A wooden box holds the buttons of three generations of women in Lynn Knight’s family – each one with its own tale to tell... Tracing the story of women at home and in work, from the jet buttons of Victorian mourning, to the short skirts of the 1960s, taking in suffragettes, bachelor girls, little dressmakers, Biba and the hankering...

In the summer of 1911 David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, hired a young schoolteacher called Frances Stevenson to tutor his daughter in the summer holidays. He was forty-eight, and married with four children. She was twenty-two, highly intelligent as well as very attractive, and Lloyd George soon began to employ her as his secretary. At the beginning...

'As good a guide to a fascinating country in transformation as you will get.' Management Today In the course of a couple of generations, South Koreans took themselves out of the paddy fields and into Silicon Valley, establishing themselves as a democracy alongside the advanced countries of the world. Yet for all their ambition and achievement, the new Koreans...

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...

'This vivid and engaging book brings to life some of the most important moments in ancient history, moments that have shaped not only the politics and culture of bygone eras, but the institutions, thoughts and fantasies of our time.' Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens) 'A bold and imaginative page-turner that challenges ideas about the world of antiquity.' Peter Frankopan (The Silk...

Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A People's Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available today. 'A modern masterpiece' Andrew Marr Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People's Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers...

This classic history of crime tells how the Chicago underworld earned - and kept - its notorious reputation, from the time it was settled to the Prohibition days of the 1920s. Recounting the lives of such infamous early inhabitants as the original Mickey Finn and the mass murderer H. H. Holmes, it climaxes with the city's golden age of crime...

'It covers three centuries of high living, high politics and high drama [...] it is so fascinating' MEL SYKES _____________________________ A Sunday Times bestseller Five women. One house. One extraordinary history. Even today, Cliveden retains its royal mystique - it is where Meghan Markle and her mother spent the night before the royal wedding - but from its construction in...

National Anthems have been sung for hundreds of years, inspired patriots and rebels, armies and athletes. Each one has its own story. And yet most of us know almost nothing about them ... until now. In Republic or Death!, Alex Marshall takes to the road on an adventure that includes cycling the route French revolutionaries marched as they first sang...

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...

'The greatest history of an event I know' - C.L.R. James Regarded by many as among the most powerful works of history ever written, The History of the Russian Revolution offers an unparalleled account of one of the most pivotal and hotly debated events in world history. This book presents, from the perspective of one of its central actors, the...

In this extraordinary memoir Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov recounts the early, heady days of the 20th century and his plot to kill the 'mad monk' Rasputin in gruesome, thrilling prose. After a glamorous life in England, partying with the rich and famous at Oxford and London he eventually returned to Russia where he married Princess Irina of Russia, the Tsar's...

Granite, a tough composite of quartz, feldspar and mica, is the stuff of Dartmoor, the most formidable of the five granite bosses punctuating Britain’s southwest peninsula. A miserable place of rain and bog or a sunny upland of exquisite natural beauty, here the elements are raw, the sky huge and nature seems ascendant. But it is no less a place...

This is the book on the way we eat. Solidifying her standing as a preeminent observer and scholar of everyday life, Margaret Visser takes on the sweeping history of table manners, from the civilizations of ancient Greece and medieval Europe to the way that technology has altered, and continues to alter, our behaviour over dinner. She writes of everything from...

The next instalment in the acclaimed New Yorker 'decades' series featuring an all-star line-up of historical pieces from the 1960s alongside new pieces by current New Yorker staffers. The 1960s, the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, were a time of tectonic shifts in all aspects of society – from the March on Washington and the Second Vatican Council...