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The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world. Rubicon paints a vivid portrait of the Republic at the climax of its greatness—the same greatness which would herald the catastrophe of its fall.

Although Hungary was a German ally in 1941, two years into World War II, it was still possible for Allied prisoners of war, French and Polish refugees, spies of every kind, and the city’s large Jewish population to live openly, enjoying the cafes and boulevards that made Budapest one of the great European capitals. While the other multicultural centers of Europe had fallen to the almost all-consuming conflict, Budapest remained intact. In September 1944, three months after D-Day, life in the city seemed idyllic. But under the guise of peace existed an undercurrent of tension and anxiety.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.

La Révolution aurait-elle connu un autre cours si Robespierre n'avait été celui qu'il était ? La psychologie de l'"Incorruptible" traquée dans tous ses méandres pour un livre surprenant. Maximilien Robespierre reste le personnage le plus controversé de la Révolution française, en même temps qu'une figure historique étudiée dans le monde entier. Max Gallo, historien de métier et biographe aux succès éditoriaux considérables, brosse ici un portrait psycho-historique de Robespierre.

Richard of Bordeaux and Henry Bolingbroke were first cousins, born just three months apart. Their two lives were from the beginning entwined. When they were still children, Richard was crowned King Richard II with Henry at his side, carrying the sword of state: a ten-year-old lord in the service of his ten-year-old king. Helen Castor tells this story of one of the strangest and most fateful relationships in English history. It is a story about power, and masculinity in crisis, and a nation brought to the brink of catastrophe and disintegration – and then brought back.

Churchill. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2, each with their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare. But if we want to understand their military strategy, we must first understand the strategist. In THE STRATEGISTS, Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are crucial to understanding how they fought WW2.

Robert Cecil, statesman and spymaster, lived through an astonishingly threatening period in English history. Queen Elizabeth had no clear successor and enemies both external and internal threatened to destroy England as a Protestant state, most spectacularly with the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot. All His Spies is a wonderfully engaging and original work of history. Many listeners are familiar with the great events of this tumultuous time, but All His Spies shows how easily these dramas could have turned out very differently.

Language of War is about what happens when your world changes overnight. When you wake up to the sound of helicopters and the smell of gunpowder. When your home is hit by shells or broken into by gunmen, and you spend another night in a basement-turned-bomb shelter. When, even though you’ve never held a weapon before, you realise the only choice is to fight back. It is about things one can never forget, or forgive.

Harold Wilson's famous reference to 'white heat' captured the optimistic spirit of a society in the midst of breathtaking change. From the gaudy pleasures of Swinging London to the tragic bloodshed in Northern Ireland, from the intrigues of Westminster to the drama of the World Cup, British life seemed to have taken on a dramatic new momentum.

In this strikingly impressive book, he combines academic verve and insight with colourful, dramatic writing to produce a classic, ground-breaking work that has changed forever how we think about the Sixties.

How did Boris Johnson supersede Theresa May to become Britain's Prime Minister? How did he pursue his promise to Get Brexit Done amidst multiple Brexit secretaries, repeated coup attempts and reshuffles, and an extraordinarily terse relationship with Brussels? What really happened in Downing Street – from the political choices to the party place settings – as the pandemic took the world in its grip? Out follows from May's resignation through to the tussles over the final Brexit deal, the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and our shortest serving PM ever.

Through passages of narrative, deeply researched explanation and beautifully illustrated by the author with thirty paper-cutouts, Saints retells stories that enjoyed centuries of popular appeal among medieval Christians but were suppressed when their shrines were destroyed. These stories embraced the darkness of their heroes: sinister saints who sacrificed their followers and women who communed with geese, saints whose decapitated heads spoke to wolves.

Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.

In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to strip away the veneer of myth and legend from the faces of the Third Reich and present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us.

When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe. In To Overthrow the World, Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine brought large-scale warfare to Europe, reshaped relations between key global players, and redefined existing alliances and international organizations, such as NATO and the European Union. It has killed tens of thousands, displaced millions, revived the threat of a nuclear war between Russia and the West and might unleash a global famine. Political scientist and historian of genocide Eugene Finkel zooms in on the intersection of one of the most important geopolitical events in recent decades and the most odious type of violence.

Europe's internal borders have rarely been 'natural'; they have more often been created by accident or force. Successive powers have redrawn the map of our continent, with varying degrees of success: the fingerprints of Napoleon, Alexander I, Castlereagh, Napoleon III and Bismarck are all there, but the present shape of Europe is mostly the work of the Allies in 1919 and Stalin in 1945. In Borderlines, writer and political historian Lewis Baston journeys along and across key borders from west to east Europe, to explore their history.

On April 30, 1980, six heavily armed gunmen burst into the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate, overlooking Hyde Park in London. There they took 26 hostages, including embassy staff, visitors, and three British citizens. A tense six-day siege ensued as millions gathered around screens across the country to witness the longest news flash in British television history, in which police negotiators and psychiatrists sought a bloodless end to the standoff, while the SAS – hitherto an organisation shrouded in secrecy – laid plans for a daring rescue mission: Operation Nimrod.

Exiled from Downing Street, Boris Johnson may now be best known as the latest GB News presenter. His former senior advisor Dominic Cummings has reinvented himself as political pundit. And Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been ejected from high-level politics since their infamous mini budget of 2022. But the chumocracy is far from over.

Bad Girls of Ancient Greece contains profiles of wayward wives, mad mothers, scandalous sisters and damsels, that quite frankly, caused others A LOT of stress in the ancient world. With the ever-growing popularity of mythological retellings, Lizzy Tiffin has written THE guide to all of the baddies of ancient Greece. This book stands as a reminder that us women really have been badasses since the start.