Showing titles in 19th Century

For the first time, the full story of a crime that has haunted New England since 1873. The cold-blooded ax murder of two innocent Norwegian women at their island home off the coast of New Hampshire has gripped the region since 1873, beguiling tourists, inspiring artists, and fueling conspiracy theorists. The killer, a handsome Prussian fisherman down on his luck, was quickly captured, convicted in a widely publicized trial, and hanged in an unforgettable gallows spectacle.

Van Gogh is a vivid portrait of the great Impressionist painter that traces his life from the Netherlands, where he was born into a family of art dealers, through his years in England, the Hague, and Paris, to his final home in Arles, where he discovered the luminous style of his late paintings before his suicide at the age of thirty-seven.

This selection of essays by Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) demonstrate the varied power of his genius. Compiled from his lecture tours, newspaper articles, essays and epigrams, these writings show that beneath his trademark wit and love of paradox, Oscar Wilde was an original and remarkably modern writer.

Colonialism: A Global History interprets colonialism as an unequal relationship characterized by displacement and domination and reveals the ways in which this relationship has been constitutive of global modernity.

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of J.S. Mill in just one hour. John Stuart Mill is remembered today as the leading exponent of Utilitarianism, arguing that our aim in life must be the attainment of pleasure and the minimizing of pain for the majority of...

Joss Ackland, Roger Allam and Leslie Phillips star in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Victor Hugo’s classic novel. When poverty drives Jean Valjean to steal a loaf of bread from a baker’s window, it is an action that will haunt him for the rest of his life. A citizen of...

In 1848, Europe was engulfed in a firestorm of revolution. The streets of cities from Paris to Bucharest and from Berlin to Palermo were barricaded and flooded by armed insurgents proclaiming political liberties and national freedom. The conservative order which had held sway since the fall of...

In this, his best-known work, the controversial American economist and social critic Thorstein Veblen appropriates Darwin's theory of evolution to analyze the modern industrial system. For Veblen, the shallowness and superficiality observed in society results from the tendency to believe that true accomplishment lies in arriving at a condition of ostentatious wealth and status.

Little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji himself, the first Japanese emperor ever to meet a European. But now, Donald Keene sifts the available evidence to present a rich portrait not only of Meiji but also of rapid and sometimes violent change during this pivotal period in Japan's history. Emperor of Japan conveys in sparkling prose the complexity of the man and offers an unrivaled portrait of Japan in a period of unique interest.

'Captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking' A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 'A vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine . . . Richly underpinned by research in contemporary sources and firmly rooted in historical scholarship.' Fintan O'Toole 'Comprehensive, elegantly written...

Brought to you by Penguin. In The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built - and then lost - over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs grew in power to gain control of the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century. Then, in just a few...

The iconoclastic writer and director of the revered classic Withnail & I—"The funniest British film of all time" (Esquire)—returns to London in a decade-long examination of the most provocative murder investigation in British history, and finally solves the identity of the killer known as...

The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about 19th-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic change. The aim of this audiobook is to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes.

Written by one of Israel's most notable scholars, this volume provides a breathtaking history of Israel from the origins of the Zionist movement in the late nineteenth century to the present day.

The first and only successful slave revolution in the Americas began in 1791 when thousands of brutally exploited slaves rose up against their masters on Saint-Domingue, the most profitable colony in the 18th-century Atlantic world. Within a few years, the slave insurgents forced the French administrators of the colony to emancipate them, a decision ratified by revolutionary Paris in 1794. This victory was a stunning challenge to the order of master/slave relations throughout the Americas, including the Southern United States.

Before 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France—all without destroying itself in the process?

Booker Taliaferro Washington was born in a southern plantation. He was a son of a black slave woman and unknown white man. His mother worked as a cook in a house of plantation owners. In childhood he idn't have a surname as other slaves, but after the American Civil War that set the black slaves free Booker chose the surname of the first American President George Washington.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Murder by the Book by Claire Harman, read by Andy Secombe. Early in the morning of 6 May 1840, on an ultra-respectable Mayfair street, a footman answered the door to a panic-stricken maid from a nearby house. Her elderly master, Lord William Russell, was...

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Yasmin Mwanza. This definitive recording includes an introduction by Sarah Salih. Written in 1857, this is the autobiography of a Jamaican woman whose fame rivalled Florence Nightingale's during the Crimean War. Seacole's offer to...

Best-selling author of Italian Ways Tim Parks follows the hair-raising journey of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, 250 miles on foot from Rome to Ravenna, to look at Italy past and present.