Showing 145–160 of 173 resultsSorted by latest
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£22.00
Newfoundland, 1919. Buffeted by winds, an unwieldy aircraft – made mainly from wood and stiff linen – struggled to take off from the North American island’s rocky slopes. Cramped side by side in its open cockpit were two men, freezing cold and barely able to move but resolute. They had a dream: to be the first in human history to fly, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. But there were three other teams competing against them, and as the waves raged a few miles below, memories of wartime crashes resurfaced. Mining letters, diaries and evocative unpublished photographs, David Rooney’s deeply researched account of the audacious contest shows how it was the airmen’s thrilling wartime experiences that ultimately led them to the ‘Big Hop’, and brought old friends together for one more daring adventure.
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£10.99
Bestselling author and social media sensation Alice Loxton brings us a scintillating new history of Britain, told through eighteen figures in British history at the age of eighteen.
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£10.99
The second book from the creators of the smash-hit number 1 podcast takes us on a dizzying A–Z through the past
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£12.99
A brisk, concise and readable overview of Irish history from the Protestant Reformation to the dawn of the 21st century. Five centuries of Irish history are explored in this informative and accessible volume. John Gibney proceeds from the beginning of Ireland’s modern period and continues through to virtually the present day, offering an integrated overview of the island nation’s cultural, political and socioeconomic history.
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£10.99
Ah, Britain. So special. The greatest nation on Earth, some say. And we did it all on our own. Didn’t we? Well, as it happens Britannia got its name from the Romans, and for the past two centuries we have been ruled by Germans. But then, as ‘Horrible Histories’ author Terry Deary argues, nations and their leaders are defined by the enemies they make. The surprisingly sadistic Boudica would be forgotten if it weren’t for the Ninth Legion, Elizabeth I a minor royal without the Spanish Armada, and Churchill an opposition windbag without the Nazis. Britain loves its heroes so much we have been known to pickle them in brandy to keep them fresh. This book is an entertaining gallop through history that will have you laughing as you find out what they didn’t teach you in school.
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£25.00
In the heart of Santiago, the infamous 38 Londres Street becomes the haunting backdrop for a riveting tale that intertwines the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London, the post-war life of senior SS officer Walther Rauff in Chilean Patagonia and the sinister connections between the two men. Rauff, responsible for the wartime horrors of mobile gas vans, flees justice after the war and finds an unlikely refuge in Chile. Settling in Punta Arenas, he manages a king crab cannery, seemingly far removed from his dark past. But as rumours swirl about Rauff’s involvement with Pinochet’s secret intelligence services and the disappearances that plagued Chile, a chilling narrative unfolds.
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£12.99
Drawing on decades of experience excavating shipwrecks around the world, renowned maritime archeologist David Gibbins reveals the riches beneath the waves and shows us how the treasures found there can be a porthole to the past to tell a new story about the world and its underwater secrets.
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£30.00
On 15th October 1958 Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an ‘event sale’ of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for 781,000 – at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world centre of the art market and Sotheby’s as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. While Sotheby’s is the lynchpin of the story, Stourton populates his narrative with a glorious rogue’s gallery of clever amateurs, eccentric scholars, brilliant emigrés, cockney traders and grandees with a flair for the deal.
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£14.99
‘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 at peace; from the gilded capital to the barbarous realms beyond the frontier; from emperors to slaves.
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£10.99
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘Epic, moving and important’ ROBERT HARRIS
‘I’m not sure I’ve ever come across quite such a revelatory account of the Holocaust and yet despite the horror and the sadness it’s also a ‘memoir of miraculous survival’. I can’t recommend it enough’ ANTHONY HOROWITZ
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£11.99
Think you know the Kings and Queens of England? Think again. In ‘Unruly’, David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects’ destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky sods who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.
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£10.99
Make room Herodotus, stand down Bede, pipe down Pepys – there’s a new history book in town. From the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History, a whistle-stop tour through the past – from Alexander the Great to Tolkien, the Wars of the Roses to Watergate. The nation’s favourite historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook take on the most curious moments in history, answering the questions we didn’t even think to ask: Did the Trojan War actually happen? What was the most disastrous party in history? Was Richard Nixon more like Caligula or Claudius? How did a hair appointment almost blow Churchill’s cover? Why did the Nazis believe they were descended from Atlantis?
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£11.99
From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.
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£12.99
In April 1944 a teenager named Rudolf Vrba was planning a daring and unprecedented escape from Auschwitz. After hiding in a pile of timber planks for three days while 3000 SS men and their bloodhounds searched for him, Vrba and his fellow escapee Fred Wetzler would eventually cross Nazi-occupied Poland on foot, as penniless fugitives. Their mission: to tell the world the truth of the Final Solution. A thrilling history with enormous historical implications, ‘The Escape Artist’ tells the extraordinary story of a complex man who would seek escape again and again: first from Auschwitz, then from his past, even from his own name.
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£9.99
In the summer of 1941, at the height of the war in the Western Desert, a bored and eccentric young officer, David Stirling, came up with a plan that was imaginative, radical and entirely against the rules: a small, undercover unit that would wreak havoc behind enemy lines. Despite intense opposition, Winston Churchill personally gave Stirling permission to recruit the toughest, brightest and most ruthless soldiers he could find. So began the most celebrated and mysterious military organisation in the world: the SAS. The history of the SAS is an exhilarating tale of fearlessness and heroism, recklessness and tragedy; of extraordinary men who were willing to take monumental risks.
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£14.99
Having founded the bank that became the most powerful in Europe in the 15th century, the Medici gained political power in Florence, raising the city to a peak of cultural achievement and becoming its hereditary dukes. Among their number were no fewer than three popes and a powerful and influential queen of France. Their patronage brought about an explosion of Florentine art and architecture. Michelangelo, Donatello, Fra Angelico and Leonardo are among the artists with whom they were associated. Thus runs the ‘received view’ of the Medici. Mary Hollingsworth argues that the idea that they were wise rulers and enlightened fathers of the Renaissance is a fiction that has acquired the status of historical fact. In truth, the Medici were as devious and immoral as the Borgias – tyrants loathed in the city they illegally made their own and which they beggared in their lust for power.
