History

In 1956, Sudan gained independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended into civil war and conflict. When the 198...

illustrated by Joe Lillington Ever wondered what the first weapons were made from, or how the ancient Mongol warriors defeated the great armies of ...

In late 1944, the Allies invaded the Japanese-held Philippines, and soon the end of the Pacific War was within reach. But for the last 150 American...

Translated by Ivan Morris As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersper...

Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continu...

Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author...

The names of T. S. Eliot, William Golding, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney are synonymous with the publishing house Faber & Faber, f...

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, dominated the eighteenth century in the same way that Napoleon dominated the start of the nineteenth. He was ...

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms's ...

Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. She reported from the most dangerous pl...

Translated by Bryan Doyle Jacqueline van Maarsen's first book - My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank - ends in 1947, two years after the death of ...

King of Prussia, German Emperor, war leader and defeated exile, Kaiser Wilhelm II was one of the most important - and most controversial - figures ...

Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to ...

Whenever a tempestuous period in history begins, Machiavelli is summoned, because he is known as one for philosophizing in dark times. In fact, sin...

translated by Shigeru Ohta and Alexander Bennett This book tells the story of Kazuo Odachi who-in 1943, when he was just 16 years-old-joined the Im...

The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist fro...

Five teenage friends leave Brighton to wage jihad in Syria. All except one are killed. This is their untold story. No Return is a unique insight in...

Nine months after the Nazi occupation of Austria, 600 Jewish Children assembled at Vienna station to board the first of the Kindertransports bound ...

Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong riv...

Since its initial appearance, A.L.Sadler's imposing biography of the Japanese Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu has been recognized as an outstanding contribu...

Translated by Howard Goldblatt By now the world is familiar with the disastrous consequences of the ten year period (1966-1976) in China's history ...

The year is 1927, and in America, Britain and Russia, three young girls share a dream: to fly. But it won't be easy... Against the odds, Hazel, Mar...

Based on groundbreaking research, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals in captivating detail the fear and betrayal, privilege and debauchery, family life...

When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he was asked to swear allegiance to Hitler and join the Wehrmacht. He refused. He was ...

Translated by Lara Vergnaud Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Lon...

translated by Peter Zombory-Moldovan The budding young Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován was on holiday when the First World War broke out in ...

Demagogues and authoritarians are flourishing in this modern age of political myth. They exploit our fears and fantasies. Exposing the fictions tha...

In August 1974, after his involvement in the Watergate scandal could no longer be denied, Richard Nixon became the first and only president to resi...

Never tell a woman where she doesn't belong. In 1932, Roy Chapman Andrews, president of the men-only Explorers Club, boldly stated to hundreds of f...

From Classical times to the 19th century, the great quest to discover and define the intoxicating diversity of the natural world attracted a host o...

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledg...

'Missing a young girl, Dora Bruder, 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and h...

Emma Sky was working for the British Council during the invasion of Iraq, when the ad went around calling for volunteers. Appalled at what she saw ...

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside...

A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose...

Titanic: First Accounts compiles first hand accounts, testimonies, and letters by notable Titanic survivors, including Archibald Gracie, Lawrence B...

For more than twenty-five years, David Nott has taken unpaid leave from his job as a general and vascular surgeon with the NHS to volunteer in some...

Alex Halberstadt returns to Russia, the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth, where decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three g...

Born in 1898, Zhou witnessed several of the most important events in China's modern history and was a close associate of both the nationalist leade...