History & Classics

The Beauty And The Sorrow
Peter Englund
Four devastating years told by twenty eyewitnesses showing not just what the First World War was, but what it was like to live through

The Glass Bathyscaphe
Gerry Martin
Glass is one of the greatest accidents in the history of humankind.

The New East End
Michael Young
This is a fascinating and honest book which builds upon the classic Family and Kinship in East London published nearly 50 years ago reflecting the aft…

A Short History of England
Simon Jenkins
The bestselling definitive concise account of our remarkable past – now updated

The Friar of Carcassonne
Stephen O'Shea
Secret tribunals, illegal rendition, torture, trumped up charges … all in a society controlled by fear. Such was the tenor of life in Languedoc arou…

Why The West Rules – For Now
Ian Morris
Why does the West rule? Eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing uniquely on 20,000 years of history and archae…

A Serious Endeavour
Laura Schwartz
A delightfully subversive take on the traditional Oxford college history

Invisible Romans
Robert C. Knapp
Rome's invisible inhabitants – prostitutes, innkeepers, housewives, priests, freedmen, slaves, soldiers and gladiators – brought back to life.

The Roman Forum
David Watkin
The ruins of the Forum in Rome, the centre of its ancient Empire, are one of the best known wonders of antiquity and a highpoint of the tourist route…

Churchill's Bunker
Richard Holmes
For the first time, the history of the bunker – and daily life inside it – is revealed, by bestselling historian Richard Holmes.

Cleopatra
Joyce Tyldesley
The Romans regarded her as 'fatale monstrum', a tyrant to be crushed. Pascal said the shape of her nose changed the history of the world. Sh…

The Alhambra
Robert Irwin
This highly readable study provides both a welcome demystification and a fascinating reinterpretation

The Perfect Heresy
Stephen O'Shea
Eight hundred years ago, the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians from all walks of society, high and low, flourished in what is now the Languedoc…

The Ruin of the Roman Empire
James J O'Donnell
A provocative portrait of the end of Rome's empire in the 5th and 6th centuries by a major historian, who tells the story of the barbarians who m…

The Shock Of The Old
David Edgerton
'So the new is old, and the old is new! Marvellous stuff and absolutely spot-on.' – Simon Jenkins

The Tomb of Agamemnon
Cathy Gere
With wit and energy, Gere peels away layers of modern fantasy, literary imagination, political appropriation and fashions of modern scholarship.

Vesuvius
Gillian Darley
Volcanoes continue to grab our imagination – and Vesuvius is the most famous of them all.

Marathon
Alan Lloyd
The clash of civilisations at Marathon was one of the most renowned military battles of the ancient world and a pivotal moment in the course of Wester…

Westminster Abbey
Richard Jenkyns
Fifteen royal weddings and thirty-eight coronations – Westminster Abbey was the venue for a sixteenth royal wedding, that of Kate Middleton and Prince…