Born near Lemburg in Galicia - now in Ukraine - the author of The Radetzky March and several other outstanding works died in alcoholic exile on the eve of WW2. This is a powerful account of ... read more
Schmidt was an Austrian diplomat who served as Foreign Minister 1936-1938. With access to previously unpublished family papers, Bassett shows how this controversial figure in fact tried to m... read more
Barbara Cartland's daughter, Princess Diana's stepmother, who is said to left the Althorp estate with just a few bin bags of clothes. She was irrepressible, controversial - and perfectly man... read more
A biography of Marguerite Steinheil (1869-1954), who ascended the social ladder in Belle Epoque Paris on the rungs of many lovers, until a night in May 1908 when her husband and mother were ... read more
In 2011 Taseer was kidnapped in Lahore by Taliban-affiliated gunmen; only a few months earlier his father, the governer of the province Punjab, had been murdered. It is thought that Taseer w... read more
From the author of the best book on Dreyfus, this is a biography of the Indian monk who inspired Freud, Gandhi, and Tagore and introduced Westerners to yoga and the Vedanta.
The novelist, historian and biographer morphs with supreme elegance into a memoirist, borne along by his gifts of intelligence, wit, culture and scrutiny.
A fascinating exploration of the use of wood in human history: half a million years of tools, devices, construction, art and architecture, from wedges, planes, screws and pulleys to stave ch... read more
In the period 1917-1921, between 100,000 and 250,000 Jews were murdered across Ukraine. Brahin, a genealogist, traces her grandmother's family history through multiple sources.
A new edition of this pioneering account of England's large black community in the C18th - from freed slaves to prosperous citizens. (First published 1995.)
From the Persian sack in 614AD to the end of the Crusaders. Hosler argues that despite horrific acts of violence, the medieval period is also one of tolerance, when the city's conquerors oft... read more
A broad survey that considers the roles of individual leaders in C20th European history. Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini of coures, but also Tito, Adenauer, Thatcher, Kohl, Gorbachev and others... read more
Two experts incorporate much new evidence from wrecks and archives: this new book has a reasonable claim to be the definitive account of the Armada. Illustrated.
The history of the world through the lens of the family, from a group walking along a beach 950,000 years ago to Caesars, Medicis, Bonapartes, Krupps, Assads, etc.
In one generation, the Mongols reshaped the balance of world power, aided by the internecine struggles of the Byzantines, Seljuks, Crusaders and others.
An anthology of the writings by the often overlooked women of the Raj, many of whom flourished in India - Fanny Parks, Emily Eden et alia. A fascinating counterpoint to the stereotypical vie... read more
An unusual study of ten houses that were burnt down in Ireland during the 1920s, and how it was for their owners and families, some of whom believed themselves to be integrated members of th... read more
The author of several good books on Russian imperial history turns her attention to the array of gifted exiles in Paris after the Revolution: Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Bunin, Chagall, Stravinsky,... read more
The Chagos Archipelago was appropriated from Mauritius by Britain in the 1960s and its inhabitants deported (with one suitcase each) to Mauritius and the UK in 1967-1973 to make way for the ... read more
What exactly is it that we preserve - and pay for - so carefully? Stourton looks at various parks, buildings and collections and charts two particular periods of conservation - the 1880s and... read more
An investigation of the people behind the art: how did the Greeks and Romans view their own bodies? What were their ideas of perfection and ugliness and how were these used in art? Some illu... read more
The Jena set: Caroline Schlegel's salon in the 1790s, in that small German university town, included Novalis, Schiller, Hegel, Goethe and Humboldt. They radically changed our ideas as the Fr... read more
Reportage by the courageous foreign correspondent, a former Moscow bureau chief for the Guardian before his expulsion from Russia in 2011, and author of Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russ... read more