Modern History (18th–20th Century) Books

A thought-provoking and original reassessment of World War II, from Britain’s leading military historian A New York Times bestsellerRichard Overy sets out in Blood and Ruins to recast the way in which we view the Second World War …

Viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, the Victorian period was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire or burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, …

The Gaza Strip is one of the most widely-reported on regions in the worldyet misinformation about its history and its people abound. In this vital book, historian Anne Irfan explains Gaza's outsized political significance through …

From the bestselling author Linden MacIntyre comes an engrossing exploration of one of the most significant, but nearly unknown figures of the Irish War of Independence, Sir Hugh Tudor. Appointed by Winston Churchill to lead the R…

Over the last half century, sub-Saharan Africa has not had one history, but many. Histories that have intertwined, converged and diverged. They have involved a continuing process of decolonization and state-building, conflict, eco…

The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy.Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines,…

From the Sunday Times-bestselling Patrick Bishop comes a heart-stopping countdown narrative recreating the liberation of Paris in 1944, one of the great and most dramatic hinge moments of WW2. When the Germans marched in and the l…

On the 80th anniversary of the devastating bombing of Hiroshima, the stories of the hibakusha are more important than ever. The stories of hibakusha - Japanese for atomic bomb survivors - lie at the heart of this compelling minute…

The United States denies having dreams of empire. We know America has spread its money, language and culture across the world, but we still think of it as a contained territory, framed by Canada above, Mexico below, and oceans eit…

An original history of Russia's thousand-year past, tracing the forces and the myths that have shaped Putin's politics and rekindled the Cold War. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reshaped history. In the decades after the…

In this final work from renowned journalist Robert Fisk, he picks up reporting on the Middle East where his internationally bestselling The Great War of Civilisation left off. From the Arab uprisings and the Syrian civil war to Is…

In 1962, Edward Wong's father, disillusioned with Communism, fled China for Hong Kong and later the USA. From then on, he rarely spoke of his homeland, or his years crisscrossing the country in Mao's People's Liberation Army. Much…

‘The lips of the present give depth to history, and Fintan Drury certainly knows that there are several sides to every story. He rows the boat out – for some it will be a drowning experience, but for others it will be a pure lifeb…

A sweeping, original history of the Cold War, from an acclaimed historian of the USSRWhy did the Cold War erupt so soon after the Second World War? How did it escalate so rapidly, spanning five continents over six decades? And wha…

Napoleon began his military career as an artillery cadet and artillery played a fundamental part in all his great battles. Until the Napoleonic Wars artillery had been seen merely as a supporting arm to the infantry, but Napoleon …

On 24 February 2022, the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, armoured vehicles approached the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. It was the most direct way for them to reach the capital - and an e…

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTIONNamed a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times.Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly acciden…

The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and above all else integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women …

A fascinating new history of America, told through the stories of a diverse cast of ten extraordinary and often overlooked adventurers, from Sacagawea to Matthew Henson to Sally Ride, who pushed the boundaries of discovery and det…

By the time their obituary was being written in the late 1980s, Yuppies the elite, uber educated faction of the Baby Boom generation had become a cultural punchline. But amidst the Yuppies preoccupation with money, work, and the l…

A landmark new account of the single most important day of WW2, in the words of the people who lived it. On 6th June 1944, the Allied invasion began.For hours, wave after wave of soldiers, sailors, and airmen crossed the channel a…

At the height of WWI, history's most lethal influenza virus erupted in an army camp in Kansas, moved east with American troops, then exploded, killing as many as 100 million people worldwide. It killed more people in twenty-four m…

They certainly were not soldiers, yet they suddenly found themselves in uniform, in a foreign land. But, as locomotive drivers, track-workers, conductors, porters, signalmen and engine cleaners, they knew how to run trains.And the…

Described by Ulster Unionist leader James Craig as the ‘root of all evil’, the Boundary Commission that convened in 1924 was a symbol of hope for nationalist Ireland and fear for unionist Northern Ireland. Offered to Sinn Féin ple…

For nearly 60 years Mr George Lucas led a double life. A mild-mannered civil servant by day, by night he was a fixture of London's colourful underground gay scene - a twilight world of petty crime, louche pubs and public toilets. …

There are no such thing as an easy victory in war but after triumph in Tunisia, the sweeping success of the Sicilian invasion, and with the Italian surrender, the Allies were confident that they would be in Rome before Christmas 1…

Churchill. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2, each with their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare.But if we want to understand their military strategy, we must fi…

A gripping and authoritative account of the year that sealed the fate of the Nazis, from the bestselling historian. June 1944: In Operation Bagration, more than two million Red Army soldiers, facing 500,000 German soldiers, finall…

As the War of Independence began to rage in Ireland in 1920, the British, embarked on a major shake-up. They established publicity offices in Dublin to promote their version of events. In this fascinating book Michael B. Barry tel…

The brutal war launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in in response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or Operations Swords of Iron to give it its official name, was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-P…