The penalty kick
£15.99‘Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.’ Gary Lineker
Showing 37–48 of 333 resultsSorted by latest
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Predator of the seas
£25.00The dramatic biography of a slaveship turned freedom-fighter-which brings new insights into Britain’s involvement in the end of the trade in enslaved people
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Under cover of darkness
£22.00A gripping new history of London during the Blackout-revealing the violent crime that spread across the capital under the cover of darkness
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Black angels
£12.99‘Black Angels’ tells the true story of 300 black nurses who helped prevent a public health crisis in New York. In 1929, when white nurses staged a walk out at Staten Island’s 2000-bed TB sanatorium, health officials made the decision to sanction a national call for ‘coloured nurses’. Lured by the promise of good pay, education, housing, and the opportunity to work in a hospital free of quotas and segregated wards, ‘Black Angels’ from all over the country boarded trains and buses to enter wards. This book tells a ‘triumphant story’, bringing together medicine, politics, racial strife, women’s rights, and cutting-edge science.
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Jane Austen at home
£26.00This telling of the story of Jane’s life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the way in which home is used in her novels to mean both a place of pleasure and a prison.
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Republic
£25.00Events moved fast in the 1650s. Something cataclysmic happened every year, something that would thrust the newly formed republic, its people, and its eventual ‘Lord Protector’ Oliver Cromwell, in an entirely new direction. It was a time of bewildering change and uncertainty, but it was also a time of innovation and opportunity. And, for the men and women who lived through these years, this period was certainly not an ‘interregnum’. Here, in thrilling detail, Alice Hunt brings the republic and its extraordinary cast of characters, from politicians to poets and prophets, back to life.
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Behind closed doors
£12.99With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London’s private members’ clubs, from the late-18th century to the present day. In doing so, he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond. This is a chronicle, as informative as it is entertaining, of the ups and downs of London clubland, and how it had an impact on parts of the world far from London. It is packed with anecdotes and illustrative examples of the growth of this quirky, unique institution, which grew to spread around the world. London, though, with its 400 clubs, was always at its heart. Thévoz reveals how everything we might have thought we knew about these clubs is wrong.
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The rest is history returns
£20.00The second book from the creators of the smash-hit number 1 podcast takes us on a dizzying A–Z through the past
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On this day in politics
£12.99From the first meeting of an elected English parliament on 20 January 1265 to the tabling of the Bill of Rights on 13 February 1689; from the Peterloo massacre of 16 August 1819 to Britain voting to leave the EU on 23 June 2016, there is a growing thirst for knowledge about the history of our constitutional settlement, our party system and how our parliamentary democracy has developed. Writing as an observer of political history, but also as someone with an opinion, acclaimed political broadcaster Iain Dale charts the main events of the last few hundred years, with one event per page, per day.
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Embers of the hands
£25.00Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country. Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people – children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers – who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.
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Rogues and scholars
£30.00On 15th October 1958 Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an ‘event sale’ of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for 781,000 – at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world centre of the art market and Sotheby’s as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. While Sotheby’s is the lynchpin of the story, Stourton populates his narrative with a glorious rogue’s gallery of clever amateurs, eccentric scholars, brilliant emigrés, cockney traders and grandees with a flair for the deal.
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A quiet company of dangerous men
£25.00There have always been special warriors; Achilles and his Myrmidons are the obvious classical examples. What we now think of as ‘special operations,’ however, were born in World War II, and one of the earliest and most exciting units formed was Britain’s SOE. In the early years of the war, when Britain stood alone against the Nazis, Winston Churchill put them on a mission to ‘set Europe ablaze’: to foment local revolt, to gather intelligence, to blow up bridges, and to do anything that could help to disrupt the Axis cause. ‘A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men’ follows four SOE officers who distinguished themselves in this fight: the Spanish Civil War veteran Peter Kemp, the demolitions expert David Smiley, the born guerrilla leader Billy McLean, and the political natural Julian Amery.