Dancing for Stalin
£16.99The true story of one couple’s fight for survival in Stalin’s Russia: a famous ballerina, sent to the Gulag, and her husband, who found a way to save her against all odds.
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The Stones of London
£14.99In a sweeping narrative, from its mythic origins to the glittering towers of the contemporary financial capital, this book tells the story of twelve London buildings in a kaleidoscopic and unexpected history of one of the world’s most enigmatic cities.
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Wanderers
£9.99This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. ‘Wanderers’ traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson’s daughter Elizabeth Carter – who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England – to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed. For each, walking was integral, whether it was rambling for miles across the Highlands, like Sarah Stoddart Hazlitt, or pacing novels into being, as Virginia Woolf did around Bloomsbury.
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Industrial Britain
£12.99Industrial Britain details the fascinating history of industrial architecture in Britain by architectural historian and artist, Hubert Pragnell.
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Bridgerton’s Bath
£6.99A companion title to Bridgerton’s England, Bridgerton’s Bath takes a more detailed look at the locations used right across the city from the Royal Crescent to the Holburne Museum and famous Assembly Rooms.
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Great State
£12.99China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the 8 centuries since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. Timothy Brook examines China’s relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world.
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Windswept
£16.99The story of extraordinary women who lost their way – their sense of self, their identity, their freedom – and found it again through walking in the wild. A feminist exploration of the power of walking in nature, following in the footsteps of Gwen John, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frieda Lawrence, Clara Vyvyan, Simone de Beauvoir and Nan Shepherd. Recovering from a life-threatening accident, Annabel Abbs rediscovered a lost love of long, wild hikes. Consequently fascinated by the art, literature and philosophy of walking in nature, she realised it had never before been told from a woman’s point of view. She retraces the lives and walks of remarkable women who found solace, redemption and personal and artistic freedom in walking.
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Rummage
£9.99‘Rummage’ tells the overlooked story of our throwaway past. Emily Cockayne extracts glittering gems from the rubbish pile of centuries past and introduces us to the visionaries, crooks and everyday do-gooders who have shaped the material world we live in today, like the fancy ladies of the First World War who turned dog hair into yarn, or the Victorian gentlemen selling pianofortes made from papier-mâché, or the hapless public servants coaxing people into giving up their railings for the greater good.
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Britain At Bay
£10.99In the bleak first half of the Second World War, Britain stood alone against the Axis forces. Isolated and outmanoeuvred, it seemed as though she might fall at any moment. Only an extraordinary effort of courage – by ordinary men and women – held the line. The Second World War is the defining experience of modern British history, a new Iliad for our own times. But, as Alan Allport reveals in this, the first part of a major new two-volume history, the real story was often very different from the myth that followed it. From the subtle moral calculus of appeasement to the febrile dusts of the Western Desert, Allport interrogates every aspect of the conflict – and exposes its echoes in our own age. Challenging orthodoxy and casting fresh light on famous events from Dunkirk to the Blitz, this is the real story of a clash between civilisations that remade the world in its image.
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British Summer Time Begins
£9.99‘British Summer Time Begins’ is about summer holidays of the mid-twentieth century and how they were spent, as recounted to Ysenda Maxtone Graham in vividly remembered detail by people who were there. Through this prism, it paints a revealing portrait of twentieth-century Britain in summertime: how we were, how families functioned, what houses and gardens and streets were like, what journeys were like, and what people did all day in their free time. It explores their expectations, hopes, fears and habits, the rules or lack of rules under which they lived, their happiness and sadness, their sense of being treasured or neglected – all within living memory, from pre-war summers to the late 1970s.
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When Time Stopped
£8.99In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in wartorn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew. In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. 18 days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of 34 Neumann family members, 25 were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, travelled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.
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House of Glass
£9.99The Sunday Times bestseller
‘An utterly engrossing book’ Nigella Lawson
‘Remarkable and gripping’ Edmund de Waal
‘A near-perfect study of Jewish identity in the 20th century ? I don’t hesitate to call it a masterpiece’ Telegraph