1493: How Europe's Discovery of the Americas Revolutionized Trade, Ecology and Life on Earth
Charles Mann
Granta, PB, 9781847082459
Two hundred million years ago the earth consisted of a single vast continent, Pangea, surrounded by a great planetary sea. Continental drift tore apart Pangaea, and for millennia the hemispheres were separate, evolving almost entirely different suites of plants and animals. Columbus's arrival in the Americas brought together these long-separate worlds. Many historians believe that this collision of ecosystems and cultures ... More/Buy
The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War
Peter Englund
Profile Books, PB, 9781846683435
There are many books on the First World War, but award-winning and bestselling historian Peter Englund takes a daring and stunning new approach. Describing the experiences of twenty ordinary people from around the world, all now unknown, he explores the everyday aspects of war: not only the tragedy and horror, but also the absurdity, monotony and even beauty. Two of these ... More/Buy
Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present
Cynthia Stokes Brown
New Press, PB, 9781595588487
An epic for our time, Big History begins when the universe is no more than a single point the size of an atom, squeezed together in unimaginable density, and ends with a twenty-first-century planet inhabited by 6.1 billion people. It's a story that takes in prehistoric geology, human evolution, the agrarian age, the Black Death, the voyages of Columbus, the industrial ... More/Buy
Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper
Richard Smyth
Souvenir Press, HB, 9780285641143
Humans are, along with other primates, the only animals to wipe their bottoms after defecating. Richard Smyth provides the definitive history of how we have wiped over the centuries. From the Romans and ancient China to the modern day, drawing on literature from Rabelais and Jonathan Swift to the story of Myleene Klass and Pope Benedict's toilet roll, Richard Smyth has ... More/Buy
The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork
Ben Kafka
Zone Books, HB, 9781935408260
In The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka offers a critical history and theory of one of the most ubiquitous, least understood forms of media: paperwork. States rely on records to tax and spend, protect and serve, discipline and punish. But time and again, this paperwork proves to be unreliable. Examining episodes that range from the story of a clerk who lost ... More/Buy
Destiny in the Desert: The Story Behind El Alamein - The Battle That Turned the Tide
Jonathan Dimbleby
Profile Books, HB, 9781846684449
It was the British victory at the Battle of El Alamein in November 1942 that inspired one of Churchill's most famous aphorisms: 'This is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning'. And yet the true significance of this iconic episode remains unrecognised. In this thrilling historical account, ... More/Buy
The Famine Plot: England's Role in Ireland`s Greatest Tragedy
Tim Pat Coogan
Palgrave, HB, 9780230109520
The Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration in Ireland. Between 1845 and 1852 the island's population dropped by 2.5 million - a full quarter of its citizens - and its legacy continues to be felt. For both the native Irish and those in the resulting diaspora, the famine entered folk memory and became a rallying point ... More/Buy
Fashioning History: Current Practices and Principles
Robert F Berkhofer
Palgrave, PB, 9781137270283
Historians in the early twenty-first century must reconcile long-standing approaches to evidence and narrative with the challenges posed by postmodern criticism, the explosion of historical sources and interpretations on the Internet, and the popularity of histories provided in movies and on television. Fashioning History is the first book to develop and apply the same methods of source analysis and principles of ... More/Buy
Franco's Friends: How British Intelligence Helped Bring Franco to Power in Spain
Peter Day
Biteback Press, PB, 9781849543613
Franco's Friends tells the little-known true story of how MI6 orchestrated the coup that brought General Franco to power in Spain in 1936, leading to the Spanish civil war and 40 years of right-wing dictatorship. It has long been known that a British plane took Franco from the Canaries to Morocco at the start of his coup. What is not known ... More/Buy
From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia
Pankaj Mishra
Allen Lane, PB, 9780241954676
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, burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a new way of thinking ... More/Buy
The Gothic King: A Biography of Henry III
John Paul Davis
Peter Owen Publishers, PB, 9780720614800
Henry III was the son and successor of Bad King John, reigning for 56 years from 1216 - the first child king in England for 200 years. England went on to prosper during his reign and his greatest monument is Westminster Abbey, which he made the seat of his government - indeed, Henry III was the first English King to call ... More/Buy
Hiroshima Nagasaki
Paul Ham
Harper Collins, PB, 9780732288464
We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. President Harry Truman The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 100,000 instantly, mostly women, children and the elderly. Many hundreds of thousands more succumbed to their horrific injuries later, or slowly perished of radiation-related sickness. Yet the bombs were our least abhorrent choice, American ... More/Buy
A History of the World in Twelve Maps
Jerry Brotton
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846140990
