Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Historical

This second volume of the best-selling diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon takes us from the heady aftermath of the Munich agreement, when the prime minister Chips so admired was credited with having averted a general European conflagration, through the rapid unravelling of appeasement, and on to the tribulations of the early years of the Second World War. It closes with a moment of hope, as Channon, in recording the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, reflects: 'The war must be more than half over.'

Anne Lister was remarkable. Fearless, charismatic and determined to explore her lesbian sexuality, she forged her own path in a society that had no language to define her. She was a landowner, an industrialist and a prolific diarist whose output has secured her legacy as one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century. Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister follows Anne from her crumbling ancestral home in Yorkshire to the glittering courts of Denmark as she resolves to put past heartbreak behind her and find herself a wife.

As she fell in love, first with Prince Charles and then with her sons, William and Harry, the world fell in love with the young royal family—Diana most of all. With one son destined to be king and one needing to find his own way, she taught them lessons about royal tradition and also real life. 'William and Harry will be properly prepared', Diana once promised. 'I am making sure of this'. Even after her tragic death, the strength of her love for her sons remains an enduring inspiration, not only for the two princes, but for the entire world.

The life story and adventures of Captain Eric 'Winkle' Brown - Britain's greatest-ever pilot. Brown's extraordinary flying career saw him fight in the Battle of Britain, narrowly escape death on a torpedoed aircraft carrier, achieve a litany of new records and firsts as a test pilot, and fly more kinds of aircraft than any other pilot in history. With a life as remarkable as his flying, Brown faced imprisonment in Germany at the outbreak of WWII, and after the Allied victory his fluent German saw him interviewing senior Nazi officials and participating in the liberation of Belsen.

Amaryllis Fox was recruited by the CIA at the age of 21 in the aftermath of 9/11. After an intense training period - where she learns how to master a Glock, get out of flexicuffs while in the trunk of a car, withstand torture, and commit suicide in case of captivity - she is sent undercover to keep nuclear, biological and chemical weapons out of the hands of terror groups. Posing as an art dealer, she is sent on countless dangerous missions around the globe. Each time, the stakes become even higher and the risks more terrifying.

From the moment John Brown arrived as a servant to Queen Victoria's household, he became known across the land as her loyal companion, her fierce protector, and her right-hand man, their friendship immortalised in print and later on-screen. But what if there was more to their relationship than we know? And what has history been hiding from us? In this provocative exploration of Victoria's emotional world, and her passionate midlife, the acclaimed historian Fern Riddell re-examines everything we thought we knew about one of Britain's most iconic women.

The best-known modern Chinese fairy tale is the story of three sisters from Shanghai who, for most of the 20th century, were at the centre of power in China. It was sometimes said that ‘one loved money, one loved power and one loved her country’, but there was far more to the Soong sisters than these caricatures. As China battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, each sister played an important, sometimes critical role and left an indelible mark on history.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Rival Queens by Kate Williams. Elizabeth and Mary: cousins, rivals, queens. They loved each other, they hated each other - they could never escape one another. Kate Williams’ thrilling new history tells the story of Elizabeth I of England and her betrayal of Mary, Queen of Scots. At the end of the Tudor era, here were two women on two thrones. But this was a man’s world, and many believed that no woman should govern.

In the summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interred at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre - Auschwitz. It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazis' terrifying designs.

Written when Orwell was a struggling writer in his 20s, it documents his 'first contact with poverty'. Here, he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug-infested hostels and doss houses of last resort, working as a dishwasher in Paris's vile 'Hôtel X', surviving on scraps and cigarette butts, living alongside tramps, a star-gazing pavement artist and a starving Russian ex-army captain.

John Guy, one of our most acclaimed and successful historians, brings a colossal figure of British history vividly to life in this unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Thomas Becket. Read by Roy McMillan. Behind the legend, there was a man. In 1120 the wife of a Norman draper’s merchant gave birth to a baby boy in London’s bustling Cheapside.

It began with an armchair. It began with the surprise discovery of a stash of personal documents covered in swastikas sewn into its cushion. The SS Officer’s Armchair is the story of what happened next, as Daniel Lee follows the trail of cold calls, documents, coincidences and family secrets, to uncover the life of one Dr Robert Griesinger from Stuttgart. Who was he? What had his life been - and how had it ended?

Chris Hunter has the most dangerous job in the world in the most dangerous place in the world: he's responsible for bomb disposal in the British sector of Iraq, pitted against some of the most ruthless and technically advanced terrorists in the world. It is a 24/7 job; his team defused over 45 bombs in the first two months alone. And the people they're up against don't play by the Geneva Convention. For them, there are no rules, only results.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Athelstan: The Making of England by Tom Holland, read by Roy McMillan. The formation of England happened against the odds - the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world. But King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex, his son Eadweard expanded it, and his grandson Æthelstan finally united Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and became Rex totius Britanniae.

Some years ago a stash of family records was handed down to Michael Palin, among which were photos of an enigmatic young man in army uniform, as well as photos of the same young man as a teenager looking uncomfortable at family gatherings. This, Michael learnt, was his Great-Uncle Harry, born in 1884, died in 1916. He had previously had no idea that he had a Great-Uncle Harry, much less that his life was cut short at the age of 32 when he was killed in the Battle of the Somme. The discovery both shocked him and made him want to know much more about him.

‘Oh my goodness - another girl, Mrs Swain!' Clara's normal iron composure broke, and she screamed, ‘No! That's not the bloody deal!' And that was how my nanna, Bertha Swain, entered the world. When Helen Batten's marriage breaks down, she starts on a journey of discovery into her family's past and the mysteries surrounding her enigmatic nanna's early life. What she unearths is a tale of five feisty redheads struggling to climb out of poverty and find love through two world wars.

The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men; its longest-serving editor, James Murray, devoted 36 years to the project, as far as the letter T. But the Dictionary didn't just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public. By the time it was finished in 1928 its 414,825 entries had been crowdsourced from a surprising and diverse group of people, from archaeologists and astronomers to murderers, naturists, novelists, pornographers, queer couples, suffragists, vicars and vegetarians.

As a young girl in a working-class neighborhood of Sydney, Australia, Geraldine Brooks longed to discover the places where history happens and culture comes from, so she enlisted pen pals who offered her a window on adolescence in the Middle East, Europe, and America. Twenty years later, Brooks, an award-winning foreign correspondent, embarked on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends. She found men and women whose lives had been shaped by war and hatred, by fame and notoriety, and by the ravages of mental illness.

Anne Boleyn has mesmerised the English public for centuries. Her tragic execution, orchestrated by her own husband, never ceases to intrigue. How did this courtier's daughter become the queen of England, and what was it that really tore apart this illustrious marriage, making her the whore of England, an abandoned woman executed on the scaffold? While many stories of Anne Boleyn's downfall have been told, few have truly traced the origins of her tragic fate.

Mathematics shapes almost everything we do. From building rockets to the handheld technology that governs our day-to-day lives, we are all in debt to the mathematical geniuses of the past. But the history of mathematics is warped; it looks like a sixteenth-century map that enlarges Europe at the expense of Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Secret Lives of Numbers introduces listeners to a new group of mathematical boundary-smashers, those who have been erased by history because of their race, gender or nationality.