History

In 'The Sleepwalkers' acclaimed historian and author of 'Iron Kingdom', Christopher Clark, examines the causes of the First World War. The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the moder...

Soho - illicit, glamorous, sordid, louche, poverty-stricken, squalid, exhilarating. One of Britain's best-loved historians, Dan Cruickshank, grants us an intimacy with centuries of rich and varied history as he guides us around the Soho of the last five hundred years. We learn of its original asp...

The son of a Hull butcher, Neville 'Timber' Wood volunteered in 1939, at the age of eighteen, to join the British Army's Tyne-Tees 50th Northumbrian Division. Timber was in many ways an entirely unremarkable soldier - he won no medals for gallantry, though he exhibited conspicuous bravery day aft...

On 20 August 1612, ten people from Pendle were executed before a vast crowd at Lancaster's Gallows Hill. The condemned and their associates had endured six months of accusations, imprisonment and torture; their treatment was such that one of the group died in Lancaster Castle's dungeons, while aw...

Half a century after Apollo 11 we have still not returned to the Moon, but that is about to change. The thirteenth person to walk on the Moon could soon be part of a crew establishing a base on the lip of a crater at the lunar south pole. The discovery of ice in the eternal shadows of the polar r...

From author and astronaut Tim Peake, this is the captivating story of humans in space. Only 628 people in human history have left Earth. In this book, astronaut Tim Peake traces the lives of these remarkable men and women who have forged the way, from Yuri Gagarin to Neil Armstrong, from Valentin...

From author and astronaut Tim Peake, this is the captivating story of humans in space. Only 628 people in human history have left Earth. In this book, astronaut Tim Peake traces the lives of these remarkable men and women who have forged the way, from Yuri Gagarin to Neil Armstrong, from Valentin...

Spices drove the early modern world economy, and for Europeans they represented riches on an unprecedented scale. Cloves and nutmeg could reach Europe only via a complex web of trade routes, and for decades Spanish and Portuguese explorers competed to find their elusive source. But when the Portu...

The riveting story of the hundred-year intelligence war between Russia and the West with lessons for our new superpower conflict with China. Espionage, election meddling, disinformation, assassinations, subversion, and sabotage - all attract headlines today about Putin's dictatorship. But they ar...

Ancient Rome matters. Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty, and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the rape of Lucretia - still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security, and the rights of the...