Alexandra McCollum grew up in rural northeast Ohio and now lives in Nevada with their husband and dog. Among other jobs, they’ve worked in a bakery in Austria, managed a coffee shop in Ohio, and taught high school in Las Vegas. When not writing, they can be found studying languages and exploring local coffeehouses in search of the perfect americano.

Alexandra McCollum

A graduate of Yale University, Alexandra Oliva grew up in a small town deep in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School University and undertook intensive wilderness survival training while researching The Last One. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and their brindled mutt, Codex. The Last One is her first novel.

Alexandra Oliva

John Peel was born the day before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. His 38-year career as a radio DJ is the stuff of legend and the bands he went on to discover too numerous to mention, though David Bowie, Roxy Music, T Rex, Genesis, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, Radiohead and the White Stripes would do as a start. He lived in Suffolk with his wife Sheila and their children William, Thomas, Alexandra and Florence, plus various dogs and cats, until his death in October 2004.

Alexandra Ravenscroft

Alexandra Shulman

ALEXANDRA SOVERAL founded her award-winning eponymous skin care line in 2005, where she still hand-blends every product. Originally from Portugal, Alexandra moved to London 1987 to study Philosophy of Science, before dedicating her research to Anatomy, Physiology and Chemistry, becoming a respected skin specialist and product formulator for high quality brands.

Alexandra Soveral

Alexandra Wood

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

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CategoryLabel

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

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

Carol Ann Lee

Otto Frank was the father of the most famous girl of the 20th Century. It was he who found her diaries after her death and his determination to see them published around the world. This is the first time his story has been told. 
 
Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin, his life was a portrait in miniature of the century: decorated after the Battle of the Somme, forced to flee Germany in the 1930s, betrayed and imprisoned by the Nazis in the Holocaust and finally gaining recognition bybearing witness to the century's horrors though the writings of his young daughter. 
 
Carol Ann Lee has written a powerful biography of an extraordinary man's life caught up in history.

The Hidden Life of Otto Frank

Hugh Thomas

Since its first publication, Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War has become established as the definitive one-volume history of a conflict that continues to provoke intense controversy today. 
 
 What was it that roused left-wing sympathizers from all over the world to fight against Franco between 1936 and 1939? Why did the British and US governments refuse to intervene? And why did the Republican cause collapse so violently? Now revised and updated, Hugh Thomas's classic account presents the most objective and unbiased analysis of a passionate struggle where fascism and democracy, communism and Catholicism were at stake - and which was as much an international war as a Spanish one. 
 
 'Remarkable ... a definitive account' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Sunday Times 
 
 'A prodigy of a book ... about the most heroic and pitiful story of the twentieth century' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Michael Foot 
 
 'His masterwork' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Independent 
 
 'A full, vivid and deeply serious treatment of a great subject' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The New York Times Book Review 
 
 Hugh Thomas is the author of, among other books, The Spanish Civil War (1962), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (1971), An Unfinished History of the World (1979), and the first volume of his Spanish Empire trilogy, Rivers of Gold (2003).

The Spanish Civil War

Philip Bobbitt

This ambitious book sets out to reinterpret the history of the twentieth century as a long war in which conditions of outright military confrontation or of frantic "cold" competition lasted from the outbreak of the first world war until the collapseof the Soviet Union. He goes on to argue that this long experience of war has brought about a fundamental change in the constitutional basis of sates, and explores this idea through the notion of the "market state". By clarifying the relationship between constitutional settlements and military power, and by drawing on his firsthand experience in the heart of superpower planning, Bobbitt reveals a startling new way of understanding the past - and an awesome glimpse of the future.

The Shield of Achilles

War, Peace and the Course of History

Arthur Marwick

High and popular culture; family, race, gender and class relations; sexual attitudes and material conditions; science and technology - the diversity of social developments in Britain from 1945 to 2002 are thoroughly explored in this new edition of aclassic text. 
 
