European History Books

The sacrifices that enabled the Soviet Union to defeat Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-45 are sacrosanct. The foundation of their eventual victory was laid during the battle for the city of Stalingrad, resting on the …

It's summer, 1962, and Joachim Rudolph, a student, is digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall.Waiting on the other side in East Berlin - dozens of men, women and children; all willing to risk everything to escape. From the award-wi…

In March 1930, after the collapse of the coalition that had ruled Germany since 1928, President Hindenburg asked Heinrich Bruning, bespectacled and scholarly leader of the Catholic Centre Party, to form a government. Some three ye…

The Riviera Set is the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped and politicked at the Chateau de l'Horizon near Cannes, over the course of forty years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fas…

After the overwhelming horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, described by Ian Kershaw in his previous book as being ‘to Hell and back,’ the years from 1950 to 2017 brought peace and relative prosperity to most of Eur…

Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on 9 August, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never will be again. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun t…

"Thrillingly tells the story of an Eastern European Jews flight from the Holocaust and the years he spent fighting in the French underground. USA Today An American Library in Paris Book Award "Coups de Coeur" Selection The Art of …

From the author of the bestselling phenomenon The Hare with Amber Eyes As you may have guessed by now, I am not in your house by accident. I know your street rather well. The Camondos lived just a few doors away from Edmund de Waa…

On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefighters and those living in the area …

From a preeminent scholar of Eastern Europe and the prize-winning author of Chernobyl, the essential history of Russian imperialismIn 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine. While the world watched…

Located at the western edge of the Eurasian steppe, Ukraine has long been the meeting place of empires - Roman to Ottoman, Habsburg to Russian - and they all left their imprint on the landscape, the language and the people living …

We like to think we know the story of how Britain went to war with Germany in 1939, but there is one chapter that has never been told. In the early 1930s, a group of young, queer British MPs visited Berlin on a series of trips tha…

The largest military operation in history. The turning point of the Second World War. The most important year of the twentieth century. Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941, aimed at nothing less than a w…

Germany, 1945: a country in ruins. Cities have been reduced to rubble and more than half of the population are where they do not belong or do not want to be. How can a functioning society ever emerge from this chaos?In bombed-out …

The 'Viking Age' is traditionally held to begin in June 793 when Scandinavian raiders attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria, and to end in September 1066, when King Harald Hardrada of Norway died leading the charge …

The first single-volume biography of Berlin, one of the world's great cities - told via twenty-one portraits, from medieval times to the twenty-first century. A city devastated by Allied bombs, divided by a Wall, then reunited and…

A gripping and shocking insight into Russia's most influential oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, from New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires. To understand the state of Russia to…

A chilling and revelatory expose of the KGB's renaissance, Putin's rise to power, and how Russian black cash is subverting the world. In Putin's People, former Moscow correspondent and investigative journalist Catherine Belton rev…

The first major history of the International Brigades: a tale of blood, ideals and tragedy in the fight against fascism.  The Spanish Civil War was the first armed battle in the fight against fascism, and a rallying cry for a gene…

Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness. Compared to the glittering empires of Byzantium or Islam, the splintered kingdoms on the edge of the…

Eric Hobsbawm traces with brilliant anlytical clarity the transformation brought about in evry sphere of European life by the Dual revolution - the 1789 French revolution and the Industrial Revolution that originated in Britain. T…

Two tyrants. Each responsible for the death of millions. This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two leaders during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union f…

A narrative history, cinematic in scope, of a process that was taking shape in the winter of 1933 as domestic passions around the world colluded to drive governments towards a war few of them wanted and none of them could control.…

At the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left her peo…

A FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020. In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people from across the political spectrum in Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, …

A Daily Telegraph History Book of the Year 'An astonishing story... brilliantly told' Antony Beevor On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes mee…

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Hypnotic, shocking and unputdownable' JOHN LE CARRE 'Remarkable' THE SUNDAY TIMES 'Breathtaking, gripping, shattering' ELIF SHAFAK 'A taut and finely crafted factual thriller' OBSERVER 'A triumph of re…

'Paris is the World, the rest of the Earth is nothing but its suburbs' - Marivaux In this intelligently-written and supremely entertaining new history, Colin Jones seeks to give a sense of the city of Paris as it was lived in and …

WINNER of the Opzij Literature Prize 2019! During the Second World War two Jewish sisters - Janny and Lien Brilleslijper - run one of the largest hideaways in The Netherlands: The High Nest, a villa in The Gooi area. While the las…

SHORTLISTED FOR THE STANFORD DOLMAN TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD*The Rhine is one of the world's greatest rivers. Once forming the outer frontier of the Roman Empire, it flows 800 miles from the social democratic playground of th…