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A Waterstones Best History Book 2025
A BBC History Magazine Book of the Year 2025
‘Learned, entertaining and highly approachable’ BOB MORTIMER
‘A treat’ ALICE LOXTON
‘Five stars from me…’ AL MURRAY
An unmissable collaboration between two comedy legends – an irresistible, family-friendly deep dive into the murky lives of the British monarchy.
Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realization that they too are migrants far from home. ‘The Migrants’ explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonization and the migration of culture, of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters, bringing us face-to-face with history.
When Dante called despair ‘the sin that freezes the heart,’ was he describing the first burnout? What can a painting by Giotto reveal about our hunger to see others fail? Can desire ever lift us closer to wisdom, not drag us from it? What can a twelfth-century monk teach us about burnout, envy, or despair? Far more than we might imagine. In ‘Self-Help from the Middle Ages’, historian Peter Jones travels through Europe’s archives and libraries to uncover a lost psychology: a world where confession was therapy, sin was diagnosis, and the Seven Deadly Sins served as a map of the human mind.
Beginning with the death of Edward I in 1307 and ending with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, ‘Sceptred Isle’ is the story of a century told through the lives of the last Plantagenets, uncovering lesser-known voices and untold stories along the way. Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the prolonged spectre of the Black Death, religious antagonism, revolt and the end of a royal dynasty, we encounter the human stories behind a fractured monarchy, the birth of the struggle between Europeanism and nationalism, social rebellion and a global pandemic. ‘Sceptred Isle’ is a thrilling narrative account of a century of revolution, shifting power and great change – social, political and cultural – shedding new light on a pivotal period of English history and the people who lived it.
The brilliant and sometimes scandalous lives of twenty-one women who made French history.
A spectacular, vivid, groundbreaking work of history which takes us into the mind and lives of medieval women.
Richard of Bordeaux & Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their two lives were from the beginning entwined. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side, carrying the sword of state: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king. Yet, as the animals on their heraldic badges showed, they grew up to be opposites: Richard was the white hart, a narcissist, & Henry the eagle, a chivalric hero, a leader who inspired loyalty where Richard inspired only fear. Henry had all the qualities Richard lacked, all the qualities a sovereign needed, bar one: birth right. Increasingly threatened by his cousin, Richard became consumed by the need for total power, in a time of constant conspiracies, rebellions & reprisals. When he banished Henry into exile, the stage was set for a final confrontation, as Richard became the tyrant & Henry his usurper.
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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