Biography: historical, political & military

Throughout history there have been many rivalries between party leaders, but there has never been a connection like that between Churchill and Attlee. Brought together in the circumstances of the Second World War, they forged a partnership that transcended party lines for five years. If Churchill...

This title tells the story of 1000 days of crisis. As Chancellor, Alistair Darling sanctioned the £37 billion bailouts of RBS and HBoS just minutes before their cash machines would have ceased to function. Here, Darling places the reader in the rooms where the destinies of millions weighed heavil...

Red Sister, Ching-ling, married Sun Yat-sen, founding father of the Chinese republic, and later became Mao's vice-chair. Little Sister, May-ling, was Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of the pre-Communist Nationalist China and a major political figure in her own right. Big Sister, Ei-ling, was C...

Every child in Regency London knew Billy Waters, the celebrated 'King of the Beggars.' Likely born into enslavement in 1770s New York, he became a Royal Navy sailor. After losing his leg in a fall from the rigging, the talented and irrepressible Waters became London's most famous street performer...

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former sla...

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former sla...

A black porter whips a white Englishman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. A Mauritanian diver is dispatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor ...

Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, traveller and heiress; she was also bisexual and a rebel. She became the lover of Vita Sackville-West, wrecking her marriage to the Duke of Wellington. She was the intimate friend of W.B. Yeats in his final years. On the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, she...

This is an exhilarating and untold account of a Florentine bookseller working at the frontiers of human knowledge, and the epochal shift from script to print that defined the Renaissance. The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings - the dazzling handiw...

Based on a wealth of new interviews and research, this is the deepest, most rounded and most comprehensive portrait to date of the man, the mind, the politics, the affairs, the family - of a loner, a lover, a leader. Revelatory, unsettling and compulsively readable, this is the most timely and in...