History

For over two decades, Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the tidal Thames looking for objects - lost or discarded - that tell forgotten stories. In this sequel to 'Mudlarking', Lara reflects on life lived post-pandemic, widens her search beyond the river and reminds us that it's possible to dr...

In August 2021 a women's creative writing group in Afghanistan shared news of political turmoil and the Fall of Kabul. These women were in the process of publishing a short-story collection when their world was turned upside down by the Taliban. In staying connected via WhatsApp messages, they es...

The untold history of the Western invasion of Soviet Russia - and the tragedy it created. In the closing months of WW1, with the world exhausted by a long, brutal war, 15 nations cobbled together an army of 180,000 men and embarked on one of the most extraordinary and ambitious military ventures ...

When Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Jen Stout left Moscow abruptly, ending up on a border post in southeast Romania, where she began to cover the human cost of Russian aggression. 'Night Train to Odesa' begins in Russia and continues to focus on people in Ukraine. It is the account of a young...

How much can change in less than two and a half years? In the case of Britain in the Sixties, the answer is: almost everything. From the seismic coming of the Beatles to a sex scandal that rocked the Tory government to the arrival at No 10 of Harold Wilson, a prime minister utterly different from...

Amidst a landscape of economic turmoil, eroding freedoms and deepening societal fractures, one thing is clear: Britain is in a mess. Instead of serving the common good, our politicians seem fixated on personal gain, while certain segments of the media only seek to divide us further. But who is re...

On Saturday 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire reached what would prove to be its maximum territorial extent, covering a scarcely credible quarter of the world's land mass, containing 460 million people. But the tide was beginning to turn. This book is a ne...

Peter Taylor tells the gripping story of Operation Chiffon, MI5's top-secret intelligence operation that finally helped bring peace to Ireland. April 1998: the Good Friday Agreement is signed, ending decades of violence and bloodshed in Northern Ireland. The process of getting the IRA to end its ...

This is a heart-stopping countdown narrative recreating the liberation of Paris in 1944, one of the great and most dramatic hinge moments of WW2. When the Germans marched in and the lamps went out in the City of Light the millions who loved Paris mourned. Liberation, four years later, triggered a...

'Pax' is the third in a trilogy of books narrating the history of the Roman Empire. The series that began with 'Rubicon', and continued with 'Dynasty', now arrives at the period which marks the apogée of the pax Romana. It provides a portrait of the ancient world's ultimate superpower at war and...