In this scintillating book, Jerry Brotton examines the significance of twelve world maps drawn from global history - from the mystical representations of ancient history to the satellite-derived imagery of today. He vividly recreates the environments and circumstances in which each of the maps was made, showing how each conveys a highly individual view of the world - the Jerusalem-centred Christian ... More/Buy
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard
Macmillan, PB, 9781447234166
More than a million readers have thrilled to Bill O'Reilly's Killing Lincoln, the page-turning work of nonfiction about the shocking assassination that changed the course of American history. Now the anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts in gripping detail the brutal murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. In January 1961, as the Cold War escalates, John F. Kennedy struggles to contain the ... More/Buy
Leningrad Symphony: Terrorised by Stalin, Beseiged by Hitler, Immortalised by Shostakovich
Brian Moynahan
Quercus, PB, 9780857383013
In Leningrad Symphony, Brian Moynahan sets the composition of Shostakovich's most famous work against the tragic canvas of the siege itself and the years of repression and terror that preceded it. Drawing on extensive primary research in archives as well as personal letters and diaries, he vividly tells the story of the cruelties heaped by the twin monsters of the 20th ... More/Buy
LIFE With the Beatles: Inside Beatlemania, by their Official Photographer Robert Whitaker
Editors of Life
Grand Central Publishing, HB, 9781603202312
In the mid-1960s, when so much was happening in the world and the volume everywhere seemed dialed up to 11, the Beatles were the biggest thing on the planet. Their fans screamed from the fences as the Fab Four walked across the airport tarmac or into a vast stadium. They wanted to touch the Beatles. They wanted to know the Beatles. ... More/Buy
On the Map: Why the World Looks the Way It Does
Simon Garfield
Profile Books, HB, 9781846685095
Maps have the most amazing stories - and Simon Garfield is the perfect author to tell them. This is a book that will inspire mapophiles but engage even those of us who stare blankly at an OS pathfinder's hieroglyphs. Just as Garfield found the magic in fonts, here he creates compelling narratives on everything from the challenge of mapping the oceans ... More/Buy
Paper: An Elegy
Ian Sansom
Fourth Estate, PB, 9780007480265
The history of civilization is bound up with - and bound in - the history of paper. Paper is the technology through which and with which we make sense of the world: knowledge and information is arranged in words, images and numbers on paper; values and ideas are exchanged and transmitted by paper. The making of paper, the trade in it, ... More/Buy
The Secret Listeners: How the Wartime Y Service Intercepted the Secret German Codes for Bletchley Park
Sinclair McKay
Aurum Press, PB, 9781781310397
Before Bletchley Park could break the German war machine's code, its daily military communications had to be monitored and recorded by 'the Listening Service', the wartime department whose bases moved with every theatre of war (Cairo, Malta, Gibraltar, Iraq, Cyprus) as well as having listening stations along the eastern coast of Britain to intercept radio traffic in the European theatre. This ... More/Buy
Strong in the Rain: Surviving Japans Earthquake Tsunami and Fukushima NuclearDisaster
Lucy Birmingham, David McNeill
Palgrave, HB, 9780230341869
Blending history, science, and gripping storytelling, Strong in the Rain brings the 9.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Japan in 2011 and its immediate aftermath to life through the eyes of the men and women who experienced it. A beautifully written, moving account of how the Japanese endured the earthquake's horrific ... More/Buy
Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World
Steven Mithen
W & N Non Fiction, HB, 9780297864790
The planet faces a 21st global water crisis - but to what extent is this really new? Past societies and ancient civilisations have always faced climate change and been dependent on their ability to harness and manage a water supply. This has often been a key driver of historical change leading to some of the most remarkable engineering projects of the ... More/Buy
Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
John Darwin
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846140884
The enormous influence of the British Empire cannot be escaped. It has shaped the world in countless ways, repopulating continents, carving out nations, imposing its language, technology and values. For perhaps two centuries its existence, expansion, and final collapse could be seen as the single largest determinant of historical events. Now that it has gone, it seems to us baffling that ... More/Buy
The Untold History of the United States
Oliver Stone, Peter Kuznick
Ebury Press, PB, 9780091949303
An undertaking that Oliver Stone sees as his greatest achievement so far, The Untold History of the United States is a monumental history of the last 100 years of American Imperialism and the national security state, from the late nineteenth century through to the Obama administration. It uses freshly uncovered archives and newly declassified material to tell the 'untold history' of ... More/Buy
The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
Stephen Alford
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846142604
Elizabeth I was a ruler who radiated a sense of power and purpose. Her long and successful reign was the apotheosis of the Tudor dynasty. Her subjects themselves felt that they were living in exceptional times and her reign has always been remembered as an age of unique wealth, confidence and adventure. Across much of Europe, however, Elizabeth was viewed very ... More/Buy