The Edwardian Turn of Mind brilliantly evokes the cultural temper of an age. The years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a turbulent and dramatic struggle between the old and the new. Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and...

Garrett Mattingly's thrilling narrative sets out the background of the sixteenth-century European intrigue and religious unrest that gave rise to one of the world's most famous maritime crusades and the naval battles that decided its fate. In putting the naval campaign of 1588 back into the context of the first great international crisis of modern history, Mattingly builds up, like...

This is a life raft for anyone who finds themselves floundering amidst a sea of ten-second soundbites, wishing they had a better grasp of complexities of world politics and global issues. Clear, concise languagesets the record straight on a diverse range of topics as Lawrence Potter presents answers to fifty-seven questions about the world we live in, stretching from What...

What if Britain had stayed out of the First World War? What if Germany had won the Second? How would England look if there had been no Cromwell? What would the world be like if Communism had never collapsed? And what if John F. Kennedy had lived? In this acclaimed book, leading historians from Andrew Roberts to Michael Burleigh explore...

At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the Northern Hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Great Lakes, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere...

‘I have put my genius into my life but only my talent into my work’. So said Oscar Wilde of his remarkable life – a life more complex, more erotic, more troubled and more triumphant than any of his contemporaries ever knew or suspected. Neil McKenna’s The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde charts fully for the first time Oscar’s astonishing...

'Woman, who is equal to the moon in the flower of youth, Is equal to a little old ape after the onset of old age' This remarkable collection brings together a host of writings from across different regions and cultures of the Middle Ages, from the ninth to the fifteenth century. They are arranged to follow the life stages of...

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time. England after the war was a different place; the arts were different; history was different; sex, society, class were all different. Samuel Hynes examines the process of that transformation. He explores a vast cultural mosaic comprising novels and poetry, music and theatre,...

Local rather than international, the dramas and privations described in this memoir are not the stuff of headlines. This is the story of an ordinary boy growing up in Belfast after the war; an ordinary boy who would go on to become world-famous as a hostage in Beirut and author of the extraordinary testimony of imprisonment and survival that was...

Colin Wilson is the bete-noir of the Oxbridge literary establishment. He never went to university, let alone Oxbridge, yet wrote The Outsider, a brilliant account of the pain of being alive today, when he was just twenty-four. It sold millions of copies around the world, and he was acclaimed as one of the leading intellectuals of the age, finding a...

The inspiration behind the HBO series THE PACIFIC This was a brutish, primitive hatred, as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and the islands... Landing on the beach at Peleliu in 1944 as a twenty-year-old new recruit to the US Marines, Eugene Sledge can only try desperately to survive. At Peleliu and Okinawa...

John Pilger is one of the world's pre-eminent investigative journalists and documentary film-makers. His best-selling books of reportage, which include Heroes and Hidden Voices, have in the words of Noam Chomsky 'been a beacon of light in often dark times'. In Freedom Next Time he looks at five countries, in each of which a long struggle for freedom has taken...

Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her Aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up...

Anthony Eden, who served as both Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, was one of the central political figures of the twentieth century. He had good looks, charm, a Military Cross from the Great War, an Oxford first and a secure parliamentary constituency from his mid-twenties. He was Foreign Secretary at the age of 38, and the first British statesman to...

How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century hgas meant to people throughout the world. THE PIMLICO HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. it traces the...