A special bundle of one fiction and one non-fiction title from betselling historian Alison Weir, both centred around Elizabeth I: The Lady Elizabeth: England, 1536. Home to the greatest, most glittering court in English history. But beneath the dazzling façade lies treachery... Elizabeth Tudor is daughter to Henry VIII, the most powerful king England has ever known. She is destined...

Culloden was the last battle on British soil. It marked the end of clan culture and was the harbinger of the Highland Clearances. It ensured the inevitability of the American Revolution and increased the outpouring of Scots across the globe. It is the only battle that British Army regiments are not permitted to include in their battle honours; the only...

Black Seais a homage to an ocean and its shores, from the earliest times to the present. It explores the culture, history and politics of the volatile region which surrounds the Black Sea. Ascherson recalls the world of Herodotus and Aeschylus; Ovid's place of exile on what is now the coast of Romania; the decline and fall of Byzantium; the...

In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of two million years of human history using one hundred objects selected from the Museum's vast and renowned collection. Presented by the British Museum's Director Neil MacGregor, each episode focuses on a single object - from a Stone Age tool to a solar-powered...

Proud, greedy, corrupt and driven by overwhelming personal ambition. Such is the traditional image of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop if Tournai and Papal Legate. It is an image which Peter Gwyn examines, challenges and decisively overturns in this remarkable book. From exceedingly humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a pinnacle...

In 1913, when she was 54 years old, Daisy Bates went to live in the deserts of South Australia. And there she stayed, with occasional interruptions, for almost 30 years. In Daisy Bates in the Desert Julia Blackburn explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Ms Bates says she was most happy. She fuses her own imagination and experience with...

Irène Némirovsky's own life was as dramatic as any fiction. Few writers enjoy posthumous success as astonishing as hers after the international triumph of Suite Française. She was born in 1903 in Kiev to a well-off Jewish family. They fled the Russian revolution, eventually settling in France where, with the publication of David Golder in 1929 - delivered to a...

From the brilliant summer nonchalance of 1940 to the grim, anonymous exhaustion of the bomber crews delivering the infernos of Hamburg and Dresden. All the great dramas of the air war are here, described by the men in the British and Commonwealth Air Forces who did the fighting. We accompany them in the desperate days of the fall of France;...

In this monumental volume, Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer draw upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and hundreds of ordinary people who took part in the struggle, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it. ...

2014 is the 100-year-anniversary of the panama canal: one of the most extraordinary engineering feats in world history. Hell's Gorge traces a heroic dream that spanned four centuries: to build a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.The human cost was immense: in appalling working conditions and amid epidemics of fever, tens of thousands perished fighting the jungle, swamps and...

Few books have captured the atmosphere of daily medieval life as well or as movingly as A Fool and His Money. Rodez, in southern France, was divided for centuries by a feud between two masters. This partitioned town thus acquired two distinct cultures. The story focuses on the strange case of Peyre Marques, a merchant who forgets where he has...

Southern Afghanistan in the early 1990s was in even greater chaos than it is now. The Russians, who had occupied the country throughout the 1980s, were long gone. The disparate ethnic and religious leaders who had united to eject the invaders - the famous mujaheddin - were at each others' throats. For the rural poor of Kandahar province, life was...

If you love Georgette Heyer, 'the queen of Regency romance', this is a must-read: the definitive guide to the sparkling world of Georgette Heyer's celebrated novels, which are currently being reissued. A bestselling novelist since 1921, Georgette Heyer is known across the world for her historical romances set in Regency England. Millions of readers love the outrageous lifestyle, fashion and...

'A skilful and lucid study ... Hume's History has been unjustly neglected at the expense of his philosophy. Phillipson's book should help redress the balance' London Review of Books 'For pray, what is the End of Man? Is he created for Happiness or for Virtue? For this Life or for the next? For himself or for his Maker?' A giant...

Globalisation has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction...