Europe

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....

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....

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1961, this worldwide bestselling classic chronicles the most infamous era of our times.

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 Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

C. S. Lewis offers a magisterial take on the literature and poetry of one of the most consequential periods in world history, providing deep insight into some of the greatest writers of the age....

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....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

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....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

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....

The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, King George V reigned over the British Empire from 1910 to 1936, a period of unprecedented international turbulence. Yet no one could deny that as a young man, George seemed uninspired....

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

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....

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....

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages....

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the New York Times best-selling author of The Storm of War....

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

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 never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

German military history is typically viewed as an inexorable march to the rise of Prussia and the two world wars, the road paved by militarism and the result a specifically German way of war. Peter Wilson challenges this narrative....

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction....

In the newest installment of the best-selling series Mythos, legendary author and actor Stephen Fry moves from the exploits of the Olympian gods to the deeds of mortal heroes....

Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of her more famous brother Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at thirteen to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of statecraft that would enable her to survive his early death, and to construct a powerful position in her adopted country of Scotland as she dealt with domestic issues as well as navigating international relations with England and France.

A historical adventure book set in the coastal areas of Cornwall, the West Indies, and the Atlantic Ocean in the early 19th century.Swept Away is a historical adventure novel set primarily along the coast of Cornwall, England, extending to locations such as the West Indies and the vast Atlantic Ocean. The narrative begins with a picturesque autumn afternoon by the Cornish coast, where families and friends enjoy a lively picnic. Amidst the revelry, young midshipman Harry Merryweather makes a dramatic entrance, climbing down a steep cliff and entertaining his friends with tales of naval ...

History in the House looks at the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Church: Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, J. C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, and Hugh Trevor-Roper (a Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the protestant settlement, a conservative, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist, and a contrarian).

Trawling through a vast family archive and arcane sources in half a dozen languages, Adam Zamoyski has revealed the dramatic life of his great-great-great grandmother, an uneducated, vulnerable girl cast into a man’s world. Her aristocratic position enmeshed her in high politics and close encounters with Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Rousseau, Joseph II, Marie-Antoinette and Tsar Alexander I, and earned her the enmity of Catherine the Great.

Germany, 1918: a country in flux. The First World War is lost, traditional values are shaken to their core, revolution is afoot and the victory of democracy beckons. Everything must change with the times. The country is abuzz with talk of the 'new woman', the 'new man', 'new living' and 'new thinking'. What follows is the establishment of the Weimar Republic, an economic crisis and the transformation of Germany. A triumphant procession of liberated lifestyles emerges.

The book provides a detailed chronological history of early Western Europe through the lives of the nobility, their marriages, wars, rebellions, and betrayals. The book has original source documentation embedded. This book was compiled from 20-plus years of research combined with an interest in the history of western civilization. By putting all the events in chronological order, I was able to show the impact of relationships between the various factions, and how these relations helped shape Western Europe.

Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivaled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion?

Born into a traditional East End family in Bethnal Green, Gilda O'Neill grew up in a world most of us associate with chirpy cockneys, pub knees-ups, legendary criminals and the Dickensian underworld. Her nan had a pie and mash shop, her grandfather was a tug skipper on the Thames and her great-uncle was the minder for a gambling den.

Dive into the epic saga of global dominance in The British Empire. In this riveting journey, you’ll explore how a tiny island nation ascended to rule nearly a quarter of the globe. From the Age of Discovery to the poignant end of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, this audiobook is a masterful tapestry of history, power, and ambition.

Great Britain? is a much-needed antidote to the pervading sense that Britain is going backwards rather than forwards. It is both a clear-eyed and rigorous diagnosis of the problems facing our country – a unique toxicity of huge inequality and stagnant economic growth – and a hopeful case for reclaiming a different future: by building an investment nation of good work, resilient communities and secure homes, a society in which both burdens and prosperity are shared.

'All roads lead to Rome.' It's a medieval proverb, but it's also true: today's European roads still follow the networks of the ancient empire and continue to grip our modern imaginations as a physical manifestation of Rome’s ‘extraordinary greatness’. Over the two thousand years since they were first built, the roads have been walked by crusaders and pilgrims, liberators and dictators, but also by tourists and writers, refugees and artists. The Roads to Rome is a magnificent journey into a past that remains intimately connected to our present.

Straight Acting is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act straight and to recognise how queerness powerfully shaped the life and career of the world's most famous playwright.

Exiled from Downing Street, Boris Johnson may now be best known as the latest GB News presenter. His former senior advisor Dominic Cummings has reinvented himself as political pundit. And Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been ejected from high-level politics since their infamous mini budget of 2022. But the chumocracy is far from over.

In February 1944, in one of the most astonishing battles of World War II, a ragtag collection of British clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen and a handful of tank crews, managed to defeat a much larger and sophisticated contingent of some of the finest infantry in the Japanese army on their march toward India.

Following the end of the First World War, Poland was wedged uncomfortably between the two dominant nations of Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland was obliged to plot and negotiate to try and prevent them from realizing their ambitions to eviscerate the country. As well as bitter ethnic battles between Germany and Poland for the political control of Upper Silesia, there were also the burning ambitions of Weimar Germany, and later Nazi Germany, to reclaim lands incorporated into the new state of Poland at Versailles.