History

One of the world's oldest civilisations and the longest lasting state, China's story is rich and dramatic, stretching back thousands of years. In our time, after a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war and revolution, China has once more returned to centre stage in the world, a global...

GWR, LMS, LNER and SR: these initials arouse memories of the Cornish Riviera Express, the streamlined Coronation Scot, the streamlined Coronation with its beaver tail, and the Southern Electrics, yet three of these companies only enjoyed a life of 25 years. Colin G. Maggs, who was born in this er...

In his ambitious book, Neil Oliver takes us on a whistlestop tour around the world and through a million years to give us a unique and invaluable grasp of how human history pieces together. From the east to the west, north to south, these 100 moments act like stepping stones allowing us to make s...

'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 str...

In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. What kind of p...

This title explores how widespread belief in fortune-telling, prophecies, spirits, magic, and protective talismans gripped the battlefields and home fronts of Europe during the First World War.

Edwardian London in 1910, the notorious tale of Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve re-investigated by a prizewinning journalist.

In the village of Road in Wiltshire during the summer of 1860, a family awakes to discover that a gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The guilty party is surely still among them. Jack Wilcher of Scotland Yard, the most celebrated detective of his day, has the unenviable task of conduct...

To most Americans, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, Black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for Black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. While nonviolent direct action is remembered as an unassai...

Queen Victoria dreamt that her Coburg dynasty would unite Europe in an extended family network via a series of dynastic marriages. Her eldest daughter, Vicky, married the future German Emperor in 1855, and by the time Victoria died in 1901, six of her eight children had married German royals, and...