Great Britain

Using a range of forgotten Afghan and Indian sources, William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful parable of colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and hubris. Return of a King is history at its most urgent and important....

Viceroys is the story of the British aristocracy sent to govern India during the reigns of five British monarchs. It is also the story of how the modern British identity was established....

An anthology of BBC Radio documentaries featuring the bestselling author Bill Bryson is the world's funniest travel writer, and a master of comic observation. His hugely popular books, spanning topics from linguistics to Shakespeare to the human body, have sold over 16 million copies and been...

In the tradition of The Rape of Nanking and A Problem from Hell, this account will change the way we think of Churchill and World War II....

India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. There were vast riches to be exploited and vast numbers of people to be subjugated....

Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year The "rich and gripping" true story of the first time machines came for human jobs—and how the Luddite uprising explains the power, threat, and toll of big tech and AI today (Naomi Klein) The most urgent story in modern tech begins...

Were World Wars I and II–which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction–inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond man’s control? Or were they products of calamitous...

Winston Churchill understood and wielded the power of words throughout his six decades in the public eye....

The book is full of humorous anecdote and rich characterization, and paints a vivid picture of 18th-century London, peopled by prominent personalities of the time....

Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat....

Read by the author, Alice Loxton. Biggest books to look out for in 2024 – The Guardian 'Loxton is the next big thing in history' – Dan Snow At eighteen, your life is full of of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to – unless you’ve got the plague. From a young...

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and...

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE By a prize-winning young historian, an authoritative work that reframes the Industrial Revolution, the expansion of British empire, and emergence of industrial capitalism by presenting them as...

The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine....

American-born Paul Theroux had lived in England for 11 years when he realized he'd explored dozens of exotic locations without discovering anything about his adopted home....

Brought to you by Penguin. We all want to know what on earth is going on. Why real wages are flatlining but taxes are rising, and public services are still collapsing. Why our children can’t afford a house and our neighbours are using foodbanks. We are all yearning for a way out of the...

Spanning 1940 to 1965, this volume picks up shortly after Winston Churchill became prime minister - when Britain stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany....

In this engaging, accessible account, Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman explore the methods spies actually used in the period, including disguises, invisible inks, and even poisons....

Brought to you by Penguin. George Mikes's perceptive manual for everyone who longs to attain True Britishness provides a complete guide to the British Way of Life. Having been born in Hungary, he eventually spent more than forty years in the field, and the fruits of his labour include insights...

From the Norman Invasion in 1066 to the eve of the First World War, Stick a Flag in It is a thousand-year jocular journey through the history of Britain and its global empire....

Now a Major Motion Picture starring Dame Judi Dench from director Stephen Frears. History’s most unlikely friendship—this is the astonishing story of Queen Victoria and her dearest companion, the young Indian Munshi Abdul Karim. In the twilight years of her reign, after the devastating...

In The Making of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr paints a fascinating portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century as the country recovered from the grand wreckage of the British Empire. Between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Second World War, the nation...

The fourth and last volume in Churchill's famous account spans 1815 to 1901...

Timothy West reads the second volume of Simon Schama's compelling chronicle of the British Isles....

The story of Britain from the earliest settlements in 3000BC to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603....

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall.

From May 1941 to the end of night raids in 1943, Luftwaffe bombers attacked provincial cities across England, Scotland, and Wales. However, these air raids are not considered part of the Blitz—at least, not according to the British Official History. The official historiography maintains that the Blitz on the United Kingdom ended when aircraft were redeployed to support the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, after the final major raid against London that May.

Horatio Nelson's celebrated victory over the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 presented Britain with an unprecedented command of the seas. Yet the Royal Navy's role in the struggle against Napoleonic France was far from over. This groundbreaking book asserts that, contrary to the accepted notion that the Battle of Trafalgar essentially completed the Navy's task, the war at sea actually intensified over the next decade, ceasing only with Napoleon's final surrender.

The dramatic, absolutely outrageous story of Caroline of Brunswick, a beloved icon of the Regency era, who uplifted the voice of the public and unabashedly defied society’s expectations, yet was shockingly robbed of her crown, from the host of the Vulgar History podcast. Caroline Amelia...

The British Isles hold a unique position in the history of art, a place where local traditions fuse with international ideas. At once isolated by coastal boundaries, yet also part of larger networks of diverse peoples, these islands have always benefited from a dual perspective.