Great Britain

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling....

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell....

From New York Times bestselling author Hampton Sides, an epic account of the most momentous voyage of the Age of Exploration, which culminated in Captain James Cook’s death in Hawaii, and left a complex and controversial legacy still debated to this day....

The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history....

From the award-winning historian, war reporter, and author Damien Lewis (Zero Six Bravo, Judy) comes the incredible true story of the top-secret "butcher-and-bolt" black ops units Prime Minister Winston Churchill tasked with stopping the unstoppable German war machine....

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away....

Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible....

In this landmark biography of Winston Churchill based on extensive new material, the true genius of the man, statesman, and leader can finally be fully understood - by the best-selling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War....

The sensational biography of Princess Diana, now revised to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her death....

In Unruly, David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects’ destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky bastards who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear today in their portraits....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

A sweeping and original history of the Anglo-Saxons by national best-selling author Marc Morris....

In the spring of 1939, a top-secret organization was founded in London: Its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler's war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage....

A road trip book with a difference. Stars of Outlander - Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish - explore Scotland, a land of raw beauty, poetry, feuding, music, history and warfare....

Killing England chronicles the path to independence in gripping detail, taking the listener from the battlefields of America to the royal courts of Europe....

An absorbing account of the conspiracy to kill King James I by his handsome lover, the duke of Buckingham, a historical crime that has remained hidden for 400 years....

Picking up where Tina Brown’s masterful The Diana Chronicles left off, The Palace Papers reveals how the royal family reinvented itself after the trau­matic years when Diana’s blazing celebrity ripped through the House of Windsor like a comet....

Queen Elizabeth II’s death ruptured the already-fractured foundations of the House of Windsor—and dismantled the protective shield around it....

Beevor's grand and provocative account is destined to become the definitive work on this complex, tragic, and endlessly fascinating period in world history....

Who was Kim Philby? Those closest to him—like his fellow MI6 officer and best friend since childhood, Nicholas Elliot, and the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton—knew him as a loyal confidant and an unshakeable patriot....

Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written....

Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat....

D-Day, June 6, 1944, and the 76 days of bitter fighting in Normandy that followed the Allied landing, have become the defining episode of World War II in the west - the object of books, films, television series, and documentaries....

Hunting the Falcon is the story of how Henry VIII’s obsessive desire for Anne Boleyn changed him and his country forever. John Guy and Julia Fox, two of the most acclaimed and distinguished historians of this period, have joined forces to present Anne and Henry in startlingly new ways.

The first full-length biography of Mal Evans, the Beatles’ beloved friend, confidant, and roadie....

The countryside is almost sacred to many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton.

In the great revolutionary year of 1968, Tony Benn was a respectable Labour minister in his forties, and he was restless. While new social movements were shaking up Britain and much of the world, Westminster politics seemed stuck. It was time, he decided, for a different approach. Over the next half century, the radicalized Benn helped forge a new left in Britain. He was joined by four other politicians, who would become comrades, collaborators and rivals: Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn.

For over a hundred years until it closed in 1981, Henry Tate’s flagship sugar refinery at Love Lane dominated the Liverpool skyline - and was the beating heart of the local community. More than 10,000 workers passed through the doors of the factory during its lifetime, with some families counting four or even five generations of service. Young women leaving school in the post-war years were drawn by the good wages and the unrivalled social life that Tate & Lyle offered.

Anne Boleyn has mesmerised the English public for centuries. Her tragic execution, orchestrated by her own husband, never ceases to intrigue. How did this courtier's daughter become the queen of England, and what was it that really tore apart this illustrious marriage, making her the whore of England, an abandoned woman executed on the scaffold? While many stories of Anne Boleyn's downfall have been told, few have truly traced the origins of her tragic fate.

From 1792 to 1795, George Vancouver sailed the Pacific as the captain of his own expedition and as an agent of imperial ambition. To map a place is to control it, and Britain had its eyes on America's Pacific coast. And map it Vancouver did. His voyage was one of history's greatest feats of maritime daring, discovery, and diplomacy, and his marine survey of Hawaii and the Pacific coast was at its time the most comprehensive ever undertaken.