'Something of a tour de force... Without serious distortion or omission he moves dexterously through a wide variety of sources, ranging from poetry through film and novels to opinion polls.. it is astonishing how much he gets in' Times Educational Supplement 
 
'An enjoyable, readable, usable achievement which leads the field' John Vincent, Sunday Times

British Society Since 1945

The Penguin Social History of Britain

Paul Ginsborg

In this long-awaited book (already a major bestseller in Italy) Ginsborg has created a fascinating, sophisticated and definitive account of how Italy has coped, or failed to cope, with the past two decades. Contemporary Italy strongly mirrors Britain - the countries have roughly the same extent, population size and GNP - and yet they are fantastically different. Ginsborg sees this difference as most fundamentally clear in the role of the family and it is the family which is at the heart of Italian politics and business. Anyone wishing to understand contemporary Italy will find it essential to have this enormously attractive and intelligent book.

Italy and its Discontents 1980-2001

Mark Roseman

At a villa on the shore of the Wannsee, a lake in suburban Berlin, on 20th January 1942 one of the most terrible meetings in human history convened.  Chaired by Reinhard Heydrich and organised and minuted by Adolf Eichmann, it brought together representatives of all the principal Nazi agencies in eastern Europe. Pooling the expertise of those present, Heydrich created the plan that would let Europe 'be combed through from west to east' for Jews and which would put the Final Solution on a rational and industrial footing.

The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting

Wannsee and the Final Solution

Richard Overy

Europe in early 1945 was a vast physical and moral wasteland.  It was now that the weary Allied armies, fighting their way through the devastated Reich, truly came to understand the horror the Nazi's had unleashed. As the Nazi leaders were killed, committed suicide or were captured and the regime fell to pieces, it was through the interrogation of the survivors that the Allies began to find out the true nature of their enemy. In hour after hour of questioning the truth (and of course many lies)about Nazi Europe came spilling out. Richard Overy brings the reader face to face with a regime in its death throes and with a world struggling to understand what had really been perpetrated within the gigantic fortress of Hitler's Reich.

Interrogations

Inside the Minds of the Nazi Elite

Brendan Simms

For most of 1992-1995, Britain stood aside while an internationally recognised state was attacked by externally-sponsored rebels bent on a campaign of territorial aggression and ethnic cleansing. It was her unfinest hour since 1938. Based on interviews with many of the chief participants, parliamentary debates, and a wide range of sources, Brendan Simm's brilliant study traces the roots of British policy and the highly sophisticated way in which the government sought to minimise the crisis and defuse popular and American pressure for action. We all continue to live with the results of these shameful actions to this day.

Unfinest Hour

Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia

Alex Kerr

The decades of Western adulation for the Japanese 'economic miracle' failed to notice a key point: that in the pursuit of this miracle the Japanese had turned their country into a degraded, concrete shambles - a wilderness of bad planning, corruption and crowding. Now that the miracle is at an end and Japan seems set to remain in the economic doldrums it must become apparent to everyone that one of the world's greatest cultures has ruined itself almost beyond repair. Alex Kerr's wonderful book conveys vividly and furiously both the dazzling nature of Japanese culture and how the bureaucrats of a country he loves have poisoned and ruined it.

Dogs and Demons

The Fall of Modern Japan

Niall Ferguson

Generations of historians have shied away from the truth behind the cliche: money makes the world go around. In the same style and manner that made 'The Pity of War' an international bestseller, Niall Ferguson answers the big questions about financeand its crucial place in bringing happiness and despair, warfare and welfare, boom and crash to nations buffeted by the onward march of history. Starting in 1700 and ending today, THE CASH NEXUS is a dazzling, powerful and controversial explanation of modern world history and the fundamental force that lurks behind it all.

The Cash Nexus

Money and Politics in Modern History, 1700-2000

Ryszard Kapuscinski

'Only with the greatest of simplifications, for the sake of convenience, can we say Africa. In reality, except as a geographical term, Africa doesn't exist'. Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In astudy that avoids the official routes, palaces and big politics, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen at once as a whole and as a location that wholly defies generalised explanations. It is both a sustained meditation on themosaic of peoples and practises we call 'Africa', and an impassioned attempt to come to terms with humanity itself as it struggles to escape from foreign domination, from the intoxications of freedom, from war and from politics as theft.

