic and charming account of the writings of some of the most attractive figures ever to write English.

Flesh in the Age of Reason

N A M Rodger

Throughout Britain's history, one factor above all others has determined the fate of the nation: its navy. N. A. M. Rodger's definitive account reveals how the political and social progress of Britain has been inextricably intertwined with the strength - and weakness - of its sea power, from the desperate early campaigns against the Vikings to the defeat of the great Spanish Armada. Covering policy, strategy, ships, recruitment and weapons, this is a superb tapestry of nearly 1,000 years of maritime history. 
 
'No other historian has examined the subject in anything like the detail found here. The result is an outstanding example of narrative history' Barry Unsworth, Sunday Telegraph

The Safeguard of the Sea

A Naval History of Britain 660-1649

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Reformation was the seismic event in European history over the past 1000 years, and one which tore the medieval world apart. Not just European religion, but thought, culture, society, state systems, personal relations - everything - was turned upside down. Just about everything which followed in European history can be traced back in some way to the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation which it provoked. The Reformation is where the modern world painfully and dramatically began, and MacCulloch's great history of it is recognised as the best modern account.

Reformation

Europe's House Divided 1490-1700

Simon Schama

The most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution, and one of the great landmarks of modern history publishing. 
 
'Monumental...provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful, informed and profoundly revisionist' Eugen Weber, The New York Times Book Review

Citizens

A Chronicle of The French Revolution

David Carpenter

The two-and-a-half centuries after 1066 were momentous ones in the history of Britain. In 1066, England was conquered for the last time. The Anglo-Saxon ruling class was destroyed and and the English became a subject race, dominated by a Norman-French dynasty and aristocracy. This book shows how the English domination of the kingdom was by no means a foregone conclusion. 
 
 
The struggle for mastery in the book's title is in reality the struggle for different masteries within Great Britain. The book weaves together the histories of England, Scotland and Wales in a new way and argues that all three, in their different fashions, were competing for domination

The Penguin History of Britain: The Struggle for Mastery

Britain 1066-1284

Richard J. Evans

Richard Evans' brilliant book unfolds perhaps the single most important story of the 20th century: how a stable and modern country in less than a single lifetime led Europe into moral, physical and cultural ruin and despair. A terrible story not least because there were so many other ways in which Germany's history could have been played out. With authority, skill and compassion, Evans recreates a country torn apart by overwhelming economic, political and social blows: the First World War, Versailles, hyperinflation and the Great Depression. One by one these blows ruined or pushed aside almost everything admirable about Germany, leaving the way clear for a truly horrifying ideology to take command.

The Coming of the Third Reich

How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany

Gilda O'Neill

Our Street is the perfect companion to Gilda O'Neill's bestselling My East End. This book focuses on the lives of Londoners in the East End during the Second World War.  Showing the concerns, hopes and fears of these so-called 'ordinary people' Our Street illustrates these times by looking at the every day rituals which marked the patterns of daily life during WWII. It is an important book and also an affectionate record of an often fondly remembered, more communal, way of life that has all but disappeared.

Our Street

East End Life in the Second World War

Carlo d'Este

Field Marshal Montgomery's battleplan for Normandy, following the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944, resulted in one of the most controversial campaigns of the Second World War.  Carlo D'Este's acclaimed book gives the fullest possible account of the conception and execution of Montgomery's plan, with all its problems and complexities.  It brings to light information from diaries, papers and letters that were not available in Montgomery's lifetime adn draws on interviews with senior officers who were involved in the campaign and have refrained from speaking out until now.

Decision in Normandy

The Real Story of Montgomery and the Allied Campaign

Anne Applebaum

This landmark book uncovers for the first time in detail one of the greatest horrors of the twentieth century: the vast system of Soviet camps that were responsible for the deaths of countless millions. 
 
Gulag is the only major history in any language to draw together the mass of memoirs and writings on the Soviet camps that have been published in Russia and the West. Using these, as well as her own original research in NKVD archives and interviews with survivors, Anne Applebaum has written a fully documented history of the camp system: from its origins under the tsars, to its colossal expansion under Stalin's reign of terror, its zenith in the late 1940s and eventual collapse in the era of glasnost. It is a gigantic feat of investigation, synthesis and moral reckoning.

