Western

September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever....

The 14th century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering time of crusades and castles, cathedrals and chivalry; and on the other, a time of ferocity and spiritual agony, a world of chaos and the plague....

In The War on the West, Douglas Murray shows how many well-meaning people have been fooled by hypocritical and inconsistent anti-West rhetoric....

When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era—and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation....

This is the story of a thousand years, a must-listen narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury, and madness....

A riveting story that has been ignored by modern historians, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara will prompt intense interest and discussion as it lays bare attitudes of the Catholic Church....

How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more? This internationally acclaimed revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat....

On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation comes this compelling, illuminating, and expansive religious history that examines the complicated and unintended legacies of Martin Luther....

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide....

Bernard Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting chronicle of every dramatic moment from Napoleon's daring escape from Elba....

A masterly chronicle of the Battle of Arnhem, which marshaled the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled and cost the Allies nearly twice as many casualties as D-day....

This second volume in William Manchester's three-volume biography of Winston Churchill challenges the assumption that Churchill's finest hour was as a wartime leader....

The true story of the bloodiest and most dramatic march to victory of the Second World War....

The creator of the hit podcast series Tides of History and Fall of Rome explores the four explosive decades between 1490 and 1530, bringing to life the dramatic and deeply human story of how the West was reborn....

The Great Sea is above all the history of human interaction across a region that has brought together many of the great civilizations....

In Big Week, acclaimed World War II historian James Holland chronicles the massive air battle through the experiences of those who lived and died during it. Prior to Big Week, the air forces on both sides were in crisis....

From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini....

From the New York Times best-selling author of Crusaders and a top authority on the historical events that inspired Game of Thrones comes a vivid, blood-soaked account of one of the most famous rebellions in history....

The best-selling author of The Liberator brings to life the incredible true story of an American doctor in Paris and his heroic espionage efforts during the Second World War....

Best-selling classical historian Barry Strauss tells the story of three-and-a-half centuries of the Roman Empire through the lives of 10 of the most important emperors, from Augustus to Constantine....

On the western part of the Iberian Peninsula, touching the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean lies a nation with a proud history that influenced Europe and the rest of the world....

The Rise of Germany is a masterful history of the war on land, in the air, and at sea, destined to generate significant scholarly debate and listener interest....

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of the bloody revolution that stripped the pope of political power and signaled the birth of modern Europe....

A riveting look at the story of World War II and the Holocaust through the diaries of Dutch citizens, firsthand accounts of ordinary people living through extraordinary times....

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present....

D-Day was bloody, chaotic and frequently terrifying. Its outcome was far from certain. And at its epicentre were tens of thousands of young men, many seeing their first active service. It was a single day that changed millions of lives. A critical turning point of the Second World War. Using audio interviews with British, American, Canadian and German veterans, as well as French civilians, this immersive new oral history describes what it was actually like to take part in the landings on 6 June 1944 and the weeks of ferocious fighting in Normandy that followed.

In the summer of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, shattering what Stalin had considered an ironclad partnership. There were real fears that Stalin's forces would be defeated or that the Soviet leader would once again strike a deal with Hitler. Either eventuality would spell catastrophe for both Britain and America.

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off – through luck, guile and sheer mulishness – any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere – indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate.

There are many reasons to be fascinated by Germany: forests, architecture and fairy tales, not to mention its history and inhabitants’ penchant for very peculiar food. Our distant and often maligned cousin, this is a place in which innumerable strange characters have held power, in which a chaotic jigsaw of borders have moved about seemingly at random, and which at the dark heart of the 20th century fell into the hands of truly terrible forces. And now Simon Winder is here to tell us everything else there is to know about this mesmerizing, tortured and endlessly fascinating country.