History Books 55 results

Bruno Carvalho

A kaleidoscopic and original new history of urbanization—from Lisbon to New York, Paris to Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires to LagosFor the past three centuries, urban dwellers and planners have imagined future cities that would be radically different from those of the past. Planners pursued progress, whether focused on flying vehicles above, sewage systems below, or daily life...

Dan Wang

America used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China's astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West. In Breakneck, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China - which helps us to see global geopoliti...

Tim Bouverie

A Sunday Times bestselling landmark history of the alliance that won the war and made the peace from the author of Appeasing Hitler 'An astonishing achievement. Compellingly told, immensely wide-ranging and utterly fascinating'JAMES HOLLAND 'The best book I have ever read about the politics of the Second World War' TIM SHIPMAN After the fall of France in June 1940, only Brit...

Daniel Swift

How Shakespeare became Shakespeare: a riveting tale of London's first playhouse and the people--actors, writers, builders, investors--who built the Theatre. Between 1576 and 1598, a playhouse called the Theatre stood in the northeast suburbs of London, until it was secretly torn down and its timbers used to build the much more famous Globe. Dreamed up and run by a former actor ...

Andrew Fitzmaurice

A dramatic intellectual biography of Victorian jurist Travers Twiss, who provided the legal justification for the creation of the brutal Congo Free StateEminent jurist, Oxford professor, advocate to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Travers Twiss (1809-1897) was a model establishment figure in Victorian Britain, and a close collaborator of Prince Metternich, the architect of the Co...

Ben Macintyre

"On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which poli...

David Lee

In the Third Reich, the SS ran the Gestapo, the police and the concentration camps where millions of people were killed. However Nazi Germany still had laws and a legal system which outlawed murder and other criminal acts and SS Investigating Judge and Police Official SS, Major Konrad Morgen, used these laws to investigate and bring individual members of the SS to justice for t...

Ben Macintyre

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 'Engrossing as any thriller' Daily Telegraph 'Superb. Meticulously researched, splendidly told, immensely entertaining' John le Carré 'This is the most amazing book, full of fascinating and hair-raising true life adventures . . . It would be impossible to recommend it too highly' Mail on Sunday _______ One December night in 1942, a Naz...

Fareed Zakaria

Fareed Zakaria first warned of the threat of \"illiberal democracy\" two decades ago. Now comes Age of Revolutions- Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present. A decade in the making, the book is based on deep research and conversations with world leaders from Emmanuel Macron to Lee Kuan Yew. In it Zakaria sets our era of populist chaos into the sweep of history. Age of Re...

Jack Carr / James M. Scott

The first in a new in-depth nonfiction series examining the devastating terrorist attacks that changed the course of history from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr and Pulitzer Prize finalist James M. Scott, beginning with the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut. 1983: the United States Marine Corps experiences its greatest single-day loss of life since the Bat...

Ben Macintyre

In a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely band of British officers spent the Second World War plotting daring escapes from their German captors. Or so the story of Colditz has gone, unchallenged for 70 years. But that tale contains only part of the truth. The astonishing inside story, revealed for the first time in this instant bestse...

Linda Kinstler

A TABLET AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BOOK OF THE YEAR Shortlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize 'A tremendous feat of storytelling, propelled by numerous twists and revelations, yet anchored by a deep moral seriousness . . . Enthralling' Guardian Across the world the last Nazi trials are winding their way through the courts. Nearly a century on from the Holocaust, survivors are ...

Henry Kamen

A new edition of a seminal work--one that explores crucial changes within Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century The early modern period was one of profound change in Europe. It was witness to the development of science, religious reformation, and the birth of the nation state. As Europeans explored the world--looking to Asia and the Americas for new peoples and l...

James M Scott

The definitive history of one of the most brutal campaigns of the war in the Pacific.Before World War II, Manila was a slice of America in Asia, populated with elegant neoclassical buildings, spacious parks, and home to thousands of U.S. servicemen and business executives who enjoyed the relaxed pace of the tropics. The outbreak of the war, however, brought an end to the good l...

Derek Robinson

From the Phoney War of 1939 to the Battle of Britain in 1940, the pilots of Hornet Squadron learn their lessons the hard way. Hi-jinks are all very well on the ground, but once in a Hurricane's cockpit, the best killers keep their wits close. Newly promoted Commanding Officer Fanny Barton has a job on to whip the Hornets into shape before they face the Luftwaffe's seasoned pilo...

Ying-Ying Chang

A devastatingly powerful book about the loss to madness not only of a daughter, a wife and a mother, but of a promising young historian and author. You must read this. -Recommended by Jeff, City Lights BooksIris Chang's best-selling book The Rape of Nanking forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies ...

Elizabeth Horodowich

In this colourful new history of Venice, Elizabeth Horodowich, one of the leading experts on Venice, tells the story of the place from its ancient origins, and its early days as a multicultural trading city where Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together at the crossroads between East and West. She explores the often overlooked role of Venice, alongside Florence and Rome, as ...

Tim Pat Coogan

An account of the events, personalities and repercussions of the Irish rebellionThe Easter Rising began at 12 noon, 24 April, 1916 and lasted for six short but bloody days, resulting in the deaths of innocent civilians, the destruction of many parts of Dublin, and the true beginning of Irish independence.The 1916 Rising was born out of the Conservative and Unionist parties' ill...

Justin Marozzi

A powerful account of the life of Tamerlane the Great (1336-1405), the last master nomadic power, one of history's most extreme tyrants, and the subject of Marlowe's famous play. Marozzi travelled in the footsteps of the great Mogul Emperor of Samarkland to write this wonderful combination of history and travelogue. The name of the last great warlord conjures up images of mys...

Stephen E. Ambrose

On the bloody battlefields of World War II Europe, Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army, got the toughest missions. As good a rifle company as any in the world, Easy was always in the thick of the fight -- from parachuting into France under a hellish crossfire early D-Day morning, to the final capture of Hitler's supposedly impregnable Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden....

Tracy Borman

Norman Ohler

A brilliant and original investigation into the medical origins of LSD and how the Nazis and the CIA turned it into a weapon, by the author of Blitzed. ...

Ben Macintyre

THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER THE BOOK BEHIND THE HIT BBC SERIES SAS: ROGUE HEROES, STARRING CONNOR SWINDELLS, JACK O'CONNELL, ALFIE ALLEN AND DOMINIC WEST From the secret SAS archives and bestselling author Ben Macintyre: The first ever authorized history of the SAS. 'A master at setting the pulse racing' Daily Mail________________ In the summer of 1941, at the heigh...

Jung Chang

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the centre of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the `Father of China', Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao's vice-chair. Little Sister, May-...