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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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
An original and irreverent retelling of overlooked stories from Irish history, hailed by Sebastian Barry as ‘a stirring atlas of Irishness’
When Europe’s Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against the Turks. The British supported the Arabs’ fight for an independent state and sent an intelligence officer, T.E. Lawrence, to join Prince Faisal, leader of the Arab army and a descendant of the Prophet. In October 1918, Faisal, Lawrence and the Arabs victoriously entered Damascus, where they declared a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. At the Paris Peace Conference, Faisal won the support of President Woodrow Wilson, who sent an American commission to Syria to survey the political aspirations of its people. However, other Entente leaders at Paris – and later San Remo – schemed against the Arab democracy, which they saw as a threat to their colonial rule.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised the Jews a homeland where the Palestinians already lived. Despite constant bloodshed and uprisings, that impossible arrangement continued until 1948 when it was ended by what Israelis call the War of Independence and the Palestinians the Nakba, or Tragedy. Worse was to follow with conclusion of the Six Day War in 1967 and Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, previously respectively under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Since then, the Palestinian story has been one of occupation and resistance. In this book, Professor Khalidi provides a thorough overview of this enduring and controversial conflict.
Here, historian William Dalrymple tells the timely and cautionary tale of the rise of the East India Company and one of the most supreme acts of corporate violence in world history.
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