Showing titles in Great Britain

On a raw January afternoon, the Stuart king, Charles I, was executed for treason. Within weeks, the English monarchy had been abolished and the ‘useless and dangerous’ House of Lords discarded. The people, it was announced, were now the sovereign force in the land. What this meant, and where it would lead, no one knew. The Restless Republic is the story of the extraordinary decade that followed.

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.

This is a story of the most well documented, most commented on love affair of our times. Yet the personalities behind the facade remain elusive and the nature of their relationship is an enigma. This is the first major biography of Charles and Camilla, two people who have battled against the curious lot that fate has thrown their way. Gyles Brandreth returns to the same ground as his last book, the bestselling "Philip and Elizabeth"; "Portrait of a Marriage".

What was life really like for women in the medieval period? How did they think about sex, death and God? Could they live independent lives? And how can we hear the stories of women from this period?

William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment and about the purpose of poetry. He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution and had a love affair and an illegitimate child before witnessing horrific violence in Paris.

Putting history into a perspective, this is an engaging, entertaining and educational trip through time, packing in equal parts fun and facts. Recently updated, British History For Dummies introduces listeners to recent events, including British actions in Afghanistan, and David Cameron's formation of Britain's first coalition Cabinet since World War II. But don't worry - British History For Dummies doesn't skimp on the old stuff! It's a riotous, irreverent account of the people and events that have shaped Britain.

Award-winning historian Simon Schama completes his monumental three-volume history of Britain, which accompanies the acclaimed television epic. In The Fate of Empire, Schama illuminates the period of British history from 1770-2000 through a variety of historical themes, including the advance of technology and industry, women's increasing role in society and the burgeoning British Empire.

Every queen had ladies-in-waiting. Her confidantes and chaperones, they are the forgotten agents of the Tudor court. Ever present and yet hidden behind the scenes, these women held the secrets and the hearts of some of the Tudor period's most powerful men and women. Experts at survival, negotiating the competing demands of their families and their queen, the ladies-in-waiting of Henry VIII's wives were far more than decorative 'extras': they were serious political players who changed the course of history, and four of them became queen themselves.

At eighteen, your life is full of of what-ifs and why-nots. You have everything to look forward to – unless you’ve got the plague. From a young Elizabeth Tudor, the orphan facing deadly intrigue at court, to a teenage Richard Burton, the rugby-obsessed son of a Welsh miner, historian Alice Loxton explores Britain’s past through the lives of eighteen figures at this crucial age.

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Learning of his father’s death, the adolescent, dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the North, vows to avenge him. He is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger sons to safety. Against them is the queen, passionate, proud, and strong-willed and with more of the masculine virtues of the time than most men. She too is battling for the inheritance of her young son, not yet fully grown but already a sadist who takes delight in watching executions.

In this delicious history of Britain’s food traditions, Diane Purkiss invites listeners on a unique journey through the centuries, exploring the development of recipes and rituals for mealtimes to show how food has been both a reflection of and inspiration for social continuity and change. Purkiss uses the story of food as a revelatory device to chart changing views on class, gender, and tradition through the ages. Sprinkled throughout with glorious details of historical quirks, this audiobook is both an education and an entertainment.

From the Gilded Age until 1914, more than 100 American heiresses invaded Britannia and swapped dollars for titles-just like Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, the first of the Downton Abbey characters Julian Fellowes was inspired to create after reading To Marry An English Lord. Filled with vivid personalities, gossipy anecdotes, grand houses, and a wealth of period details-plus photographs, illustrations, quotes, and the finer points of Victorian and Edwardian etiquette- To Marry An English Lord is social history at its liveliest and most accessible.

The thrilling true account of Hitler's first defeat. One of Britain's most remarkable victories of the Second World War. In the summer of 1940, the Nazi war machine was at its zenith. France, Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries were all under occupation after a series of lightning military campaigns. Only Britain stood in the way of the complete triumph of Nazi tyranny. But for the first time in the war, Hitler did not prevail.

The lasting reputation of George V is for dullness. He was a crack shot and an outstanding stamp collector, but that's about it. The flamboyance and hedonism of his father, Edward VII, defined an era whose influence and magnetism is still felt today. The contrast between the two could hardly be greater.

Cousin to Elizabeth I - and possibly Henry VIII's illegitimate granddaughter - Lettice Knollys had a life of dizzying highs and pitiful lows. Entangled in a love triangle with Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I, banished from court, plagued by scandals, embroiled in treason, Lettice would lose a husband and son to the executioner's ax. In the first ever biography of this remarkable woman, Nicola Tallis takes us through her dramatic life and the grand sweep of the Tudor Age and the events that define it.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.

The story of the love affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, and his abdication in order to marry the divorcée, has provoked fascination and discussion for decades. However, the full story of the couple's links with the German aristocracy and Hitler has until now remained untold. Meticulously researched, 17 Carnations chronicles this entanglement, starting with Hitler's early attempts to matchmake between Edward and a German noblewoman.

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. However, the first human footprints on this vast territory were felt 70,000 years earlier. The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia is a complex. For generations after the arrival of whites in Australia, the Aboriginal people were disregarded and marginalized, largely because they offered little in the way of a labor resource, and they occupied land required for European settlement.

For fans of The Crown—which surgically removed the Queen Mother’s sense of humour, and Craig Brown’s bestseller Ma’am Darling which hilariously captured Princess Margaret and the rest of the royal roost—this biography is part-joke book, part-skimming stone biography, and part-travel guide to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. In a journey of 101 vignettes—one for every year of her life—Gareth Russell captures the incredibly dry, incredibly popular personality of the Queen Mother, whose public life neatly spanned the entire twentieth century.

Making sense of the British Empire's legacy... through the stories of people who lived through it.