The Shadow of the Sun

My African Life

Sarah Bradford

The Queen lived through nearly a century of immense change and upheaval. Her own family experiences, a mixture of happiness and crisis, weddings and divorces, and, in the case of Diana, violent death, have been lived in the glare of tabloid headlines. More than 2 billion people watched the wedding of her grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton in 2010 shortly before she made the first State Visit to Ireland by a British monarch for 100 years. Our world has changed more in her lifetime than in any of her predecessors': and before her death, the Queen remained a calm presence at the centre, earning the respect of monarchists and republicans. How did she do it? 
__________________________ 
 
'The only book that could overtake it is the autobiography, which in this case will never be written' Spectator 
 
'Bradford has a real grasp of history and the ability to make it spark into new life' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Bradford's forte, ever since she was a history-mad girl, is thinking herself into other lives' Daily Telegraph

Elizabeth

A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen

Roy Porter

A portrait of 18th century England, from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered include - diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.

English Society in the Eighteenth Century

Ian Kershaw

Ian Kershaw's HITLER allows us to come closer than ever before to a serious understanding of the man and of the catastrophic sequence of events which allowed a bizarre misfit to climb from a Viennese dosshouse to leadership of one of Europe's most sophisticated countries. With extraordinary skill and vividness, drawing on a huge range of sources, Kershaw recreates the world which first thwarted and then nurtured the young Hitler. As his seemingly pitiful fantasy of being Germany's saviour attracted more and more support, Kershaw brilliantly conveys why so many Germans adored Hitler, connived with him or felt powerless to resist him.

Hitler 1889-1936

Hubris

Following the enormous success of HITLER: HUBRIS this book triumphantly completes one of the great modern biographies.  No figure in twentieth century history more clearly demands a close biographical understanding than Adolf Hitler; and no period is more important than the Second World War.  Beginning with Hitler's startling European successes in the aftermath of the Rhinelland occupation and ending nine years later with the suicide in the Berlin bunker, Kershaw allows us as never before to understand the motivation and the impact of this bizarre misfit.  He addresses the crucial questions about the unique nature of Nazi radicalism, about the Holocaust and about the poisoned European world that allowed Hitler to operate so effectively.

Hitler 1936-1945

Nemesis

Gitta Sereny

Gitta Sereny is one of the world's most respected journalists and historians. This book gathers together the best of her writing on Germany from over sixty years. It amounts to an extraordinary portrait of the country and its people, how they have come to terms with their Nazi past, both collectively and in specific instances - and how the burden of their guilt has altered the national identity. She writes about key individuals - Stangl, Speer - and the questions which their lives raise. Thepenetration and conviction of her writing throughout is startling and she constantly reminds us why it is important to consider the questions she addresses - war guilt, holocaust denial and the temptations of obedience.

The German Trauma

Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001

Peter Hennessy

In this major study, Peter Hennessy explores the formal powers of the Prime Minister and how each incumbent has made the job his or her own. Drawing on unparalleled access to many of the leading figures, as well as the key civil servants and journalists of each period, he has built up a picture of the hidden nexus of influence and patronage surrounding the office. From recently declassified archival material he reconstructs, often for the first time, precise prime ministerial attitudes towards the key issues of peace and war. He concludes with a controversial assessment of the relative performance of each Prime Minister since 1945 and a new specification for the premiership as it enters its fourth century.

The Prime Minister

The Office And Its Holders Since 1945

A J P Taylor

One of the most popular and controversial historians of the twentieth century, who made his subject accessible to millions, A.J.P. Taylor caused a storm of outrage with this scandalous bestseller. Debunking what were accepted truths about the Second World War, he argued provocatively that Hitler did not set out to cause the war as part of an evil master plan, but blundered into it partly by accident, aided by the shortcomings of others. Fiercely attacked for vindicating Hitler, A.J.P. Taylor&rsquo;s stringent re-examination of the events preceding the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939 opened up new debate, and is now recognized as a brilliant and classic piece of scholarly research. 
 
&lsquo;Highly original and penetrating &hellip; No one who has digested this enthralling work will ever be able to look at the period again in quite the same way&rsquo; Sunday Telegraph.

