Modern History (18th–20th Century) Books

The history of the world's most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. As they signed NATO into being after World War II, its founders fervently believed that only if…

In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans tha…

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…

A landmark history of the postwar trials of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and their impact on the modern history of Asia and the world. In the aftermath of World War II, the victorious Allied powers turned to the question of h…

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…

The British empire was built on slavery, but it also pioneered abolition. It spread democracy, but it also seeded geopolitical instability.It devastated nature but it also gave birth to modern notions of environmentalism. In this …

Every war has its "bridge"--Old North Bridge at Concord, Burnside's Bridge at Antietam, the railway bridge over Burma's River Kwai, the bridge over Germany's Rhine River at Remagen, and the bridges over Korea's Toko Ri. In Vietna…

For nearly a century the two most powerful nations on earth, Victorian Britain and Tsarist Russia, fought a secret war in the lonely passes and deserts of Central Asia. Those engaged in this shadowy struggle called it 'The Great G…

After the Second World War, new international rules heralded an age of human rights and self-determination. Supported by Britain, these unprecedented changes sought to end the scourge of colonialism. But how committed was Britain?…

When Thomas Harding discovered that his mother's family had made money from plantations worked by enslaved people, what began as an interrogation into the choices of his ancestors soon became a quest to learn more about Britain's …

An intimate history of the most important month of the Second World War as experienced by those who lived through it, completely based on their diaries, letters and memoirs. At the beginning of November 1942, it looked as if the A…

The epic, harrowing and world-changing story – in words and colourized images – of global conflict from the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the obliteration of Hiroshima by the dropping of the first atom bomb. The…

An illuminating account of John F. Kennedy’s brief but transformative tenure in the White House, from acclaimed author and historian Mark K. Updegrove, head of the LBJ Foundation and presidential historian for ABC News.Nearly sixt…

The Bloody History of British Colonisation. For centuries, a small island nation cast a shadow across the world. The British Empire’s methods of expansion were often brutal, usually devastating. From Amritsar to Zululand, from the…

An indispensable guide to understanding the Israel–Palestine conflict, and how we might yet still find a way out of it. The devastation of 7 October 2023 and the horrors that followed astounded the world. But the Israel–Palestine …

Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasant’s Revolt was started and propelled by women, protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just th…

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense - economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand …

In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama took us from the dawn of mankind to the French and American Revolutions. Here, he picks up the thread again in the second instalment of his definitive account of mankind's emerge…

When the Germans marched in and the lamps went out in the City of Light the millions who loved Paris mourned. Liberation, four years later, triggered an explosion of joy and relief. It was the party of the century and everybody wh…

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…

A vivid re-creation of the D-Day invasion and its aftermath, told through detailed maps, authoritative text by a noted military historian and contemporary photographs. This powerful study chronicles the evolution of the invasion p…

The American West, 1860-1890: years of broken promises, disillusionment, war and massacre. Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos and ending with the massacre of Sioux at Wounded Knee, this extraordinary book tells how the Am…

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…

Acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author Craig Shirley delivers a compelling account of 1945, particularly the watershed events in the month of April, that details how America emerged from World War II as a leadin…

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…

April 12, 1945: After years of bloody conflict in Europe and the Pacific, America is stunned by news of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death. In an instant, Vice President Harry Truman, who has been kept out of war planning and…

Following victory in Sicily, while the central command planned the spring 1944 invasion of France, Allied troops crossed into southern Italy in September 1943, expecting to drive Axis forces north and liberate Rome by Christmas. I…

A New York Times bestseller, the incredible true story of a couple that escaped slavery in the South and eventually made their way to the UK, Africa and beyond. The remarkable true story of Ellen and William Craft, who escaped sl…

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…