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£22.00
From the moment John Brown arrived as a servant to Queen Victoria’s household, he became known across the land as her loyal companion, her fierce protector, and her right-hand man, their friendship immortalised in print and later on-screen. But what if there was more to their relationship than we know? And what has history been hiding from us? In this provocative exploration of Victoria’s emotional world, and her passionate midlife, historian Fern Riddell re-examines everything we thought we knew about one of Britain’s most iconic women.
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£10.99
Anne Alexander describes the life of Gamal Abdel-Nasser (1918-1970), father of modern, independent Egypt and an icon of Arab nationalism. In the 1950s he was a key figure in the Free Officers revolutionary organization. He is remembered for standing up to the British in the Suez Crisis and building the Aswan Dam.
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People have betrayed their country, or their friends, for all kinds of different reasons – and often a traitor to one person is a friend to another, especially as those found guilty of treason have historically faced only one penalty – death. Betrayal for money is perhaps the most despicable level of treachery – not for nothing is the term ‘Judas’ applied with such contempt; others have earned the mark of treason for rebelling against established authority. The stories in ‘Traitors’ range from a British seaman in the Second World War who sold information to the Nazis for a pittance, to the White Rose gang’s defiant campaign against Hitler; from the recusant terrorism of Guy Fawkes, to the abolitionist fury of John Brown; from the unwitting treason of Lady Jane Grey, to the deadly perfidy of Mata Hari.
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£12.99
Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi’s life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. This book, based on new sources, leads the reader from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today. It reveals how the Chinese elite groomed Xi as a manager only to get a dictator, a man who has made himself into a new version of Mao and who dares not give up power. The fresh material includes open-source Chinese coverage that the experts have missed, access to the papers of a deceased high official, information from personal friends of the Xi family and briefings from intelligence sources.
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£12.99
Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. Cecil stood at the heart of the Tudor and then Stuart state, a vital figure in managing the succession from Elizabeth I to James I & VI, warding off military and religious threats and steering the decisions of two very different but equally wilful and hard-to-manage monarchs. The promising son of Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister Lord Burghley, for Cecil there was no choice but politics, and he became supremely skilled in the arts of power, making many rivals and enemies. ‘All His Spies’ is an engaging and original work of history.
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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
On the morning of the 28th of January 1986, just 73 seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Like the assassination of JFK, the disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history – one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, this book follows a handful of central protagonists – including each of the seven members of the doomed crew – through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself and into the investigation that followed.
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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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£22.00
On 14 August 1943, Adam Hart’s great-grandfather Frank Griffiths took off from RAF Tempsford, the SOE ‘Special Duties’ airbase in rural England. Frank and his crew were on a secret midnight mission codenamed Operation Pimento, but they were shot down near Annecy in southeast France. Only Frank survived. Though seriously injured, Frank felt it was his duty to get back to England to continue the fight against the Nazis. He embarked on a perilous, 1200-mile, 108-day escape across Europe, via the attic of a brothel, a Frenchwoman’s chimney and a Spanish prison cell. 79 years later, Frank’s 22-year-old great-grandson Adam Hart retraced the epic escape through France, Switzerland and Spain. His emotional encounters with descendants of people who’d risked their lives to help his great-grandfather reveal the enduring legacy of Operation Pimento and how we should never forget their sacrifice.
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£12.99
Cameron. May. Johnson. Truss. Sunak. The last 14 years have seen turbulence at the centre of politics that is perhaps unique in British history. From coalition to Brexit, Covid to Partygate, Trussonomics to this year’s election, our government has never felt so fractured. And as prime ministers have come and gone, one man has been at the heart of every leadership challenge, seeing all, but saying nothing. Until now. Sir Graham Brady has been the Chairman of the 1922 Committee since 2010. As the leader of the group with the power to choose a new leader of the Conservative Party, it is his hand that held the executioner’s axe over five consecutive Conservative prime ministers’ heads.
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Based on diaries, letters, memoirs and thousands of contemporary documents, ‘Fallen’ is both a forensic account of George Mallory’s last expedition to Everest in 1924 and an attempt to get under his skin and separate the man from the myth.
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In Winston Churchill, veteran historian Peter Caddick-Adams gives us an overview of Churchill’s life, from his early days as a soldier and part-time journalist through to the Second World War and beyond. Caddick-Adams argues that the recipe for Churchill’s success during his wartime premiership of 1940-45 can be found in the First World War. The nation, and its leaders, had undergone a ‘dress rehearsal’ in 1914-18: conscription, rationing, convoys, air raids, mass production, women’s uniformed services, coalitions and war cabinets had all happened before, which Churchill had personally witnessed and, in some cases, helped administer. This experience, combined with Churchill’s extraordinary abilities (along with some foibles), were what enabled Britain to survive.
