Showing results by publisher "Sceptre" in History

The Sicilian mafia, or Cosa Nostra, is far from being Italy's only dangerous criminal fraternity. The south of the country hosts two other major mafias: the camorra, from Naples and its hinterland and the 'ndrangheta, the mafia from the poor and isolated region of Calabria that has now risen to become the most powerful mob of all. Each of these brotherhoods has its own methods, its own dark rituals, its own style of ferocity and corruption. Their early history is little known, indeed some of it has been entirely shrouded in myth and silence until now.

English is the collective work of millions of people throughout the ages. It is democratic, ever-changing and ingenious in its assimilation of other cultures. English runs through the heart of world finance, medicine and the Internet, and it is understood by around two thousand million people...

Looking to Sea is an alternative history of Britain in the twentieth century, told through the prism of ten iconic artworks of the sea, one for each decade. 'We see nothing truly until we understand it.' John Constable An alternative history of Britain in the twentieth century, Looking to Sea is...

A gripping untold war story: using exclusive new archive material, letters and diaries, this is the story of the prisoners of war in internment camps during the Second World War. The police came for Peter Fleischmann in the early hours. It reminded the teenager of the Gestapo's moonlit roundups...

Published to mark the 30th anniversary of the financial revolution known as 'Big Bang', Crash Bang Wallop will tell the gripping story of how the changes introduced in the 1980s in the City of London transformed our world. Attitudes to money and the way we measure value and status were...

Now a major motion picture starring Juliette Binoche and Antonio Banderas. August 2010: the San Jose mine in Chile collapses, trapping 33 men half a mile underground for 69 days. Faced with the possibility of starvation and even death, the miners make a pact: if they survive, they will share their story only collectively, as 'the 33'.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2025* 'Remarkable... entertaining... deft... moving... refreshing' Daily Telegraph 'A richly rewarding account of a resonant cultural moment' Guardian 'Textured literary portraits of the masculine mind and body' Raymond Antrobus...

Juliet Capulet is the heartbeat of the world's most famous love story. She is an enduring romantic icon. And she is a captivating, brilliant, passionate teenage girl who is read and interpreted afresh by each new generation. Searching for Juliet takes us from the Renaissance origin stories behind William Shakespeare's child bride to the boy actor who inspired her creation onstage. From enslaved people in the Caribbean to Italian fascists in Verona, and real-life lovers in Afghanistan. From the Victorian stage to 1960s cinema, Baz Luhrmann and beyond.

In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years. Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable...

In 1980 Thomas Keneally walked into a shop in Beverley Hills to buy a briefcase, an impulse that was to change his life. For the owner, Leopold Pfefferberg, had a story he'd been trying to interest writers and Hollywood in for years. It was the story of Oskar Schindler. In SEARCHING FOR...

In 1868, Charles Dickens dispatches his youngest child to Australia. Like his brother Alfred before him, sixteen-year-old Edward is expected to learn to apply himself in what his father considers to be the new land of opportunity. Posted to a remote sheep station in New South Wales, Edward...

Our names are so mundane that we barely notice them. Yet each contains countless stories of tradition and belonging - be that a legacy of colonialism or persecution, the desire to fit in, or the complex cultural inheritance from one's parents. In What's in a Name?, Sheela Banerjee unravels the personal histories of friends and family through their names. And while tracing their heritage across centuries and continents - from west London to British India, and from 1960s Jamaica to pre-Revolutionary Russia - Sheela also tells the story of twentieth-century immigration to the UK.

In 1913 all the musk plants in the world stopped smelling. Unable to resist the lure of this mystery, Bob Gilbert turns detective, determined to find the truth in the tale. Mixing history, memoir, science and nature writing, The Missing Musk takes the listener on a journey of discovery, uncovering the truth behind six mysteries and myths from across the natural world.

On the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote, Helen Pankhurst - great-granddaughter of suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst and a leading women's rights campaigner - charts how women's lives have changed over the last century, and offers a powerful and positive argument for a new way...

Green belts are part of the landscape and psyche of post-war Britain, but have led to conflicts at every level of society - between conservationists and developers, town and country, politicians and people, nimbys and the forces of progress. Growing up on 'the last road in London' on an estate at the edge of the woods, John Grindrod had a childhood that mirrored these tensions. His family, too, seemed caught between two worlds: his wheelchair-bound mother and soft hearted father had moved from the inner city and had trouble adjusting.  

Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time series regularly entertains and fascinates substantial audiences on BBC Radio 4. For this book he has selected episodes which reflect the diversity of the radio programmes, and take us on an amazing tour through the history of ideas, from philosophy, science and...

With the invention of printing, reading books moved from being an act performed only by priests and aristocrats into an individual, even private activity. This change helped spark the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution - in which punctuation played a crucial role. As long as texts were read out loud by only an educated elite there was no need for punctuation to mark pauses, full stops or questions. 

The night is a time of darkness and nightmares, fear and vulnerability, especially for women. And, yet, it is another world, full of beauty and possibility, too. After the sun goes down, insomnia and sleep paralysis do threaten. But some have always walked the nocturnal landscapes, with more or less confidence. Others have worked, night shifts and hidden night work: nurses, security guards, sex workers. And some have found solace in the darkness, from queer rave culture to religious pre-dawn traditions.