Showing titles in Historical

In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’ shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. The three men's lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine.

‘DEVASTATING’ Daily Mail ‘FASCINATING’ Daily Telegraph ‘POIGNANT’ TLS The extraordinary story of Bep Voskuijl, Anne Frank’s closest friend during the 761 days she spent in the Secret Annex. Bep Voskuijl was just twenty-three when the Franks went into hiding and she risked her life...

The compiling of the OED was a monumental task. It took 50 years, even with the help of numerous contributors. Among the most prolific was William Chester Minor, who sent editor James Murray thousands of extracts. On many occasions, Murray invited this mysterious correspondent to Oxford, but the invitation was always declined. Finally stirred by curiosity, Murray himself went to visit Minor. What he found was shocking: Minor lived in Broadmoor asylum.

Victor Sebestyen's intimate biography is the first major work in English for nearly two decades on one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. In Russia to this day Lenin inspires adulation. Everywhere, he continues to fascinate as a man who made history, and who created a new...

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the 20th century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany.

Brought to you from the Peter Capstick Library. Major W. Robert Foran once killed a lion while "garbed in dinner clothes and patent leather shoes" in the days when it was still possible to meet simba in the streets of Nairobi. He hunted the big five of the dangerous game, experienced many close shaves in the process. Buckley served in the Boer War, and in the British East Africa Police, a paramilitary group that blazed a rough trail through Kenya's early days. He survived injury and disease, and covered Theodore Roosevelt's famous safari for the Associated Press.

Brought to you by Penguin. The authoritative, illuminating biography of T. E. Lawrence - the man who inspired the iconic film Lawrence of Arabia - from "The World's Greatest Living Explorer" Ranulph Fiennes. Thomas Edward Lawrence first set foot on the hot sands of Arabia in 1909. By 1918 there...

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *SELECTED AS ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2023* Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. – and the first to include recently declassified...

Few families can boast of not one but two saints among their ancestors, a great-aunt who was the last tsarina of Russia, a father who was Grace Kelly's pinup, and a grandmother who was not only a princess but could also argue the finer points of naval law. Pamela Mountbatten entered a remarkable family when she was born at the very end of the Roaring Twenties.

This book has been re-issued as Dial 999! ISBN 9780552165310. Card-playing corpses, unfaithful husbands and 'flying' ladies - life as an ambulance driver in the 1970s was certainly varied ... At the age of twenty-three, Les Pringle decided to escape from office life, broaden his horizons and...

For more than two years, Miep Gies and her husband helped hide the Franks from the Nazis. Like thousands of unsung heroes of the Holocaust, they risked their lives each day to bring food, news, and emotional support to the victims. From her own remarkable childhood as a World War I refugee to the moment she places a small, red-orange, checkered diary -- Anne's legacy -- in Otto Frank's hands, Miep Gies remembers her days with simple honesty and shattering clarity.

Brought to you by Penguin. A fascinating journey into the life of H.G. Wells, from one of Britain's best biographers. How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction? From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to...

"This is a deeply stylish, astute and illuminating biography of a fascinating writer" FRANCESCA WADE, author of Square Haunting "Utterly charming. A book as elegant, sharp-witted and mischievous as its subject" CLARE POLLARD, author of Delphi "Like a Spark novel, the moment my eyes met the page...

Brought to you by Penguin. Berlin, September 1944. Ulrich von Hassell, former ambassador to Italy and a key member of the German Resistance, is executed for his part in an assassination plot against Hitler. In response to the attack, Himmler, leader of the SS, orders the arrest of all the...

On the night of March 24, 1944, Bram Vanderstok was number 18 of 76 men who crawled beyond the barbed wire fence of Stalag Luft III in Zagan, Poland. His memoir sets down his wartime adventures before being incarcerated in Stalag Luft III and then, in extraordinary detail, describes various escape attempts which culminated with the famous March breakout.

Including letters, speeches, articles, and essays written before 1935, this collection offers a complete portrait of Einstein as a humanitarian and as a human being trying to make sense of the world changing around him.

It is 1964 and Maya Angelou is on her way back home, leaving behind her beloved - and now seriously teenage son Guy, to finish university in Ghana. America is pulsing with the challenge of change, the civil rights movement is in full swing and that's where Maya Angelou wants to be, working alongside her friends Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. In this marvellous account, Maya Angelou provides, with her customary wisdom, compassion and wit, a first-hand record of an extraordinarily exciting and tragic political period.

A majestic tale of discovery thatchanged many long-held views about the world In 1519 Magellan and his fleet of five ships set sail from Seville, Spain, to discover a water route to the fabled Spice Islands in Indonesia, where the most sought-after commodities -- cloves, pepper, and nutmeg --...

"Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography" by Robert Graves is a seminal work that vividly captures the harrowing experiences of a young British officer during World War I.

Set sail on a thrilling voyage into the mysterious and treacherous world of the notorious pirate, Blackbeard, in this riveting biography that unveils the man behind the legend. In Blackbeard, the high seas come alive as we chart the tumultuous life of Edward Teach, the infamous pirate who struck fear into the hearts of sailors and coastal communities alike.