Stuart Britain

John Stuart Mill became one of the most influential defenders of liberty in the Victorian age, yet his own life was shaped by extraordinary discipline, emotional crisis, political controversy and the contradictions of empire. Educated from early childhood by his demanding father, James Mill, John Stuart Mill was deliberately trained to become a rational reformer. The experiment produced a formidable intellect, but it also contributed to the mental crisis that forced him to rethink the relationship between reason, feeling, individuality and happiness. From that struggle emerged some of the ...

From golden Tudor tombs to the quiet simplicity of a modern royal grave, Royal Funerals & Burials explores what happened when Britain’s monarchs died, and what became of their bodies afterwards. Beginning with Henry VII and ending with Elizabeth II, Sidney Smith traces more than five centuries of royal death, funeral ceremony and burial. Behind the magnificent processions and solemn services lies a stranger and more intimate history: embalming and lead coffins, funeral effigies and death masks, hidden vaults and unfinished tombs, coffins moved decades after burial, graves that were lost ...

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, an extraordinary history of the meteoric rise and fall of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham. As King James I’s favourite, Buckingham was also his confidant, gatekeeper, advisor and lover. When Charles I succeeded his father, he was...

The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.

The last Stuart queen. The first sovereign of Great Britain. Queen Anne inherited a throne shaped by revolution, religion, war, and dynastic fracture. She was the Protestant daughter of James II, the Catholic king driven from power in 1688. She was a Stuart by blood, but her crown depended on the political settlement that had rejected her father and excluded her Catholic half-brother. Her reign was brief, but its consequences were enormous. Under Anne, England and Scotland were joined by the Act of Union in 1707, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. The War of the Spanish Succession ...

From New York Times bestselling author Stephen R. Lawhead comes the first installment in the beloved Song of Albion Trilogy--an epic blend of myth, history, and adventure that transports readers beyond the boundaries of the modern world. Lewis Gillies is an American graduate student in Oxford...

Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist who treats the poor in a slum hospital and a prison in England, has seemingly seen it all. Yet in listening to and observing his patients, he is continually astonished by the latest twist of depravity that exceeds even his own considerable experience. Dalrymple's key insight in Life at the Bottom is that long-term poverty is caused not by economics, but by a dysfunctional set of values, one that is continually reinforced by an elite culture searching for victims.  

Book two in an epic historical fantasy series that blurs the lines between this world and the Otherworld. “Before Albion is one, the hero feat must be performed and Silver Hand must reign.” The great king, Meldryn Mawr, is dead, and his kingdom lies in ruins. Treachery and brutality rule the...

At the end of The King’s Witch, the first book in Tracy Borman’s Stuart-era trilogy, Frances Gorges was pregnant with the child of her dead lover, Thomas Wintour, executed for his role as a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Now, in The Devil’s Slave, Frances is compelled to return to the dissolute and dangerous court where she has been suspected of witchcraft.

'Thoroughly researched and extremely readable' THE TIMES 'Fascinating, gripping, revelatory' KATE WILLIAMS 'An epic and clever history' GARETH RUSSELL 'I know no rival to this book in its presentation of a major dynasty in English history' DIARMAID MACCULLOCH THOMAS MADE ENGLAND. OLIVER MADE...

History tells us that the Second World War broke Britain as a great power, diminishing its military strength, ruining its economy, and precipitating a striking wave of decolonization. Nationalists and new superpowers dominated the post-war landscape, and the country was on the slide. But no one...

The British Empire is unique in world history. How did this small island come to rule a full quarter of the globe? No other nation has matched this achievement.

A BBC History magazine, Esquire, Historia magazine and Waterstones History Book of the Year 'James comes alive in full flamboyance … Russell expertly weaves the bedchamber gossip into the tapestry of a tumultuous reign' SUNDAY TIMES 'Brings the backbiting and power struggles of the Jacobean...

An intimate, myth-shattering new biography of Mary Queen of Scots by a premier historian that draws on a trove of newly discovered sources.Queen of Scots, the first full-scale biography of Mary in more than thirty years, offers a singularly novel, nuanced, and dramatic portrait of one of...

Bloomsbury presents Monstrous Tales read by Kimberley Nixon, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Ian Hanmore, Oscar Kennedy, Janice Hallett, Catrin Walker-Booth, Dan Jones, Abir Mukherjee, Arthur Darvill and Ralph Ineson. This isle is full of noises... From the beaches of Orkney to the Welsh mountains, and the...

The United Kingdom accrued considerable financial debts to the United States during and immediately after the First World War. In 1934, the British government unilaterally suspended payment on these debts. This book examines why the United Kingdom was one of the last major powers to default on its war debts to the United States and how these outstanding obligations affected political and economic relations between both governments.

THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 WINNER OF THE POL ROGER DUFF COOPER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE Eleven years when Britain had no king. In 1649 Britain was engulfed by revolution. On a raw January afternoon, the Stuart king, Charles I, was...

This is the history of Scotland from the earliest times of human habitation to around the mid 14th century. This book details the long forgotten people and events that created the foundations of Scotland and, indeed, Britain - and explains why things are the way they are, exploring the roots of the long running antagonism between Scotland and England. Mistakes, successes, disasters, reasons as well as pinpointing the exact events that created such a long lasting rivalry between Scotland and its nearest neighbour. It also explains that after a bloody start forged in harsh times, how an ...

Urgent and inspiring stories of rural Britain today, from the Sunday Times no. 1 bestselling author of Politics on the Edge Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as MP for Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found...

George Villiers rose faster than any man in Stuart England. From obscure gentry to Duke of Buckingham, he became the indispensable favourite of two kings and the most hated man in the realm. His power was unrivalled, his influence unchecked, and his failures catastrophic. When he was stabbed to death in a Portsmouth lodging house in 1628, half the country mourned the violence, and half quietly celebrated the removal. This book tells the full story of Villiers’s extraordinary rise and brutal fall, not as court gossip or moral fable, but as political history driven by personality, power, ...