Modern History (18th–20th Century) Books

From the great storyteller of Russia, a spellbinding account of the stories that have shaped the country's past - and how they can inform its present. No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. None has chan…

Through one woman's fight for justice, the award-winning author of East West Street exposes the shocking events that marked the 1965 establishment of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Written with Sands' characteristic expertise…

Winner of the UKs 2022 Costa Prize for Biography A portrait of one of the most enigmatic figures in the annals of white-collar crime. . . From the acclaimed author of A Very English Scandal, a thrilling and dramatic true-life acco…

A sweeping yet intimate narrative about the last hundred years of turbulent European history, as seen through one of Mitteleuropa’s greatest houses—and the lives of its occupants When Norman Eisen moved into the US ambassador’s re…

The thrilling story of two Cold War spies, CIA case officer Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko -- improbable friends at a time when they should have been anything but.In 1978, CIA maverick Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady …

On 22 June 1922, Sir Henry Wilson - the former head of the British army and one of those credited with winning the First World War - was shot and killed by two veterans of that war turned IRA members in what was the most significa…

March 1945. Allied troops are poised to cross the Rhine and sweep on into Germany.Victory is at last within their grasp. But if they believe this victory can be easily won, they face swift disillusionment. The final I00 days of th…

The gripping story of the tumultuous destruction of the Irish country house, spanning the revolutionary years of 1912 to 1923 During the Irish Revolution nearly three hundred country houses were burned to the ground. These "Big Ho…

A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II - and how the world allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Gunther Quandt - patriarch of …

Martin King has produced the definitive chronicle of the war that unshackled a continent and preserved freedom in the West.

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different Ger…

Though it remains by far the world's most famous mountain, in recent years Everest's reputation has changed radically, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high altitude trash…

What if you had a vision that something terrible was going to happen? A train crash, a department store fire, an assassination. What if you could share your vision, and prevent a disaster? In 1966, John Barker, a British psychia…

The reunification of Ireland, which in 1998 seemed to have been pushed over the far horizon as an aspiration, has returned with a vengeance.Brexit calls into question the British commitment to Northern Ireland and threatens its ec…

For decades the British and Irish had 'got used to' a situation without parallel in Europe: a cold, ferocious, persistent campaign of bombing and terror of extraordinary duration and inventiveness. At the heart of that campaign li…

For some 40 years the Islamic Republic has resisted widespread condemnation, sanctions, and sustained attacks by Iraq in an eight-year war. Many policy-makers today share a weary wish that Iran would somehow just disappear as a pr…

A suspense filled tale of murder on the American frontier-shedding new light on a family of serial killers in Kansas, whose horrifying crimes gripped the attention of a nation still reeling from war.  In 1873 the people of Labette…

In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Once a mont…

From bra burning and body hair to Beyonce and body positivity, feminism has come a long way. The illustrated story of the women's movement, Badly Behaved Women is a compelling and entertaining journey through the four waves of fem…

On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Mieville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history. In February of 1917 Russia was a backwards, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, af…

The Empire Must Die portrays the vivid drama of Russia's brief and exotic experiment with civil society before it was swept away by the despotism of the Communist Revolution. The window between two equally stifling autocracies - t…

EMPIRE explains why there are millions of Britons living worldwide. EMPIRE explains Brexit and the feeling that we are exceptional. EMPIRE explains our distrust of cleverness.EMPIRE explains Britain's particular brand of racism. S…

In August 1942, beleaguered Malta was within weeks of surrender to the Axis, because its 300,000 people could no longer be fed. Churchill made a personal decision that at all costs, the 'island fortress' must be saved. This was no…

Hidden deep in the Bavarian mountains lies the picturesque village of Oberstdorf - a place where for hundreds of years people lived simple lives while history was made elsewhere.Yet even this remote idyll could not escape the brut…

Flat, fertile, and fatally tempting to invaders, for centuries Ukraine was fought over by more powerful neighbours. Though its modern national movement dates back to the early nineteenth century, it did not win real independence u…

From rivals propelling each other forwards to friends combining their talents, it's clear: often two heads are better than one. How did William and Ellen Craft work together to pull off a perilous cross-country escape from slavery…

A dazzling short history of the Balkans from the Romans to the present, which provides vital historical and cultural background to contemporary Balkan politics. At the end of the twentieth century people spoke as if the Balkans ha…

The Lightning Warfare that changed history foreverIf Hitler had failed in his invasion of Western Europe in 1940 he could well have been assassinated by a group of his senior officers. But he decisively defeated the combined effor…

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 Sunday Times Top 10 bestseller on India's experience of British colonialism, by the internationally-acclaimed author and diplomat Shashi Tharoor'Tharoor's impassioned polemic slices straight to the heart of the darkness that d…