The Origins of the Second World War

Andrew Rawnsley

'Downing Street is said to be 'furious' at this book - and it is easy to understand why. It is the first meticulous chronicle of all that has happened since that bright May Day three years ago which first brought the Blair government to office'  Anthony Howard, Sunday Times

Servants of the People

The Inside Story of New Labour

Christopher R Browning

Ordinary Men has been admired all over the world and is now published in the UK for the first time. It takes as its basis the detailed records of one squad from the Nazis' extermination groups and explores in detail its composition, its actions, andthe methods by which it was trained to perform acts of genocide on an industrial scale. He introduces us to cheerful, friendly, ordinary men who killed without hesitation or apparent remorse for years on end, in docile obedience to an authority theyhappily accepted as legitimate. It is a valuable corrective to the idea of German uniqueness and offers a much more chilling picture of human beings as avidly suggestible and desperate for an organising purpose in their lives, however disgusting.

Ordinary Men

Reserve Police Battalion 11 and the Final Solution in Poland

David Reynolds

The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the unfolding drama of the Cold War, from the Berlin blockade to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A booming global economy has had its sinister shadow in the apparently insoluble crises that havebeset much of the Third World. Above all, peace in the West has been offset by wars of unbelievable murderousness elsewhere. Reynolds' account is both an overview of the trends underlying this spectacular and awful variety, and an insight into the lives led in its midst.

One World Divisible

A Global History Since 1945

John Cornwell

Backed by a wealth of new research, John Cornwell tells for the first time the story of the World War II career of Eugenio Pacelli, the man who was Pope Pius XII, arguably the most dangerous churchman in modern history. In the first decade of the century, as a brilliant young Vatican lawyer, Pacelli helped shape a new ideology of unprecedented papal power in Germany. In 1933 Hitler became his negotiating partner, an agreement was arranged that granted religious and financial payments to the Catholic Church in exchange for their withdrawal from social and political privillage, ensuring the rise of Nazism.

Hitler's Pope

The Secret History of Pius XII

John W Dower

Drawing on a vast range of sources, from manga comics to MacArthur's report to Congress, this monumental new work by America's foremost historian of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. Alongside the familiar story of economic resurgence, Dower examines how the nation as a whole reacted to the contradictory experiences of humiliation at the hands of a foreign power and liberation from the demands of a suicidal nationalism. The result is a titanic history, and a landmark book.

Embracing Defeat

Japan in the Aftermath of World War II

James Pettifer

Our perception of Greece conjures up many potent images: an ancient civilization brought alive by fable, hillsides dotted with sunbaked villages, lazy beaches lapped by crystal blue waters, the warmth and humour of its people. Yet if we look behind the picture-postcard imagery, the painful contradictions of the country begin to emerge. James Pettifer's classic text on Greece, now revised and updated with extensive new material, argues that it is vital to understand this country's present by looking at the far-reaching effects of its troubled past. He surveys the roots of Greek social, economic and political realities with intelligence and convincing clarity.

The Greeks

The Land and People Since the War

Michael Asher

'The best life of Lawrence yet published' - The Express 
 
Lawrence was a brilliant propagandist, rhetorician and manipulator, who deliberately turned his life into a conundrum. But who was the real man behind the masks? Lawrence began the GreatWar as a map-clerk and ended it as one of the greatest military heroes of the 20th century. He altered the face of the Middle East, helped to lead the Arabs to freedom and formulated modern guerilla warfare. Yet he refused any honours and spent therest of his life in near obscurity. Desert explorer and Arabist, Michael Asher, set out to solve this riddle and discovers a hero whose greatness owed as much to his weaknesses as to his strengths.

Lawrence

The Uncrowned King of Arabia

Guy Wint

Peter Calvocoressi

John Pritchard

First published in 1972 under the title TOTAL WAR, THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR was designed by its authors to show a rising generation why the Second World War happened and how it was conducted. In this bold feat of compression they give as much stress and space to political, social and moral forces (not to mention intelligence and other activities 'behind the line') as to the ensuing clashes of arms. This acclaimed analysis of the causes and courses of the Second World War has stood the tests of time and criticism.

The Penguin History of the Second World War

Ladybird Readers

Ladybird Sing-along Stories

Ladybird Tales

Ladybird Tales of... Treasuries

These delightful books are the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them. 
 
The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. The subject of the books will greatly appeal to grown-ups. 
 
The eight books in the series feature original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text. The other books in the series are: 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Mindfulness 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Sheds 
 
- The Ladybird Book of The Hipster 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Mid-Life Crisis 
 
- The Ladybird Book of the Hangover 
 
- The Ladybird Book of Dating 
 
- How it Works: The Husband 
 
- How it Works: The Wife

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