Showing titles in Great Britain

On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Christopher’s epic sea voyage had spanned from Japan, via the Philippines, New Spain (Mexico), Java and Southern Africa. On the way, he had already become the first recorded Japanese person in North America. Now Christopher was the first ever Japanese visitor to England, and no other would leave such a legacy for centuries to come.

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. Under Edward Heath, the optimism of the '60s had become a distant memory. Now the headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation. As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid the gloom, glittered a creativity and cultural dynamism that would influence our lives long after the nightmarish '70s had been forgotten.

Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise.

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today, we must look closely at the way it ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt. In this paradigm-altering book, acclaimed historian and professor Kris Manjapra identifies five types of emancipations across the globe.

Alice Spencer was born in 1560 to a family on the rise. Her grandfather had amassed a sizeable estate of fertile grazing land and made a small fortune in sheep farming, allowing him to purchase a simple but distinguished manor house called Althorp. With her sizable dowry, Alice married the heir to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in the country, eventually becoming the Countess of Derby. Though she enjoyed modest renown, it wasn’t until her husband’s sudden death that Alice and her family’s future changed forever.

With his tumultuous love life, relentless pursuit of a male heir, and drastic religious transformation, England's King Henry VIII's life sounds more like reality television than history. He was a man of fascinating contradictions. What could have caused his incredible paradoxes? Could there be a simple medical explanation for the king's descent into tyranny? Where do the answers lie? Blood will tell.

Captain Kidd has gone down in history as America's most ruthless buccaneer. However, Captain William Kidd was no career cut-throat; he was a tough, successful New York sea captain who was hired to chase pirates. Across the oceans of the world, the pirate hunter, Kidd, pursued the pirate, Culliford. One man would hang in the harbor; the other would walk away with the treasure. The Pirate Hunter is both a masterpiece of historical detective work and a page-turner.

Nazi Germany expected its airborne attack on Crete in 1941 to be a textbook victory based on tactical surprise. Little did they know that the British, using Ultra intercepts, had already laid a careful trap. It should have been the first German defeat of the war, but a fatal misunderstanding turned the battle around.

Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd’s History of England to a triumphant close. Ackroyd takes listeners from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the 20th century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almost five decades.

This biography of Abraham Lincoln was written by Lincoln's White House secretary. Nicolay was involved in Lincoln's most intimate personal affairs during the Civil War and became one of the president's most trusted aides. On a day-to-day basis, he and the president's assistant secretary, John M. Hay, were responsible for receiving and screening visitors, writing and editing letters, and delivering and receiving messages, among other duties.

George Rogers Clark (1752-1818) led four victorious campaigns against the Indians and British in the Ohio Valley during the American Revolution, but his most astonishing coup was recapturing Fort Sackville in 1779 when he was only 26. For 18 days, in the dead of winter, Clark and his troops marched through bone-chilling nights to reach the fort. With a deft mix of guile and violence, Clark led his men to triumph without losing a single soldier.

Beginning with their introduction in the 11th century, and ending with their widespread abandonment in the 17th, Marc Morris explores many of the country's most famous castles, as well as some spectacular lesser-known examples. At times this is an epic tale, driven by characters like William the Conqueror, King John, and Edward I, full of sieges and conquest on an awesome scale.

Timothy West reads the third and concluding volume of award-winning historian Simon Schama's compelling chronicle of the British Isles. Here he illuminates the period from 1776 to 2000 through a variety of historical themes, including Victorian advances in technology and industry, women's increasing role in society, and the burgeoning British Empire which promised civilisation and material betterment for all.

Challenging conventional wisdom about where power is held on a global scale, Stern complicates the supposedly firm distinction between private enterprise and the state, offering a new history of the British Empire, as well as a new history of the corporation.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.

When Queen Elizabeth was excommunicated by the Pope in 1570, she found herself in an awkward predicament. Now England's key markets would be closed to her Protestant merchants. To complicate matters, the staunchly Catholic king of Spain was determined to destroy her, bolstered by the gold pouring in from the New World. In a bold decision with far-reaching consequences, Elizabeth set her sights on the East.

Nothing drove Henry VIII, England's wealthiest and most powerful king, more than producing a legitimate male heir and perpetuating his dynasty. To that end he married six wives, became the subject of the most notorious divorce case of the sixteenth century, and broke with the Pope, all in an age of international competition and warfare, social unrest and growing religious intolerance and discord.

Away from the frontlines of World War II, in towns and villages across Great Britain, ordinary women were playing a vital role in their country's war effort. As members of the Women's Institute, an organization with a presence in a third of Britain's villages, they ran canteens and knitted garments for troops, collected tons of rosehips and other herbs to replace medicines that couldn't be imported, and advised the government on issues ranging from evacuee housing to children's health to postwar reconstruction. But they are best known for making jam.

In 1787, William Bligh, commander of the Bounty, sailed under Captain Cook on a voyage to Tahiti to collect plants of the breadfruit tree, with a view to acclimatizing the species to the West Indies. During their six-month stay on the island, his men became completely demoralized, and on the return voyage mutinied. Yet a resentful crew, coupled with ravaging storms and ruthless savages, proved to be merely stages leading up to the anxiety-charged ordeal to come.

Often the colourful kings and queens of England seem like mere caricature, while less familiar rulers like William IV or Henry VI have faded into the shadows of history. Carolly Erickson's sensitive and revealing portrayals bring new life to the big names, and light up some of our most neglected but intriguing royals. Here is the puny Charles I, nervous, tense and socially awkward, the frail slight Richard II, melancholic and sad, and the homosexual James I with his handsome favourites.