The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I (1100-35) was never meant to be king, but he was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthless...
THE PERFECT READ FOR TROUBLED TIMESFrom the bestselling author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places comes this inspiring and beautifully written meditation on the wisdom inhe...
This semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac's trip to France, to trace his ancestors and explore his own understanding of the Buddhism that came to define his beliefs, contains some of Kerouac's mos...
'Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street JournalWatermark is Joseph Bro...
Hellhound on His Trail is the story of two very different men whose lives catastrophically interweaved over the course of some nine months in the late 1960s: one was a thief and con man called Jame...
'Everyone thinks, tomorrow it will be my turn. Daily, hourly, death is before our eyes . . .'Gustav and Fritz Kleinmann are father and son in an ordinary Austrian Jewish family when the...
On today's world stage, one leader stands apart. Queen Elizabeth II has seen more of the planet and its people than any other head of state, and has engaged with them like no other monarch in Briti...
Everyone knows that Jeremy Clarkson finds the world a perplexing place - after all, he wrote a bestselling book about it. Yet despite the appearance of The World According To Clarkson, things don't...
'Fresh, compelling ... an important book, revealing that 50 years on, 1968 is still unfinished business' Andrew Hussey, Financial Times'A thoughtful, readable account of a moment in his...
'A masterpiece ... a moving image of post-war Poland, and the first breathing of one of the essential voices of the twentieth century... the master of literary reportage' The Times Literary Supplem...
Proud to be a Mammal (1942-97) is Czeslaw Milosz's moving and diverse collection of essays. Among them, he covers his passion for poetry, his love of the Polish language that was so nearly wiped ou...
Warsaw Boy is the remarkable true story of a sixteen-year old boy soldier in war-torn Poland'The best-ever account of what is was like to be young and fighting in the Warsaw Rising' Nea...
Niall Ferguson's acclaimed bestseller on the highs and lows of Britain's empireOnce vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the ...
Niall Ferguson's acclaimed bestseller on the highs and lows of Britain's empireOnce vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the ...
"To live in Victorian Britain was to experience an astonishing series of changes, of a kind for which there was simply no precedent in the human experience. There were revolutions in transport...
"To live in Victorian Britain was to experience an astonishing series of changes, of a kind for which there was simply no precedent in the human experience. There were revolutions in transport...
Henry VIII's reign transformed the physical and spiritual landscape of England. Magnificent, tyrannical, a strong ruler, a 'pillager of the commonwealth', this most notorious of kings remains a fig...
William III (1689-1702) & Mary II (1689-94) (Britain's only ever 'joint monarchs') changed the course of the entire country's history, coming to power through a coup (which involved Mary betray...
Like his mother Queen Victoria, Edward VII defined an era. Both reflected the personalities of their central figures: hers grand, imperial and pretty stiff; his no less grand, but much more relaxed...
'After my death', George V said of his eldest son and heir, 'the boy will ruin himself in 12 months'. From the death of his father in 1936 to the constitutional crisis provoked by his proposal to t...