Showing 25–36 of 325 resultsSorted by latest
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£25.00
For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites – castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields – to unpick their stories. Oliver invokes his family’s history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin.
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£12.99
As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation’s stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. Perhaps even more surprising was the fact that so many of these great houses survived, as dukes and duchesses clung desperately to their ancestral seats and tenants’ balls gave way to rock concerts, safari parks and day trippers. From the Rolling Stones rocking Longleat to Christine Keeler rocking Cliveden, ‘Noble Ambitions’ takes us on a lively tour of these crumbling halls of power, as a rakish, raffish, aristocratic Swinging London collided with traditional rural values.
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£25.00
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
‘A beautiful, beautiful book . . . archaeology is changing so much about the way we view the so-called Dark Ages ? [Williams] is just brilliant at bringing them to light’ Rory Stewart on The Rest is Politics
From the bestselling author of Viking Britain, a new epic history of our forgotten past.
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£30.00
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 his Old Etonian predecessors. ‘A Northern Wind’ brings to vivid life the period between October 1962 and February 1965. Drawing upon an unparalleled array of diaries, newspapers and first-hand recollections, Kynaston’s masterful storytelling refreshes familiar events – the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Big Freeze, the assassination of JFK, the funeral of Winston Churchill – while revealing in all their variety the experiences of the people living through this history.
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£22.00
Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister – before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow and inadequate our democracy and government had become. Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict. This book invites us into the mind of one of the most interesting actors on the British political stage.
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£25.00
‘A diligent historian and a superb writer’TIMES, BOOK OF THE WEEK
From bioarchaeologist and bestselling author of River Kings, a gripping new history of the making of England as a nation, told through six bone chests, stored for over a thousand years in Winchester Cathedral.
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£30.00
The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is one of the most remarkable in history: a long courtship followed by a shotgun wedding and then a coronation, ending just short of three years later when a husband’s passion turned to such hatred that he simply wanted his wife gone. Missing from most accounts is how the turbulent nature of Anne and Henry’s relationship was tied almost completely to the major events of international politics at one of the great turning points of British and European history. Drawing on new archival documents, John Guy and Julia Fox unearth the truth of these two extraordinary lives and their tumultuous times.
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£16.99
Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s land mass and claiming nearly 500 colonial subjects, Britain’s empire was the largest empire in human history. For many, it epitomised our nation’s cultural superiority, but what legacy have we delivered to the world? Spanning more than 200 years of history, Caroline Elkins reveals evolutionary and racialised doctrines that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in Victorian calls for punishing indigenous peoples who resisted subjugation, and how over time, this treatment became increasingly institutionalised.
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£12.99
When Queen Elizabeth II came to the throne in 1952, Britain had a far-flung empire, Winston Churchill was prime minister, sweets were rationed, mums stayed at home and kids played on bombsites. In the years that followed everything changed utterly. Through original research, interviews with people who were there and his own memories of the time, Matthew Engel traces this transformation of British society as never before. Beginning with the death of King George VI and ending on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s election, Engel not only covers all the major historical events but also explores everyday life – from the food we ate and where we shopped, to what we watched on television and the newspapers we read. In doing so, he brings these three decades to life with his own light touch and a wealth of fascinating, forgotten, often funny detail. This book was previously published as ‘The Reign’.
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£25.00
Queen Elizabeth II was Britain’s longest-reigning monarch. This intimate, personal biography tells the story of her life, reign and times, from a perspective unlike any other. Gyles Brandreth writes the Queen’s tale candidly with grace and sensitivity from the view of someone who met her, talked with her and kept a record of those conversations. Brandreth knew the Queen’s husband well and knows the new King and Queen Consort. Told with authority, humour and moving honesty from a totally unique viewpoint, this is the biography of a woman who represented not only her people but stood as an emblem of fortitude and resilience. Updated to include exclusive material about Charles III’s coronation.
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£35.00
Follow Alan Titchmarsh into Chatsworth’s irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains and English eccentrics, and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks. Featuring stunning, specially commissioned photography of the gardens and parkland, alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this vivid companion, crowded with character and colour, is a book to treasure and revisit over and over again.
