European History Books

1930s Europe - as the Roaring Twenties wind down and the world rumbles towards war, the great minds of the time have other concerns. Jean-Paul Sartre waits anxiously in a Parisian café for his first date with no-show Simone de Bea…

Sunday Times Bestselling author of The Traitor of Colditz Robert Verkaik reveals the incredible never-before-told story of the role played by the Cambridge Spies in the British defeat at Arnhem. The end of the Second World War is …

Kurt Schindler was an impossible man. His daughter Meriel spent her adult life trying to keep him at bay. Kurt had made extravagant claims about their family history. Were they really related to Franz Kafka and Oscar Schindler, of…

DURING THE AGE OF DISCOVERY, in the autumn of 1550, a little-known public servant in the Venetian government, Giovambattista Ramusio, anonymously published Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). Containing a wealth of …

An essential guide to one of the world’s most remarkable, and often misunderstood, cities by the author of Why the Dutch Are Different. When Ben Coates injures his leg and needs to rebuild his strength by walking, he finds himself…

A gripping reconstruction of the daring escape to freedom of hundreds of East Germans in the summer of 1989 - and how it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In August 1989, a group of activists did the unthinkable: they entered t…

In a tour de force of investigative journalism, White Terror tells for the first time the story of the National Socialist Underground in Germany – in an engrossing global story that examines violence, modern racism and national tr…

An exhilarating, immersive journey into the Exclusion Zone of Chornobyl with the disaffected adventurers who illegally stalk its ruins Amidst the toxic desolation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, a subculture has sprung up. They c…

From the bestselling author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of UkraineThe extraordinary story of the West's intervention into the Russian Civil WarIn the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France…

Drawing on a wealth of unexplored material - available for the first time since the collapse of the former Soviet Union - Robert Service's biography of Stalin is the most authoritative yet published. It concentrates not simply on …

Walking along the crumbling defensive walls of Istanbul and talking to those he passes, Alexander Christie-Miller finds a distillation of the country’s history, a mirror of its present, and a shadow of its future. Caught between t…

Why have Western societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian become so secular? Looking to the feelings and faith of ordinary people, the award-winning author of Protestants Alec Ryrie offers a bold new history of atheism. W…

Its name means 'centre of the world', and since the dawn of history the Mediterranean Sea has formed the shared horizon of innumerable cultures. Here, history has blurred with legend. The glittering surface of the sea conceals the…

Revolutionary practitioner, theorist, factional chief, sparkling writer, ‘ladies’ man’ (e.g., his affair with Frieda Kahlo), icon of the Revolution, anti-Jewish Jew, philosopher of everyday life, grand seigneur of his household, f…

April 1944. Nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler became two of the very first Jews to successfully escape Auschwitz. Evading the thousands of SS men hunting them, Vrba and Wetzler made the perilous journey …

No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin.Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to…

On 29 September 1934, at the German Embassy office in London, Christabel Bielenberg officially became a German citizen. Having met her German husband Peter two years prior, Christabel decided to renounce her British citizenship, p…

Less than a month after it marched into France in summer 1870, the Prussian army had devastated its opponents, captured Napoleon III and wrecked all assumptions about Europe's pecking order. Other countries looked on in helpless a…

Sinclair McKay's portrait of Berlin from 1919 forward explores the city's broad human history, from the end of the Great War to the Blockade, rise of the Wall, and beyond.Sinclair McKay's Berlin begins by taking readers back to 19…

When Vladimir Putin, an unimportant, low-level KGB operative, was rushed to power by a group of Oligarchs in 1999, he was a man without a history. Within a few brief years, Putin had dismantled the country's media, wrested control…

Central Europe is not just a space on a map but also a region of shared experience - of mutual borrowings, impositions and misapprehensions. From the Roman Empire onwards, it has been the target of invasion from the east.In the Mi…

There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. As if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent…

'Spain is different,' proclaimed the Franco regime in the 1940s, keen to attract foreign tourists. For the most part, the world has agreed. From the end of its 'glorious empire' in 1898 to the dazzling World Cup victory in 2010, t…

Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered. Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and…

Through the lives of major figures from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, including Copernicus, Gutenberg, Luther, Catherine de Medici, Rabelais, van Eyck and Shakespeare, Paul Strathern tells the fascinating story of th…

An epic history of the ‘other’ Europe, a place of conflict and coexistence, of faith and folklore. ‘Do not rush to bid farewell to eastern Europe until reading this book. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this very …

Kersten presented himself after the war as a resistance hero who convinced Himmler to save countless people from mass murder. Kawashima Yoshiko, a gender fluid Manchu princess, spied for the Japanese secret police in China, and wa…

A sweeping history of occupation and resistance in war-torn Europe, from the acclaimed author of The Eagle Unbowed. Across the whole of Nazi-ruled Europe the experience of occupation was sharply varied. Some countries - such as De…

In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich set out to write her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from of…

Stalin's only difference from Hitler, he argues, was that he was a successful murderous predator. With Hitler dead and the Third Reich in ruins, Stalin created an immense new Communist empire. Among his holdings were Czechoslovaki…