Gulag

A History of the Soviet Camps

J. Roberts

Comprehensive in its scope and brilliantly readable, this is a superb follow-up to the author's bestselling Penguin History of the World.  Beginning with prehistory and the early civilizations of the Aegean, The Penguin History of Europe traces the development of European identity in its many guises, through the age of Christendom, the Middle Ages, early Modern history and the old European order.

The Penguin History of Europe

Christopher Hibbert

This book is as captivating as the city itself. Hibbert's gift is weaving political, social and art history into an elegantly readable and marvellously lively whole. The author's book on Florence will also be at once a history and a guide book and will be enhanced by splendid photographs and illustrations and line drawings which will describe all teh buildings and treasures of the city.

Florence

The Biography of a City

Peter Clarke

Peter Clarke brilliantly challenges the commonly held view of Britain in the twentieth century as a nation in decline. Adopting a wide perspective, he examines the political. social and economic changes that transformed Britain. He looks at how jobs and prices, food and shelter, and education and welfare, shaped society and explores such areas as architecture, sport and popular culture. Embracing a century of national experience, Hope and Glory superbly conveys the diverse aspects of three generations who lived through unparalleled change.

Hope and Glory

Britain 1900-2000

W. G. Sebald

In the last years of World War II, the Allies dropped a million tons of bombs on Germany.  Yet the German people have been silent about the resulting devastation and loss of life, failing to recognise the terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land. Here W. G. Sebald, one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, asks why it is we turn our backs on the horrors of war, and, in addressing our response to the past, bravely offers insights into how we live now.

On The Natural History Of Destruction

Richard Fletcher

A short, brilliant account of the relations between Islam and Christianity from Muhammad to the Reformation. Fletcher argues that though there were trading and cultural interactions between Islam and Christianity during the period when Arabs controlled most of the Mediterranean world, neither side was remotely interested in the religion of the other. "Christian and Moslem lived side by side in a state of mutual religious aversion. Given these circumstances, if religious passions were to be stirred up, confrontation would probably be violent." He shows how religious misunderstanding and antagonism between "the peoples of the book" has been present since their earliest encounters.

The Cross and the Crescent

The Dramatic Story of the Earliest Encounters Between Christians and Muslims

Amos Elon

The Pity of It All is a passionate and poignant history of German Jews, tracing the journey of a people and their culture from the mid eighteenth century to the eve of the Third Reich. 
 
As it is usually told, the story of the Jews in Germany starts at the end, overshadowed by their tragic demise in Hitler's Reich. Now, in this important work of historical restoration, the acclaimed historian and social critic Amos Elon takes us back to the beginning, chronicling a 150-year period of achievement and integration that at its peak produced a golden age second only to the Renaissance.

The Pity of it All

A Portrait of Jews in Germany 1743-1933

Virginia Nicholson

'Racy, vivacious, warm-hearted. Offers an illuminating and well-researched portrait of life among the artists, a century ago' TLS 
 
Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant, the artistic community in the first half of the twentieth century were ingaged in a grand experiment. 
The Bohemians ate garlic and didn't always wash; they painted and danced and didn't care what people thought. They sent their children to co-ed schools; explored homosexuality and Free Love. They were often drunk, broke and hungry but they were rebels. 
 
In this fascinating book Virginia Nicholson examines the way the Bohemians refashioned the way we live our lives.

Among the Bohemians

Experiments in Living 1900-1939

Charles Esdaile

For centuries Spain had been the most feared and predatory power in Europe - it had the largest empire and one of the world's great navies to defend it. Nothing could have prepared the Spanish for the devastating implosion of 1805-14. Trafalgar destroyed its navy and the country degenerated into a brutalized shambles with French and British armies marching across it at will. The result was a war which killed over a million Spaniards and ended its empire. 
This book is the first in a generation to come to terms with this spectacular and terrible conflict, immortalised by Goya and the arena in which Wellington and his redcoats carved out one of the greatest episodes in British military history.

