The streets and squares of the West End of London, some of the most famous in the world, have been home to poets and pop stars, world-renowned artists and revolutionary anarchists. They have been a playground of gangsters and gamblers, secret agents and religious visionaries. The exploits of these and many other colourful characters are recounted in Ed Glinert's latest...

A trusted member of the Byzantine establishment, Procopius was the Empire's official chronicler, and his History of the Wars of Justinian proclaimed the strength and wisdom of the Emperor's reign. Yet all the while the dutiful scribe was working on a very different - and dangerous - history to be published only once its author was safely in his grave....

An electrifying narrative history of the Mediterranean from Ancient Egypt to 1919, from the bestselling author of The Popes and Sicily: A Short History The Mediterranean has nurtured three of the most dazzling civilisations of antiquity, witnessed the growth of three of our greatest religions and links three of the world's six continents. John Julius Norwich has visited every country...

An awful lot has happened since that bright, fateful May morning in 1997 when New Labour swept to power. Things, we were told, Could Only Get Better. Instead, things took a turn for the worse... To console Tony Blair as he embarks on his long, grinning journey into oblivion, Craig Brown has packed a special time-capsule of Britain during the...

Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine was one of the leading personalities of the Middle Ages and also one of the most controversial. She was beautiful, intelligent and wilful, and in her lifetime there were rumours about her that were not without substance. She had been reared in a relaxed and licentious court where the arts of the troubadours flourished, and was...

Henry and Miriam were raised in East London, but their families had emigrated from Eastern Europe, and they were not to end their lives in the East End. From a market stall on Petticoat Lane, their story led - from forays into the West End to the success of Henry's underwear business and a remarkable friendship with his upper-class mentor...

Ireland's bestselling popular historian tells the story of contemporary Ireland - controversial, authoritative and highly readable. Tim Pat Coogan's biographies of Michael Collins and DeValera and his studies of the IRA, the Troubles and the Irish Diaspora have transformed our understanding of contemporary Ireland, and all have been massive bestsellers. Now he has produced a major history of Ireland in...

Was medieval England full of knights on horseback rescuing fainting damsels in distress? Were the Middle Ages mired in superstition and ignorance? Why does nobody ever mention King Louis the First and Last? And, of course, those key questions: which monks were forbidden the delights of donning underpants... and did outlaws never wear trousers? Terry Jones and Alan Ereira are...

'We thought we had lived through the terror of a nuclear war, but something far more ominous was brewing in the Soviet Union - a biological Armageddon from which no one would escape. Dr Alibek has emerged from the world's deadliest labs to tell a story that is as important as it is chilling. Sometimes the truth is far worse...

Sweet Water and Bitter is the extraordinary sequel to Britain's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The last legal British slave ship left Africa that year, but other countries and illegal slavers continued to trade. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, British diplomats negotiated anti-slave-trade treaties and a 'Preventive Squadron' was formed to cruise the West African coast....

Martin Amis first wrote about September 11 a week later in a piece for The Guardian beginning, 'It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.' He has kept returning to September 11, in essays and reviews, and in two remarkable short stories, 'In the Palace of the...

In 1989, Tim Moore moved into the last house in Chiswick with an outside toilet. Intrigued by a subsequent encounter with an elderly former resident, he finds himself inspired to travel back to the land before now, experiencing the hardships and pleasures enjoyed and endured by Moores gone by. The journey that follows takes him through the world of historical...

EMPTY CRADLES is a powerful testament to an ordinary woman's astonishing dedication, compassion and stubborn courage. In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker and mother of two, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret Humphreys...

An award-winning epic on the birth of Australia In 1787, the twenty-eighth year of the reign of King George III, the British Government sent a fleet to colonise Australia. Documenting the brutal transportation of men, women and children out of Georgian Britain into a horrific penal system which was to be the precursor to the Gulag and was the origin...

Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is a journey from London to Asia by train. Winner of the Stanford Dolman Lifetime Contribution to Travel Writing Award 2020 Thirty years ago Paul Theroux left London and travelled across Asia and back again by train. His account of the journey - The Great Railway Bazaar - was a landmark book...