The August Coup
£30.00The acclaimed historian of Russia offers his compelling analysis of a dramatic turning point in recent Russian history: the August Coup of 1991.
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A Hateful Decision
£22.00Summer, 1940. Winston Churchill watches in horror as France falls to the Germans in just six weeks, completing the Nazi conquest of mainland Europe. He faces an urgent question: what will happen to France’s mighty navy? Under German control it presents a major threat to Great Britain, and could mark a point of no return. With the Nazis closing in and time running out, Churchill ordered Operation Catapult. By the end of one of the most agonising but necessary military operations of the war, a large part of the French navy would be destroyed and nearly 1,300 French sailors would be dead, a number which would haunt all involved for the rest of their lives. Based on extensive new archival research, rediscovered eyewitness accounts and reflections from the private papers of the key protagonists, ‘A Hateful Decision’ tells the full story of the British attack on the French navy at Mers el Kébir, on 3 July 1940.
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What We Leave We Carry
£22.00What do we leave behind when we move to a new place – and what do we carry with us, physically and emotionally, wherever we land? Here are the voices of people who have come to Britain to make a new life: a Czech-Roma lawyer in Reading, an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire, a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton, a Romanian police officer in Edinburgh. Colin Grant has travelled the country and listened to their stories – foundational tales of arriving in a new land, along with rarely spoken stories of love and loss. Together, these accounts ask questions about assimilation, identity, belonging and the emotional cost of migration in twenty-first-century Britain.
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Raise Your Soul
£12.99Eleni put an arm around him and said: ‘Come, come, life is ahead of us. Raise your soul now. We have much to do’. This is a book about how the great forces of history shape us – and how world-famous political activist Yanis Varoufakis was inspired by the resilience and the courage of his family, from his mother Eleni and grandmothers Anna and Trisevgeni, to his partner Danae. It is both an intimate portrait of a political awakening and a dramatic sweep through Greece’s history of post-colonial independence, Nazi occupation, communist partisan resistance, Cold War fracture, civil war, fascist dictatorship, socialist revival and tumultuous present-day economic collapse.
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The Last Titans
£12.99A compelling dual biography of Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that shines new light on two of the greatest figures of the twentieth century.
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Weimar
£30.00Weimar looms large in German history: a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. This ancient town nestled in the heart of the country was home to some of Europe’s greatest thinkers, Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche among them. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest. This book shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new archival research, historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler’s regime. We encounter a vividly drawn cast of characters, from bookbinder Carl Weirich and hotel owners Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth.
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Superveloce
£12.99From the author of High Performance and Racing Through the Dark, the story of how Italy rose from the ashes of the Second World War to lead the world with its beautiful fast cars.
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Building Britannia
£14.99The history of Britain told through the stories of twenty-five notable buildings, from the Iron Age fortification of Maiden Castle in Dorset to the Gherkin.
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Peace Makers
£22.00Combining vivid storytelling with fresh research, Peace Makers explores how Britain’s diplomats played a vital and unsung part in victory in WWII while also laying the foundations for post-war peace, and how the war transformed the Foreign Office, sweeping away the barriers which had kept women out of top jobs.
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The English House
£12.99This is the story of the superbly elegant early 18th-century Pallant House in Chichester. It’s the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitafields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, ultimately a synagogue. It’s also the story of – among others – a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, a block of flats in London’s East End, and what Ideal Home’s magazine described in 1926 as Britain’s ‘first modern house’ – in Northampton. Together these buildings reveal the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries. At the same time, as Dan Cruickshank shows, they have much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants: their aspirations, their struggles, their place within society and relationship with their local community. ‘The English House’ blends architectural and social history to create a series of brilliantly observed portraits of fascinating buildings.
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The North Road
£11.99The A1. The Great North Road. A 400-mile multiplicity of ancient trackway, Roman road, pilgrim path, coach route and motorway that has run like a backbone through Britain for the last 2,000 years. In this genre-defying and profoundly personal book, Cowen follows this ghost road from beginning to end on a journey through history, place, people and time. Weaving his own histories and memories with the layered landscapes he moves through, this is the story of an age, of coming to terms with time past and time passing, and the roads that lead us to where we find ourselves.
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The Fire in the Mountain
£25.00For centuries, Mount Etna has sent lava to engulf the towns and villages, terraced fields, orchards, vineyards, and citrus groves that nestle across its slopes. But still it remains home to a quarter of Sicily’s population. Why? Because Etna has always rewarded her people after every eruption with a landscape of unparalleled fertility, richness and drama. In this book, Helena Attlee combines travel writing with history, mythology, geology, gastronomy and horticulture to tell a unique story of life in the shadow of Sicily’s most dangerous and alluring landmark.
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Elizabeth II
£22.00From the Sunday Times number 1 bestselling royal biographer comes an intimate and revealing portrait of Elizabeth II – daughter, wife, mother and queen.
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Conquer We Must
£14.99The First and Second World Wars were separated by a mere two decades, making the period 1914-1945 an unprecedentedly intense and violent era of history. But how did Britain develop its complex military strategy during these wars, and how were decisions made by those at the top? Robin Prior examines the influence politicians had on military operations, in the first history to assess both world wars together. Drawing uniquely on both military and political archives and previously unexamined sources Prior explores the fraught relationships between civilian and military leaders: from Lloyd George’s remarkably interventionist stance on military tactics during the First World War to Churchill’s near-constant arguments with American leaders during the Second.
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Radicals
£25.00The political Left in Britain rose out of the Industrial Revolution, as the working classes emerged as the leading force in the call for social change. Their contributions extended widely to political representation, the birth of the Labour Party and women’s suffrage, the autodidact tradition in adult education, and Britain’s literary culture. Throughout subsequent decades, the working classes remained central to the British radical tradition. Geoff Andrews traces the history of the Left and the Labour Party through the ideas of leading thinkers, writers, educationalists, trade unionists, and politicians. Ranging from the Workers Educational Association to the General Strike and the Women’s Liberation Movement, Andrews uncovers the voices of key figures.
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A Kingdom and a Village
£25.00The city of Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, 11 time zones and nearly 150 million people, some 13 million of whom live in the capital. In ‘A Kingdom and a Village’, historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a ‘big village’ – the demeaning nickname the St. Peterburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbour – into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import.