The Peninsular War

A New History

John Bierman

Colin Smith

'Excellent ... a remarkable achievement and ought to be recognised as one of the most succesful histories of the Western Desert and North African fighting yet to have appeared' John Keegan, Daily Telegraph 
 
For the British, the battle fought at ElAlamein in October 1942 became the turning point of the Second World War. In this study of the desert war, John Bierman and Colin Smith show why it is remembered by its survivors as a 'war without hate'. Through extensive research the authors provide a compellingly fresh perspective on the see-saw campaign in which the two sides chased each other back and forth across the unforgiving North African landscape.

Alamein

War Without Hate

Robert Service

A comprehensive overview of twentieth-century Russian history that treats the years from 1917 to 2000 as a single period and analyses the peculiar mixture of political, economic and social ingredients that made up the Soviet compound.  It takes the reader from the age of communist rule to the changes that occurred in 1991 and the more uncertain world of Yeltsin and Putin.

A History of Modern Russia

From Nicholas II to Putin

Orlando Figes

This tremendously attractive, ambitious, dizzying book is in every way a worthy successor to Figes' bestselling A PEOPLE'S TRAGEDY.  The whole panorama of Russia's mighty culture is conjured up in a way that is fresh, intimate and immediate.  Whether talking about music or novels, buildings or paintings, Figes' enthusiasm and literary brilliance sweeps the reader along through a series of great set-piece chapters.

Natasha's Dance

A Cultural History of Russia

Sarah Burton

The little known story of the inseparable brother and sister, lights of the Romantic circle, privately haunted by madness 
 
Wordsworth thought that if there were such a thing as a good man, it would be Charles Lamb, while Hazlitt believed Mary Lambto be the only sensible woman he knew. The couple's literary reputation rested partly on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. And yet there was an unhappier side: Charles was an alcoholic and Mary, in an attack of insanity, stabbed their mother to death. 
 
This fascinating account reaches to the heart of early nineteenth century London, meeting its eccentrics and its literary giants. It also visits the city's darker corners, where poverty stalks rented rooms and madhouses conceal terrible abuse.

A Double Life

A Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb

Susan Williams

In this candid and moving account Susan Williams tells the story of what really happened to King Edward, drawing on diaries, secret documents and thousands of letters sent to Edward by the public to re-create the tragic events that led to his abdication.  She reveals a hugely popular, deeply loved monarch, one whose modern ideas and sympathy for the poor so unsettled the establishment that his devotion to Wallis Simpson provided the perfect excuse to force him off the throne.

The People's King

The True Story of the Abdication

Romila Thapar

This new book represents a complete rewriting of Romila Thapar's hugely successful HISTORY OF INDIA - VOLUME ONE, thirty-four years after it was first published.  Incorporating the vast changes in knowledge developed during her lifetime, Thapar tells the extraordinary story of this great civilisation - a civilisation always based on diverse, often warring sources and that left the astounding buildings and beliefs that still fill India.  This book is the authoritative history told with style andmeticulous attention to detail by the world's leading authority.

The Penguin History of Early India

From the Origins to AD 1300

Henry Kamen

How did a barren, thinly populated country, somewhat isolated from the rest of Europe become the world's first superpower?  Henry Kamen's tremendous new book takes full advantage of its great theme to recreate the dazzling world of militant Castile from the fall of Moorish Granada and Columbus' first voyage to the imperial collapse over three centuries later.  There is no better account in English of this immense, brutal adventure - a ceaseless quest for land, gold and slaves that made Spain, both for its conquered peoples and much of the rest of Europe, into a rapacious nightmare.

Spain's Road to Empire

The Making of a World Power, 1492-1763

Legacy of Gods

Legend

Legends from the Ancient North

Leith's How to Cook

Lemon Tree Cafe

Leonora Bolt: Secret Inventor

Liam Scott series

Liar's Beach

Library of Fallen Souls

Life of Picasso

Lionboy

Little Badman

Little Bear

Little Book of

Little Clothbound Classics

Little Golden Books

Little Guides

Little Pop-Ups

Little Princesses

Little Puffin Clothbound Classics

Little Red Train

Little Swan Ballet

Little Town of Marrowville

Little World

Lives of the Artists

Living Autobiography

Living World

Stella Rimington brings all her experience as the first woman Director General of MI5 to bear in a heart-stopping thriller series that takes us deep into a wilderness of mirrors where nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted.

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