This collection of Fife County folk-lore, superstion, legend, and more from the extensive Folk Lore Society public domain volumes is full of the lore of places, ghosts, witch craft, charms, potions, folk-tales, etc.

I have formed the opinion that the folk of the East Riding are more reticent of tongue and pen than are those of other parts of Yorkshire, for I cannot believe that they are freer from superstition than their neighbours—are less sufficingly suckled in a creed outworn," which seems destined to assert itself to the end of Time. Ethnic influences may account for their reserve. Looking round on the company among which he found himself at Routh, Walter White had little difficulty in discovering the three principal varieties of Yorkshire men : " There was the tall, broad-shouldered rustic, ...

In England, Tom Baldwin, bestselling biographer of Keir Starmer, and Marc Stears, influential think tank head, unravel seven myths that have distorted ideas of this country and provided ammunition for charlatans or culture warriors from both left and right. Instead of vainly promising to solve everything all at once, Baldwin and Stears provide clues for how a humbler, less grandiose, set of ideas rooted in real lives can help fix some of the things that have gone so badly wrong in recent years.

The legendary ‘Red Devils’ were among the finest combat troops of the Second World War. Created at Churchill’s instigation in June 1940, they began as a single parachute battalion of 500 men and grew into three 10,000-strong airborne divisions: the 1st, 6th and 44th Indian, each composed of parachutists and glider-borne troops. Wearing their distinctive maroon berets, steel helmets and Dennison smocks, they served with distinction in every major theatre of the conflict and played a starring role in some most iconic airborne operations in history.

Cairo, 1942: If you had asked a British officer who Colonel Clarke was, they would have been able to point him out: always ready with a drink and a story, he was a well-known figure in the local bars. If you then asked what he did, you would have less success. Clarke thought of himself as developing a new kind of weapon. Its components? Rumour, stagecraft, a sense of fun. Its target? The mind of Erwin Rommel, Hitler's greatest general. Throughout history, military commanders have sought to mislead their opponents. Dudley Clarke set out to do it on a scale no one had imagined before.

In WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT BRITAIN, Michael Peel digs into the national consciousness with the perspective of distance to pull apart the ways in which we British have become unmoored from crucial truths about ourselves. He shows us that from many perspectives we are no different from other countries whose own national delusions have seen them succumb to abuses of power, increased poverty and divisive conflict.

‘He invented a whole cat world’ declared H. G. Wells of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist whose anthropomorphic kittens made him a household name. His drawings were irresistible but Catland was more than the creation of one eccentric imagination. It was an attitude – a way of being in society while discreetly refusing to follow its rules. As cat capitalism boomed in the spectacular Edwardian age, prize animals changed hands for hundreds of pounds and a new industry sprung up to cater for their every need. Cats were no longer basement-dwelling pest-controllers, but stylish cultural subversives.

Every queen had ladies-in-waiting. Her confidantes and chaperones, they are the forgotten agents of the Tudor court. Ever present and yet hidden behind the scenes, these women held the secrets and the hearts of some of the Tudor period's most powerful men and women. Experts at survival, negotiating the competing demands of their families and their queen, the ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII's wives were far more than decorative 'extras': they were serious political players who changed the course of history, and four of them became queen themselves.

We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward, and unchanging time characterized by violence, ignorance, and superstition. By contrast, we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world. We couldn't be more wrong.

Indulge in a journey back in time with "The Petrifying Well Chronicles," your passport to an era when myth and history intertwine into a fascinating narrative that seamlessly binds reality and legend together. Embarking from chapter one, the reader is gently guided through the intriguing origins of Mother Shipton's Cave, the setting for some of England's most compelling folklore. In the following chapters, uncover the peculiarities of the Petrifying Well, a natural formation that has continually sparked the interest of curious minds for centuries. Delve deeper into the mysteries of the ...