Biography: historical, political & military
Showing 1–16 of 53 results
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A History of Islam in 21 Women
£9.99A History of Islam in 21 Women
Beginning in seventh-century Mecca and Medina, ‘A History of Islam in 21 Women’ takes us around the globe, through eleventh-century Yemen and Khorasan, and into sixteenth-century Spain, Istanbul and India. From there to nineteenth-century Persia and the African savannah, to twentieth-century Russia, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq, before reaching present day London. From the first believer, Khadija, and the other women who witnessed the formative years of Islam, to award-winning mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani in the twenty-first century, Hossein Kamaly celebrates the lives and groundbreaking achievements of these extraordinary women in the history of Islam.
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A Royal Affair
£12.99A Royal Affair
Telling the dramatic story of King George III, a king trying to hold family and state together, as both his siblings and his American colonies rebel, this work provides a sweeping picture of 18th century royalty, politics, and family affairs.
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Agent Sonya
£8.99Agent Sonya
In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1942, a thin, and unusually elegant, housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother-of-three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, Sonya was heading for the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific secrets from a nuclear physicist. Secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the atomic bomb. Far from an obedient homemaker, Sonya Burton was a dedicated communist, a decorated colonel and a veteran spy who risked her life to keep the Soviet Union in the nuclear arms race. In ‘Agent Sonya’, Ben Macintyre reveals the astonishing story behind the most important woman spy in history and the huge emotional cost that came with being a mother, a wife, and a secret agent at once.
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Alfred the Great
£3.99Alfred the Great
A concise account of the place of Alfred, King of the West Saxons, in English history.
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Beethoven
£16.99Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as an eccentric genius shaking his fist. In this book, Oxford professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise in a refreshing way – with each chapter focusing on a period of his life, a piece of music and a revealing theme, from family to friends, heroism to liberty.
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Beethoven
£9.99Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as an eccentric genius shaking his fist. In this book, Oxford professor Laura Tunbridge cuts through the noise in a refreshing way – with each chapter focusing on a period of his life, a piece of music and a revealing theme, from family to friends, heroism to liberty.
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Black Spartacus
£10.99Black Spartacus
The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world’s first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony’s black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life, he confronted (and for a time overcame) some of the dominant forces of his age – slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. Treacherously seized by Napoleon’s invading army in 1802, this charismatic figure ended his days, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘the most unhappy man of men’, imprisoned in a fortress in France.
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Brothers in Arms
£25.00Brothers in Arms
From the bestselling author of Normandy ’44 and Sicily ’43 comes the untold story of the Sherwood Rangers. It took a certain type of courage to serve in a tank in World War Two. Encased in steel, surrounded by highly explosive shells, a big and slow-moving target, every crew member was utterly vulnerable to enemy attack from all sides. Living – and dying – in a tank was a brutal way to fight a war. The Sherwood Rangers were one of the great tank regiments. They had learned their trade the hard way, under the burning sun of North Africa, on the battlefields of El Alamein and Alam el Halfa. By the time they landed on Gold Beach on D-Day, they were toughened by experience and ready for combat.
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Churchill and Empire
£14.99Churchill and Empire
Winston Churchill’s attitude towards the Empire at the time was the stereotypical Victorian paternalistic approach, and he held what many would regard today as racist views, in that he felt that some nationalities were superior to others. This outmoded attitude was one of the reasons the British voters rejected him after the Second World War in which he had led the country brilliantly. His attitude remained decidedly old-fashioned in a world that was shaping up very differently. This ground-breaking volume reveals the many facets of Churchill’s personality: a visionary leader with a truly Victorian attitude toward the British Empire.
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Churchill’s Shadow
£25.00Churchill’s Shadow
Winston Churchill towered over his own age, when he was variously described as ‘the saviour of his country’, ‘the leader of humanity’, or ‘the man of the century’. More remarkably, he has towered over fifty years and more since his since his death in 1965. He overshadows both his country, whose recent history has been called ‘an extended footnote to Churchill’, and the United States, where a great cult of Churchill has burgeoned. This account of Churchill’s life and afterlife has been more than ten years in the making. It is not a conventional biography but an account of Churchill’s long life, the cult that arose almost immediately after his death, and his place in popular culture, up to the Oscar-winning film ‘Darkest Hour’ in 2017.
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Clementine Churchill
£30.00Clementine Churchill
The biography of Clementine Churchill, wife of English Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
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Cnut
£4.99Cnut
Cnut, or Canute, was King of England for nearly 20 years, dying in Dorset in 1035. A formidable figure, Cnut is one of the great ‘what ifs’ in English history. The culmination of a long period of Viking attacks and settlement across England, Cnut’s reign could have permanently shifted 11th century England’s orbit to Scandinavia. Stretching his authority across the North Sea to become king of Denmark and Norway, and with close links to Ireland and an overlordship of Scotland, Cnut created a Viking Empire at least as plausible as the Anglo-Norman Empire that would emerge in 1066. Ryan Lavelle’s book explores this fascinating and powerful man. He has popularly come down to us for the story of Canute and the waves – but he was a nation and empire builder on the grandest scale and his reign is a sort of masterclass in the contingent, wayward nature of history.
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Golda Meir
£14.99Golda Meir
Mining unpublished archival treasures, this is the authoritative biography of the first woman in the West to become an elected leader: Golda Meir.
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Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls
£25.00Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls
What if the princess did not marry Prince Charming but instead went on to be an astronaut or an activist? What if the jealous step sisters were supportive and kind? And what if the queen was the one really in charge of the kingdom? ‘Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls’ introduces us to 100 remarkable women and their extraordinary lives. From Marie Curie to Malala, Ada Lovelace to Zaha Hadid, it brings together the stories of scientists, artists, politicians, pirates and spies.
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Hitler and Stalin
£25.00Hitler and Stalin
This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin – the culmination of 30 years’ work – examines the two tyrants during WWII, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Hitler’s charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin’s regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin’s change in behaviour in response to events. But at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt-of suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build the utopias they wanted, and while Hitler’s creation of the Holocaust remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin committed a series of atrocities at the same time.
£25.00 -
Hitler and Stalin
£10.99Hitler and Stalin
This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin – the culmination of 30 years’ work – examines the two tyrants during WWII, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Hitler’s charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin’s regimented rule by fear; and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin’s change in behaviour in response to events. But at a macro level, both were prepared to create undreamt-of suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build the utopias they wanted, and while Hitler’s creation of the Holocaust remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin committed a series of atrocities at the same time.
£10.99