Regional & national history
Showing all 7 results
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A history of Britain in just a minute
£10.99A history of Britain in just a minute
Join Gyles Brandreth on a hilariously addictive romp through British history. This isn’t just another history book – there’s a catch! From Stonehenge and Boudicca to Megxit and Brexit, each topic is written in 60-second installments, without hesitation, repetition, or deviation.
£10.99 -
Arise, England
£25.00Arise, England
Between 1199 and 1399, English politics was high drama. These two centuries witnessed savage political blood-letting – including civil war, deposition, the murder of kings and the ruthless execution of rebel lords – as well as international warfare, devastating national pandemic, economic crisis and the first major peasant uprising in English history. Arise, England uses the six Plantagenet kings who ruled during these two centuries to explore England’s emergent statehood. Drawing on original accounts and arresting new research, it draws resonances between government, international relations, and the abilities, egos and ambitions of political actors, then and now. Colourful and complicated, and by turns impressive and hateful, the six kings stride through the story; but arguably the greatest character is the emerging English state itself.
£25.00 -
Everybody wants to rule the world
£20.00Everybody wants to rule the world
Travel back to the 1980s – to Botham’s Ashes and the Brixton riots; the Moscow Olympics and the miners’ strike; the Crucible Theatre and the Falklands – to explore how we got to where we are now. Discover how sport became fully entwined in our national story; how sporting heroes were made, and destroyed; how ‘wars’ were fought on the pitch; and how sport responded to – and drove cultural change in – our society.
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Papyrus
£12.99Papyrus
Long before books were mass produced, those made of reeds from along the Nile were worth fighting and dying for. Journeying along the battlefields of Alexander the Great, beneath the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, at Cleopatra’s palaces and the scene of Hypatia’s murder, Irene Vallejo chronicles the excitement of literary culture in the ancient world, and the heroic efforts that ensured this impressive tradition would continue. Weaved throughout are stories about the spies, scribes, illuminators, librarians, booksellers, authors, and statesmen whose rich and sometimes complicated engagement with the written word bears remarkable similarities to the world today: Aristophanes and the censorship of the humourists, Sappho and the empowerment of women’s voices, Seneca and the problem of a post-truth world.
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The Britannias
£25.00The Britannias
This is the story of Britain’s islands and how they are woven into its culture, history and collective psyche. From Neolithic Orkney and druidical Anglesey to the joys and strangeness of modern Thanet, we explore the furthest reaches of Britain’s island topography, once known by the collective term, Britanniae (the Britains). Alice Albinia takes the reader over borders and through disparate island cultures, past and present, listening to neglected voices and subversive stories. ‘The Britannias’ examines how the smaller islands have wielded disproportionate influence on the mainland, becoming the fertile ground of political, cultural and technological innovations which have gone on to change history throughout the archipelago.
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The rising down
£25.00The rising down
When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime’s reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of unexpected stories and hypnotic voices emerged from the area’s past. Who has stood here, she asks; what did they see? From the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to the lost local women who left little trace, these electrifying encounters inspired her to imagine lives that seemed distant, yet were deeply connected through their shared landscape. By focusing on one small patch of England, Harris finds ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’ and opens vast new horizons, becoming our intimate companion as we travel on visionary journeys through space and time.
£25.00 -
The seven wonders of the ancient world
£25.00The seven wonders of the ancient world
Their names still echo down the ages: The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Temple of Artemis. The statue of Zeus at Olympia. The mausoleum of Halikarnassos. The Colossus at Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Seven Wonders of the World were staggeringly audacious impositions on our planet. They were also brilliant adventures of the mind, test cases of the reaches of human imagination. Now only the pyramid remains, yet the scale and majesty of these seven wonders still enthral us today. In a thrilling, colourful narrative enriched with the latest archaeological discoveries, bestselling historian Bettany Hughes walks through the landscapes of both ancient and modern time; on a journey whose purpose is to ask why we wonder, why we create and why we choose to remember the wonder of others.
£25.00