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Showing 97–108 of 132 resultsSorted by latest
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£12.99
The story of the family who rose from the Frankfurt ghetto to become synonymous with wealth and power has been much mythologized. Yet half the Rothschilds, the women, remain virtually unknown. From the East End of London to the Eastern seaboard of the United States, from Spitalfields to Scottish castles, from Bletchley Park to Buchenwald, and from the Vatican to Palestine, Natalie Livingstone follows the extraordinary lives of the English branch of the Rothschild women from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the early years of the twenty first. As Jews in a Christian society and women in a deeply patriarchal family, they were outsiders. Absorbing and compulsive, this book gives voice to the complicated, privileged and gifted women whose vision and tenacity shaped history.
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£8.99
Set in the same fictional London as his ‘Slough House’ series, Mick Herron now introduces Tom Bettany, an ex-spook with a violent past and only one thing to live for – avenging his son’s death.
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£25.00
Moving across millennia, ‘Nomads’ explores the transformative and often bloody relationship between settled and mobile societies. Often overlooked in history, the story of the umbilical connections between these two very different ways of living presents a radical new view of human civilisation. From the Neolithic revolution to the 21st century via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the great nomadic empires of the Arabs and Mongols, the Mughals and the development of the Silk Road, nomads have been a perpetual counterbalance to the empires created by the power of human cities. Exploring evolutionary biology and psychology of restlessness that makes us human, Sattin’s sweeping history charts the power of nomadism from before the Bible, to its decline in the present day.
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£12.99
Few fathers and sons can ever have been so close as Winston Churchill and his only son Randolph. Both showed flamboyant impatience, reckless bravery, and generosity of spirit. The glorious and handsome Randolph was a giver and devourer of pleasure, a man who exploded into rooms, trailing whisky tumblers and reciting verbatim whole passages of classic literature. But while Randolph inherited many of his fathers’ talents, he also inherited all of his flaws. Randolph was his father only more so: fiercer, louder, more out of control. Hence father and son would be so very close, and so liable to explode at each other. A revealing new perspective on the Churchill myth, this intimate story reveals the lesser-seen Winston Churchill.
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£25.00
Surprisingly little has been written about second-generation Bloomsbury who tantalised the original ‘Bloomsburies’ at Gordon Square parties with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. ‘Young Bloomsbury’ introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West, ‘who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet’; sculptor Stephen Tomlin; and writer Julia Strachey. Talented and productive, these larger-than-life figures had high-achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives.
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£12.99
The height of Mt. Everest was first measured in 1850, but the closest any westerner got to Everest during the next 71 years, until 1921, was 40 miles. ‘The Hunt for Mount Everest’ tells the story of the 71-year quest to find the world’s highest mountain. It’s a tale of high drama, of larger-than-life characters – George Everest, Francis Younghusband, George Mallory, Lord Curzon, Edward Whymper – and a few quiet heroes: Alexander Kellas, the 13th Dalai Lama, Charles Bell. Encountering spies, war, political intrigues, and hundreds of mules, camels, bullocks, yaks, and two zebrules, Craig Storti uncovers the fascinating and still largely overlooked saga of all that led up to that moment in late June of 1921 when two English climbers, George Mallory and Guy Bullock, became the first westerners – and almost certainly the first human beings – to set foot on Mt. Everest.
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£10.99
In ‘Outlandish’, travel writer Nick Hunt takes us across landscapes that should not be there, wildernesses found in Europe yet seemingly belonging to far-off continents: a patch of Arctic tundra in Scotland; the continent’s largest surviving remnant of primeval forest in Poland and Belarus; Europe’s only true desert in Spain; and the fathomless grassland steppes of Hungary. From snow-capped mountain range to dense green forest, desert ravines to threadbare, yellow open grassland, these anomalies transport us to faraway regions of the world. Against the rapid climate breakdown of deserts, steppes, and primeval jungles across the world, this book discovers the outlandish environments so much closer to home – along with their abundant wildlife.
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£10.99
Berlin was in ruins when Soviet forces fought their way towards the Reichstag in the spring of 1945. Streets were choked with rubble, power supplies severed and the population close to starvation. The arrival of the Soviet army heralded yet greater terrors: the city’s civilians were to suffer rape, looting and horrific violence. Worse still, they faced a future with neither certainty nor hope. Berlin’s fate had been sealed four months earlier at the Yalta Conference. The city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up between the victorious powers – British, American, French and Soviet. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution; in reality, it fired the starting gun for the Cold War. As soon as the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they reverted to their pre-war hostility and suspicion.
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£10.99
A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service’s First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive – but she’s had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she’s fought for. Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they’ve been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb’s crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted?
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£8.99
Jon Swift is in trouble again. His journalism career is in freefall. He is too old to be part of the new world order and he has never learned to suck up to those in charge. But experience has taught him to trust his instincts. When, for the first time in years, Jon runs into Lin Lifeng in a café in Oxford he wonders if the meeting is a coincidence. When Lin asks him to pass on a coded message, he knows it’s not. Once a radical student who helped Jon broadcast the atrocities of Tiananmen Square, Lin is now a well-dressed party official with his own agenda. Travelling to Beijing, Jon starts to follow a tangled web in which it is hard to know who are friends and who are enemies. As he ricochets across the country, Jon seeks to make sense of the ways in which China’s past and present are colliding – and what that means for the future of the country and the world.
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£12.99
No further information has been provided for this title.
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£14.99
Sven grows up in 1890s Stockholm, going from one dead-end factory job to another, before working as a live-in nanny for his sister, Olga. She senses his dissatisfaction and prompts him to take action. So, obsessed since boyhood with the romance of the Far North, Sven accepts a contract with a mining company on Spitzbergen, a sparsely inhabited icy world of mountains, polar bears, arctic foxes and rare and valuable minerals. There, digging for coal, Sven is badly injured in a shaft collapse and is disfigured. After he recovers as much as he ever will, feeling more of an outcast than ever, Sven remains in Svalbard over winter, when the mines close, hoping to study with the local trappers and learn their trade. On this isolated, rugged island, he creates a unique family of his own, planning never to return to regular society until the Second World War forces his hand.
