Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in History

It's exhausting being Irish. The constant self-flagellation is enough to put anybody off their breakfast. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Is it the postcolonial overhang following centuries of oppression at the hands of a litany of foreign invaders? Or is it collective guilt for sending Westlife out into the wider world? In Surviving Ireland, acclaimed comedy writer Colm Tobin takes the listener by the hand for a satirical romp through modern Irish life.

When Gareth Harney was first handed a Roman coin by his father as a child, he became entranced: by its beauty, its hardiness and its power to tell stories and connect us with the ancient past. He realised that coins, more than being simply markers of exchange, are metal canvases upon which societies could immortalise their ideas, cultures, personalities, tragedies and triumphs. His small tarnished coin, then, actually told the epic story of Rome.

In the overwhelming chaos across Asia at the end of the Second World War, one relatively minor issue was the future of the Japanese colony of Taiwan, a large island some one hundred miles off the coast of Fujian. Handed to the Kuomintang-ruled Republic of China, in 1949 it suddenly became the focus of global attention as a random cross-section of defeated nationalists, including President Chiang Kai-shek, fled there from Mao's triumphant Communist forces.

The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model, at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth? Far from posing silently, muses have brought emotional support, intellectual energy, career-changing creativity and practical help to artists. Muse tells the true stories of the incredible muses who have inspired art history's masterpieces. From Leonardo da Vinci's studio to the covers of Vogue, Ruth Millington uncovers the remarkable role of muses in some of art history's most well-known and significant works.

Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. It is a comprehensive account, animated by Ackroyd's concern for the close relationship between the present and the past as well as by what he describes as the peculiar "echoic" quality of London whereby its texture and history actively affect the lives and personalities of its citizens.

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture.

Over the course of five combat patrols during the Pacific War, Commander Fluckey reinvented submarine warfare, pioneering audacious strategies to hunt and sink Japanese warships and merchant vessels. At the helm of the USS Barb, he directed his boat to attack warship convoys - never mind the lop-sided odds - and to slip into heavily defended enemy harbors to launch torpedoes at unsuspecting targets.

In September 1776, the vulnerable Continental army under an unsure George Washington evacuated New York after a devastating defeat by the British army. Three weeks later, near the Canadian border, one of his favorite generals, Benedict Arnold, miraculously succeeded in postponing the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that might have lost the war. As this book ends, four years later, Washington has vanquished his demons, and Arnold has fled to the enemy. America was forced at last to realize that the real threat to its liberties might not come from without but from within.

In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing ordinary men and women who had lived through one of the most harrowing periods of modern history, the First World War. Veterans were interviewed in details about their day-to-day experiences, on and off the front. The project has since grown to be the most important archive of its kind in the world, and provides a unique account of life during the Great War.

At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile, engineer, fabulist and fraud, the magus ushered in modern physics and chemistry while also working on everything from secret codes to siege engines to magic tricks. Anthony Grafton's wonderfully original book discusses the careers of men who somehow managed to be both figures of startling genius and - by some measures - credulous or worse.

The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes.

In a hyper-competitive world obsessed with rankings, super-wealth and greatness, how can we live up to democratic ideals of equality? Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about these questions from different angles in different countries. Adventures in Democracy draws on her experiences and the deep history of democracies - in ancient Rome and Athens, the American and French revolutions and Renaissance Florence - to offer an unflinching portrait of modern democracy.

In exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Heather shows how Christendom constantly battled against both so-called 'heresies' and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction, to the astonishing revolution in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation.

Everybody wants breathable air, a healthy population, civil politics. We want a peaceful world, a stable economy. The fundamental point of politics is to deliver them. And yet clearly our political systems are failing. The answer is that politics we aspire to - democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity - is also the politics that creates traps for us. But there is hope. Ansell explains the cul-de-sac of modern politics - and how we can make it better.

‘I try to create links, to join the dots, to tell politics like a story, to make it real…’ Over a lifetime spent at the frontline of solidarity and resistance, Arundhati Roy’s words have lit a clear way through the darkness that surrounds us. Combining the skills of the architect she trained to be and the writer she became, she illuminates the hidden structures of modern empire like no one else, revealing their workings so that we can resist.

When the British fought the young United States during the War of 1812, they knew that taking the mouth of the Mississippi River was the key to crippling their former colony. Capturing the city of New Orleans and stopping trade up the river sounded like a simple task - New Orleans was far away from Washington, out of sight and out of mind for the politicians. What the British didn't count on was the power of General Andrew Jackson.

Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest. Yet from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart.

Here is a tour de force of American politics from one of journalism's most acclaimed commentators. History turns on a dime. A missed meeting, a different choice of words, and the outcome changes dramatically. Nowhere is this truer than in American politics, and in three dramatic narratives based on memoirs, histories, oral histories, fresh reporting with journalists and key participants, and Jeff Greenfield's own knowledge of the principal players, he shows just how extraordinary those changes would have been.

Editor Eleanor Brown presents a collection of personal essays from 18 different authors about their experiences in the City of Light.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of George VI: The Dutiful King by Philip Ziegler, read by Charlie Anson. If Ethelred was notoriously 'Unready' and Alfred 'Great', King George VI should bear the designation of 'George the Dutiful'. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. Inarticulate and loathing any sort of public appearances, he accepted that it was his destiny to figure regularly and conspicuously in the public eye, gritted his teeth, largely conquered his crippling stammer and got on with it.