The life story of Mary I – daughter of Henry VIII and his Spanish wife, Catherine of Aragon – is often distilled to a few dramatic episodes: her victory over the attempted coup by Lady Jane Grey, the imprisonment of her half-sister Elizabeth, the bur...

In this thoughtful and engaging book, Feargal Cochrane looks at Northern Ireland's "Troubles" from the late 1960s to the present day. He explains why, a decade and a half after the peace process ended in political agreement in 1998, sectarian attitud...

Germans of the generation born just before the outbreak of World War I lived through a tumultuous and dramatic century. This book tells the story of their lives and, in so doing, offers a new history of twentieth-century Germany, as experienced and m...

Outlandish alchemist and magician, political intelligencer, apocalyptic prophet, and converser with angels, John Dee (1527-1609) was one of the most colourful and controversial figures of the Tudor world. In this fascinating book – the first full-l...

<p>The final decade of the old order in imperial Russia was a time of both crisis and possibility, an uncertain time that inspired an often desperate search for meaning. This book explores how journalists and other writers in St. Petersburg described...

Russia today is haunted by deeds that have been unexamined and words that have been left unsaid. A serious attempt to understand the meaning of the communist experience has not been undertaken and millions of victims of Soviet communism are all but f...

A clothier and a deeply religious man, Joseph Ryder faithfully kept a diary from 1733 until his death, two and a half million words later, in 1768. Recently rediscovered and brilliantly interpreted by historian Matthew Kadane, Ryder's diary provides...

In the climactic part of his three-book series exploring the importance of public image in the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, Kevin Sharpe employs a remarkable interdisciplinary approach that draws on literary studies and art history as well as politic...

The book shows the background and mechanics of the Soviet mass executions in spring 1940 of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war – army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians – taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. The...

From log house to White House, enslaved to liberator, ghetto to office of the CEO, ambition drives the American Dream. Americans are a nation of people driven by ambition. Yet at the time of the nation's founding, ambition was viewed as a dangerous v...