Topic: European history

In July 1964, the Sunday Mirror ran a front-page story headlined: 'PEER AND A GANGSTER: YARD ENQUIRY'. While the article withheld the names of the subjects, the newspaper reported that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had ordered an investigation into an alleged homosexual relationship...

In 1937, bemused at British newspapers making opposing claims about 'national feeling' and the 'will of the people', Cambridge graduates Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson created the social survey organisation Mass Observation to capture the thoughts, feelings and minutiae of daily life across the ...

In the early 2000s, the BBC launched its biggest oral history project, recording the lives and experiences of the ordinary people who lived through World War II. It amounted to 47,000 testimonies and over 400 diaries and letters, all of which have remained unexplored in the archives for twenty ye...

Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini's commander of the Black Shirts, exemplified fascism's obsession with male strength. Through the story of his broken marriage to a young Jewish American opera star, Victoria de Grazia explores the cult of masculinity on which the New Rome was to be built, revealing the ...

Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen u...

This fundamental re-evaluation of the origins and importance of the idea of 'party' in British political thought and politics in the eighteenth century draws on the writings of Rapin, Bolingbroke, David Hume, John Brown and Edmund Burke to demonstrate that attitudes to party were more complex and...

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose pe...

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose pe...

During the Second World War, the UK government created the Central Office of Information to act as the country's marketing and communications agency. In these desperate times, the Office produced steady streams of propaganda for the home front, for the colonies and for dissemination through occup...

This revealing and compelling account of one of the darkest days in Britain's social history presents a seminal episode in the battle for civil rights and fair labour relations, originally published in 1989 and made available for a new generation of readers in this paperback edition as the discou...

In August 1989, a group of Hungarian activists did the unthinkable: they entered the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain - and held a picnic. Word had spread of what was going to happen. On wisps of rumour, thousands of East German 'holiday-makers' had made their way to the border betw...

Why Piranesi's greatest works weren't his famous prints but rather the books for which he made themA draftsman, printmaker, architect, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known today as the virtuoso etcher of the immersive and captivating Views of Rome and the darkly i...

`Enchanting' Telegraph`Miraculous' Isabella Tree`Exquisite' FTFrom the No.1 bestselling author of The Shepherd's Life, an unforgettable story of friendship, redemption and a life-changing voyage of discovery on a remote Norwegian islandHow far do you have to go to find yourself?One afternoon many...

When Boris Johnson came to power in 2019, he did so with the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher. Rewriting the political map, he united a party and shattered Labour's fabled red wall. And yet, just three years later, he was ousted by the same members who had once greeted his le...

The lives of women changed immeasurably during the twentieth century, not just because of technological and economic advances, but as a result of a multiplicity of small and large, local, national and international political campaigns by women. This book focuses on lesser-known endeavours and the...

Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict a...

Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict a...

An incredible eye-witness account of a terrifying 1950s haunting. It began with a key. One afternoon in 1956, in the home of the Hitchings family in Battersea, south London, a small silver key appeared on Shirley Hitchings' bed. This seemingly insignificant event heralded the beginning of one of ...

This groundbreaking work traces developments in poor relief from the mid fourteenth century to the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601. Between the mid-fourteenth century and the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, English poor relief moved toward a more coherent and comprehensive network of support. Marjorie McI...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNERNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BYSAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI's secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven years of research ...