Lt Cdr Julian Stockwin shares his love and knowledge of the sea in this entertaining collection of maritime stories and little-known trivia. Featuring nautical facts and feats, including superstitions at sea, the history of animals on the waves - until 1975 when all animals were banned from Royal Navy ships - and how the inventor of the umbrella helped man...

'The most moving Holocaust diary published since Anne Frank' Daily Telegraph First they led us to the baths, where they took from us everything we still had. Quite literally there wasn't even a hair left. I didn't even recognize my own mother till I heard her voice . . . In 1941, aged 12, Helga Weiss, her mother and father...

The gripping first-hand story of the disaster that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick and is the basis for a major new feature film, In the Heart of the Sea. In 1820, the Nantucket whaleship Essex was sailing in the South Pacific when it was rammed by an angry sperm whale. The ship sank, leaving twenty crew members floating in three small boats...

Bee Wilson is the food writer and historian who writes as the 'Kitchen Thinker' in the Sunday Telegraph, and is the author of Swindled!. Her charming and original new book, Consider the Fork, explores how the implements we use in the kitchen have shaped the way we cook and live. This is the story of how we have tamed fire...

‘If Downton Abbey still colours your impression of what Britain was like on the cusp of the First World War, 1913 could be a useful corrective’ Scotsman 2018 marks the centenary of the end of the Great War. What was the year before the war really like? 1913 is usually seen as little more than the antechamber to apocalypse. Our...

David Cannadine's impassioned, controversial plea for us to recognise the importance of both equality and history Great works of history have so often had at their heart a wish to sift people in ways that have been profoundly damaging and provided intellectual justification for terrible political decisions. Again and again, categories have been found--religion, nation, class, gender, race, 'civilization'--that have...

Fascist Voices is a fresh and disturbing look at a country in thrall to a charismatic dictator. Tracing fascism from its conception to its legacy, Christopher Duggan unpicks why the regime enjoyed so much support among the majority of the Italian people. He examines the extraordinary hold the Duce had on Italy and how he came to embody fascism. By...

Spell-binding, horrific, poetic, apocalyptic, heart-rending, disturbing, prophetic, seditious, compelling and utterly fascinating - the dreams of Lucrecia de Leon have lain virtually undisturbed in the archives of the Spanish Inquisition for more than four hundred years. Lucrecia was a nineteen-year-old Madrilena when, in 1587, her dreams began to be recorded and published by a disaffected group of clerics. Over the...

Al Murray's (AKA The Pub Landlord) musing on his childhood where his fascination with history and all things war began. Have you ever watched a film with someone who, at the most dramatic scene, argues that the plane on screen hasn't been invented yet? Or that the tank rumbling towards the hero at the end of the film is the...

Europe – and the question of whether to stay in or leave – has dominated British politics for the last three years. Yet how much do you really know about the Continent? From the Ice Age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies tells the entire story of Europe in a...

One Day: Saturday 13 July 1985, nearly two billion people woke up with one purpose. Nearly a third of humanity knew where they were going to be that day. Watching, listening to, attending: Live Aid. One Decade: Britain in the Eighties was different. The culture was different, the politics were different, and our engagement with the world was different. And...

The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the unfolding drama of the Cold War, from the Berlin blockade to the fall of the Berlin Wall. A booming global economy has had its sinister shadow in the apparently insoluble crises that havebeset much of the Third World. Above all, peace in the West has been offset by wars...

From Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America's greatest living writers, author of the Memory of Fire trilogy, comes Children of the Days, a new kind of history that shows us how to remember and how to live This book is shaped like a calendar. Each day brings with it a story: a journey, feast or tragedy that really happened on...

They gave us democracy, philosophy, poetry, rational science, the joke. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. They wrote the timeless myths of Odysseus and Oedipus, and the histories of Leonidas’s three hundred Spartans and Alexander the Great. But who were the ancient Greeks? And what was it that enabled them to achieve so much? Here, Edith Hall...

‘A monumental yet intimate biography, a vivid portrait of the man, the statesman and the saint’ The Times Mahatma Gandhi became a legend in his own time. A tireless fighter for human rights and for Indian independence, his strategy of satyagraha, or passive resistance, earned him the admiration of millions. Louis Fischer's biography is the definitive account of Ghandi's life;...