Great Britain

From the best-selling author of The Templars, Dan Jones' epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built....

A riveting and authoritative history of the single most important event in English history: The Norman Conquest....

In this remarkable book, Alison Weir recounts one of the greatest and most remarkable love stories of medieval England....

Edward’s life is one of the most extraordinary in all English history. He ordered his uncle to be beheaded, he usurped his father’s throne and he started a war which lasted for more than a hundred years.... 

Weakened by the loss of Normandy, King John faced insurrection by his disgruntled barons....

In Search of the Dark Ages is an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity, and the best-selling book that established Michael Wood as one of Britain's leading historians....

This brilliant new audiobook explores the lives of eight generations of the greatest kings and queens that this country has ever seen, and the worst. The Plantagenets - their story is the story of Britain....

Sixteen hundred years ago, Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea and established themselves as its new masters....

From the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers - race and class have shaped Akala's life and outlook....

Professor Alice Roberts combines archaeological finds with cutting-edge DNA research and written history to shed fresh light on how people lived: by examining the stories of the dead....

In his brilliantly illuminating new book Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past....

Tony Blair is the politician who defines our times....

Five devastating human stories and a dark and moving portrait of Victorian London - the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper....  

In Traitor King, best-selling historian Andrew Lownie draws on hitherto unexplored archives to uncover the dramatic world of the Windsors post-abdication....

Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat....

David Olusoga's Black and British is a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa....

Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland tells a history of Britain and the politics of its people through medieval eyes....

The story of Britain from the earliest settlements in 3000BC to the death of Elizabeth I in 1603....

Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War....

The biggest threat to our freedom in the 21st century isn’t coronavirus but hysterically woke liberals trying to kill democracy by suppressing free speech....  

Told through seven fascinating burial sites, this groundbreaking prehistory of Britain teaches us more about ourselves and our history: how people came and went, how we came to be on this island....

The early 1980s were the most dramatic, colourful and controversial in our modern history. Margaret Thatcher had come to power with a daring plan to reverse Britain's decline into shabbiness and chaos....

Courtiers pulls back the veil to reveal an ever-changing system of complex characters, shifting values and a battle of ideas over what the future of the institution should be. This is the inside story of how the monarchy really works, at a pivotal moment in its history....

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction....

Nick Clegg knows the volatile state of modern politics better than anyone else....

When England’s King Edward IV fell ill at Easter 1483 after coming back from a fishing trip and died shortly after on April 9, it threw a country that had already suffered a series of wars into a state of chaos. What exactly killed him is unclear, and though some people would later speculate that he had been poisoned, there is every reason to believe that he died of natural causes. Disease was common in medieval England, and doctors lacked much of the medical knowledge now taken for granted. 

In Search of the Dark Ages is an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity, and the best-selling book that established Michael Wood as one of Britain's leading historians. Now, on the book's 40th anniversary, this fully revised and expanded edition illuminates further the fascinating and mysterious centuries between the Romans and the Norman Conquest.

A strong emotional attachment to the memory of empire runs deep in British culture. In recent years, that memory has become a battleground in a long-drawn ideological war, inflecting debates on race, class, gender, culture, the UK’s future and its place in the world. This provocative and passionate book surveys the scene of the imperial memory wars in contemporary Britain, exploring how the myths that structure our views of empire came to be, and how they inform the present.  

The '70s was a time when movies and music changed in ways that had never before seemed possible. Special effects and rock and roll excess only added to the explosive nature of one of history's most important decades. Among the chaos came monumental breakthroughs in technology, freedom, and science. But just underneath all this wonder, the Yorkshire Ripper was striking fear into the public’s hearts. In this book, we will take a stroll through the period of time that gave us punk, disco, Star Wars, Jaws, and the VHS tape.

"There are children in Holbeck without crayons. Living in a city with an opera company. An opera company paid for with money from all of us. Until everyone has crayons, no one gets opera. That’s what I believe." A deeply moving memoir of how a group of artists fed their local community during the COVID pandemic. When crisis hits and audiences stay home, what’s the most useful thing a theater company can do? The answer was to become a food bank and one-stop help shop for those in need. In 15 months, Slung Low would go on to deliver over 15,000 food parcels.

In a time when outlaws are revered as heroes, Claude Duval thrives as a true gentleman of the road. Born into poverty in Domfront, France, in 1643, Duval faces many challenges as he sets off as a youth to make his mark on the world. Soon enough, the handsome and impertinent Claude becomes the most infamous highwaymen in British history! During his decades-long adventure, he is hunted by men and adored by women. However, roaming the King’s Highway by the light of the full moon comes with a terrible price....

Life in Cockney London was tough in the post-war years. The government's broken promises had led to a chronic housing shortage, rampant crime and families living in squalor. But one thing prevailed: the unbeatable spirit of the East End, a tight-knit community who pulled through the dark times with humour and heart. Drawing on both family history and her own memories of growing up in the 1950s and '60s, as well as her working life as a district nurse and local police officer, Jean Fullerton vividly depicts this fascinating part of London.

All societies, in their very different ways, are orderly. The very term 'society' implies the existence of a degree of organisation and predictability to human life. Orderliness, however, is a matter of degree. It is neither total, nor totally absent. In recent times, however, such concerns have largely given way to a greater preoccupation with disorderliness: with significant and disruptive social change; with rising crime and anti-social behaviour; and with a variety of other social problems. But what has really been happening?

It wasn't long-ago that Britons could have been as at home in Varanasi as they could have been in Wolverhampton—why?—because the shape and location of Britain's land-mass has not always been the same, and with large parts of Britain scattered across the globe, British borders and its identity has always been on the move. But, by knowing more about the twelve pivotal moments that occurred over a 2,000-year period, we can not only gain a full sense of our British history, but we can also understand where we are heading.

The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding the Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. 'Y service' was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world.

England—begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, star of beloved period dramas, and home of the House of Windsor—is not quite the stalwart island fortress that many of us imagine. Riven by an ancient fault line that predates even the Romans, its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbors, and for the past millennia, it has harbored a class system like nowhere else. This bracing tour of the most powerful country in the United Kingdom reveals an England repeatedly invaded and constantly reinvented—yet always fractured by its very own Mason-Dixon Line. 

The eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Charles has been heir to the British throne since he was three years old. In this lively and illuminating account, royal biographer Helen Cathcart charts the first thirty years of Prince Charles's life, from his birth at Buckingham Palace in 1948 and rugby-playing schooldays at Gordonstoun, through his undergraduate years cycling to lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequent military career in the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.

A wall in the distant north cuts the world in two. Ruthless sea borne warriors raid the coasts from their war galleys, yearning to regain lost glories. A young nobleman and his kin are slaughtered under a banner of truce within a mighty castle. A warrior king becomes a legend when he smites his foe with one swing of his axe during a nation-forging battle. Yet this isn’t Westeros–it’s Scotland.

As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed. 

Capital punishment was abolished for murder in Great Britain in 1969, but remained as the punishment for high treason until as recently as 1998, demonstrating how seriously we take the crime of betraying your country. But even with the threat of the noose hanging over them, many still chose the path of treachery during the cataclysmic events of last century. British Traitors examines the lives and motivations of a number of the perpetrators of this most heinous of crimes.