Great European War

George S. Patton was a general who achieved greatness in his field by contradicting his own nature. A cavalryman steeped in romantic military tradition, he nevertheless pulled a reluctant American military into the most advanced realms of highly mobile armored warfare. An autocratic snob, Patton created unparalleled rapport and loyalty with the lowliest private in his command.

From 1337 to 1453 England repeatedly invaded France on the pretext that her kings had a right to the French throne. Though it was a small, poor country, England for most of those "100 years" won the battles, sacked the towns and castles, and dominated the war. Desmond Seward's critically acclaimed account of the Hundred Years War brings to life all of the intrigue, beauty, and royal to-the-death-fighting of that legendary century-long conflict.

In a work of extraordinary narrative power, filled with brilliant personalities and vivid scenes of dramatic action, Robert K. Massie, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and Dreadnought, elevates to its proper historical importance the role of sea...

Frederick the Great is one of history's most important leaders. Famed for his military successes and domestic reforms, his campaigns were a watershed in the history of Europe, securing Prussia's place as a continental power and inaugurating a new pattern of total war that was to endure until 1916. However, much myth surrounds this enigmatic man's personality and his role as politician, warrior, and king.

On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest’s North Col. George Mallory, thirty-seven, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of twenty-two with little previous mountaineering...

As a child, he was given his own suit of armor; at the age of 16, he helped defeat the French at Crecy. At Poitiers, in 1356, his victory over King John II of France forced the French into a humiliating surrender that marked the zenith of England's dominance in the Hundred Years War. As lord of Aquitaine, he ruled a vast swathe of territory across the west and southwest of France, holding a magnificent court at Bordeaux that mesmerized the brave but unruly Gascon nobility. He was Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III, and better known to posterity as "the Black Prince".

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive 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. In the bestselling tradition of The Swerve and A Distant Mirror, The Verge tells the...

Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier—his great-uncle Harry. Some years ago a stash of family records was handed down to Michael Palin, among which were photos of an enigmatic young man in army uniform, as well as photos of the same young...

A history of the elaborate and brilliantly sustained World War II intelligence operation by which Hitler's generals were tricked into giving away vital Nazi secrets At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation...

A thrilling, vivid, and “compelling” (Wall Street Journal) account of the epic siege during one of World War II’s most important battles, told by the brilliant British editor-turned-historian and author of Checkpoint Charlie. To the Soviet Union, the sacrifices that enabled the country to...

This compelling addition to the What Was? series covers what was supposed to be “the war to end all wars” but tragically wasn't. In 1914, the assassination of an Austrian archduke set off a disastrous four-year-long conflict involving dozens of countries with battles taking place in all...

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality," author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future. We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in...

The Essential Classics Collection is a continent-hopping, century-spanning collection of five of the greatest novels ever written, and the perfect way to listen to those classics you've always been meaning to try. Read by a cast of incredible narrators including Joanne Froggatt, Stephen Fry, David Rintoul, Hugh Kermode, and Malk Williams.

*NATIONAL BESTSELLER* A New York Times Editors' Choice Booker Prize winner and “Irish master” (The New Yorker) John Banville’s most ambitious crime novel yet brings two detectives together to solve a globe-spanning mystery In 1950s Dublin, Rosa Jacobs, a young history scholar, is found...

A piercing, indispensable account of America’s pivotal involvement in World War I, rich with fresh insights into the tumultuous politics and towering historical figures that defined the era—from the New York Times bestselling author of The World Unmade “[The World Remade] succeeds...

There have been thousands of books on the Great War, but most have focused on commanders, battles, strategy, and tactics. Less attention has been paid to the daily lives of the combatants, how they endured the unimaginable conditions of industrial warfare: the rain of shells, bullets, and...

The Global War in Ukraine: An Essay on the Changing World Order is not a book about a single front or a single war. It is a forensic examination of how one conflict has become the decisive crucible for a new international order. Ukraine is not a peripheral battlefield; it is “the furnace in which the international order is being reforged,” where alliance choices, industrial bets, and software updates collide with geography, memory, and nuclear shadow. Robbin Laird traces how unresolved tensions from the 1990s, misread signals, and strategic amnesia set the stage for what one foreword ...

A toy soldier. A butter dish. A compass. Mundane objects, perhaps, but to the remarkable authors in this collection, artifacts such as these have inspired stories that go to the heart of the human experience of World War I. Each author was invited to choose an object that had a connection to the war - a writing kit for David Almond, a helmet for Michael Morpurgo - and use it as the inspiration for an original short story.

The beginning of modern Europe was a time of confusion, excitement, suspicion, hope, despair, and ideas. It was a time of a lot of change spread out over just a few hundred years, but the end result was a completely different world than the one that had come before it. This audiobook includes details of the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era, where Europe saw significant shifts across the continent in phases.