History

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…

9.07 a.m., April 12, 1961. A top-secret rocket site in the USSR. A young Russian sits inside a tiny capsule on top of the Soviet Union's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile - originally designed to carry a nuclear war…

A candid, visceral, and incredibly entertaining account of what it's like to live in one of the most extreme environments in the world. Imagine a world without natural light, where you can barely stand up straight for fear of knoc…

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction Why do leaders who vow 'never again' repeatedly fail to prevent genocide? In her award-winning modern classic, Samantha Power presents a deeply researched and powerfully argued answer t…

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 NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022  An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Levi…

Dan Jones, best-selling chronicler of the Middle Ages, turns his attention to the history of the Crusades - the sequence of religious wars fought between the late eleventh century and late medieval periods, in which armies from Eu…

From the moment towns and cities arose, the struggle for land, resources and power has turned to violence. Almost from the start, maps have been an essential part of planning and waging war. History of War in Maps gives a unique v…

Here is the story of Ireland's Civil War in colour - a defining moment in Irish history brought to life for the first time in hand-coloured photographs. The events of 1922-1923 are revealed using photographs painstakingly hand-col…

THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF THE MOST INFAMOUS PRISON IN HISTORY -- FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SAS: ROGUE HEROES AND THE SPY AND THE TRAITORIn a forbidding Gothic castle on a hilltop in the heart of Nazi Germany, an unlikely b…

With characteristic urbanity and wit, lifelong Francophile John Julius Norwich recounts two millennia of French history, from Vercingetorix‘s last stand against Caesar, via the folies de grandeur of Louis XIV and Napoleon, to the …

Revolutions hold a distinct place in the popular imagination. This may be because their rhetoric, such as 'liberty, fraternity, equality', articulates aspirations with which we identify; or because we are shocked by the destructiv…

London, Paris and New York in the eighteenth century, as today, were places where political authority, commerce and money, art and intellectual life intersected. They straddled an Atlantic world where ships powered by nothing more…

Scientifica Historica is an illustrated, accessible review of those books that marked the development of science from ancient civilizations to the new millennium. The book is divided into five eras and explores the leading scienti…

The encyclopaedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, adults cleared their shelves in the belief that wisdom was now effortlessly accessible in their livi…

The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day: Empire of Democracy is the story for those asking how we got to where we are. In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times,…

The women who shaped and were erased from our history. The Forgotten Women series will uncover the lost histories of the influential women who have refused over hundreds of years to accept the hand they've been dealt and, as a res…

A user's guide to the future from the algorithms in DNA to why time is like a cocktail glass, interstellar migrations, transhumanism, the fate of the galaxy, and the last black holeEvery second of our lives - whether we're looking…

When Catherine Corless began researching the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway in 2010, she could not have known where her interest in local history would lead her. Uncovering no less than 796 missing burial records of children …

The Guardians: 100 Years of An Garda Siochana, 1922-2022 takes readers from the first generation of the Civic Guard/Garda Siochana, through the 1950s and 1960s, and up to the modern policing service provided by An Garda Siochana i…