Biography: historical, political & military
Showing 1–16 of 61 results
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A brilliant life
£10.99A brilliant life
Here is a powerful, true story of a Holocaust survivor told by her daughter – a tale that reminds us of the resilience of the soul and the ability of the heart to heal. Born in Czechoslovakia, Mira was only 12 years old when World War II broke out. Torn apart from her family, she went on to survive four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and a Death March when she was too weak to walk. She lived when almost everyone she knew did not. At 88, living in Australia, Mira is diagnosed with cancer and her daughter, a journalist, decides to interview her to distract her from her illness. As Mira gives her testimony Rachelle comes to understand how Mira’s unique perspective – seeing her experiences through the lens of the goodness of the people who helped her – protected her from the depths of humanity’s cruelty, and enabled her to go on to live a full and brilliant life.
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A history of the Roman Empire in 21 women
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Agrippina
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Beyond chocolate
£25.00Beyond chocolate
Scion of the great Quaker chocolate dynasty, Adrian Cadbury (1929-2015) was educated at Eton and Cambridge, yet never quite fitted into the mould of the British establishment. As one of the most influential business personalities of the later 20th-century, he was a committed capitalist, but championed workers’ rights and backed numerous social causes. By his death, he had given most of his fortune away. To most people, however, his private life remained a closed book, overshadowed by a string of family tragedies and the eventual hostile take-over of his world famous family-owned business. The Cadbury Report, his pioneering work on corporate governance remains his greatest legacy, but Adrian Cadbury’s career ranged far wider. With 2024 marking Cadbury’s 200th anniversary, this is his first biography, and one drawn from interviews with the family and those who knew him.
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Bravery beyond belief
£30.00Bravery beyond belief
Incredible stories of bravery by ordinary people saving the lives of fellow citizens, often in hair-raisingly dangerous situations
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Brexit. Volume 3
£26.00Brexit. Volume 3
‘Meticulously sourced, merciless and revelatory. It is a closely observed study of power, and how it is gained, used and lost’ FINANCIAL TIMES
The unmissable next instalment of Tim Shipman’s #1 bestselling Brexit quartet.
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Broken threads
£18.99Broken threads
‘Unforgettable’ SATHNAM SANGHERA
‘Spell-binding’ PETER FRANKOPAN
‘Fascinating’ WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
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Churchill
£20.00Churchill
Gilbert gives us a vivid portrait, using Churchill’s most personal letters and the recollections of his contemporaries, both friends and enemies, to go behind the scenes of some of the stormiest and fascinating political events of our time.
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Clarissa
£30.00Clarissa
Clarissa Eden, Countess of Avon, wife of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, once famously said: ‘For the past few weeks I have really felt as if the Suez Canal was flowing through my drawing-room.’ With her impressive intellect and acerbic wit, she was a highly influential muse to many leading figures over several decades. At Oxford in the 1940s she fascinated dons and undergraduates alike. She went on to work in the film world for Alexander Korda and for George Weidenfeld at Contact Magazine. She was a close friend of Cecil Beaton, James Pope-Hennessy, Lucian Freud, Isaiah Berlin, and Lord Goodman. She fascinated Greta Garbo. After an early Bohemian life, she became a politically active wife to Eden when he was Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, particularly during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Her death at 101 in 2021 has opened the way for this enthralling and revealing biography by the widely admired biographer Hugo Vickers.
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Cnut
£7.99Cnut
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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Downfall
£18.99Downfall
Evgeny Prigozhin emerged as one of the most dangerous warlords in the world and as one of Vladimir Putin’s chief rivals in Russia’s tumultuous political climate, exiled after leading Wagner’s attempted coup and killed in a mysterious plane crash. But what is the truth about this enigmatic figure, his role in the war with Ukraine, and the chaos unleashed across Russia by his turn against Putin? And, the aftermath of his death, what is next for Russia in the new stage of late Putinism that Prigozhin’s life forged? Drawing on years of research, this book traces the rise of Russia’s most prominent non-state actor and examines the political climate that propelled a convicted gangster with no government office to the formidable role he has come to occupy.
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Enemies of all
£25.00Enemies of all
Shining a light on who pirates really were, and how the well-known ‘skull and crossbones’ Hollywood stereotype evolved
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Fallen
£22.00Fallen
Based on diaries, letters, memoirs and thousands of contemporary documents, ‘Fallen’ is both a forensic account of George Mallory’s last expedition to Everest in 1924 and an attempt to get under his skin and separate the man from the myth.
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Fanny and Stella
£12.99Fanny and Stella
28th April 1870. The flamboyantly dressed Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton are causing a stir in the Strand Theatre. All eyes are riveted upon their lascivious oglings of the gentlemen in the stalls. Moments later they are led away by the police. What followed was a scandal that shocked and titillated Victorian England in equal measure.
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Father and son
£10.99Father and son
An extraordinary memoir about family, the past and mortality, and the final work from the peerless Jonathan Raban.
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George III
£8.99George III
King of Britain for 60 years and the last king of the future United States, George III has traditionally had a bad press as the villain of Whig history and for America’s Founding Fathers a monarch of madness – and, more recently, a figure of fun and menace in the musical Hamilton. Black turns back to the archives and instead locates George within his age as a man of duty and piety, and a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain’s longest period of war. George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He was also a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art and science.
£8.99