Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Great Britain

With a novelist’s touch, Lucy Hughes-Hallett transports us into a courtly world of masques and dancing, exquisite clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, gender-fluidity, sex and appallingly rudimentary medicine. These were dangerous and complicated times, an era where witch hunts coexisted with Descartian rationality, and Buckingham stood at its centre until his spectacular fall from grace.

The first of Henry VIII's wives was Catherine of Aragon, the pious Catholic princess who suffered years of miscarriages and still births and yet failed to produce a male heir.

April 1998: the Good Friday Agreement is signed, ending decades of violence and bloodshed in Northern Ireland. The process of getting the IRA to end its so-called ‘armed struggle’ was always the prerequisite of the search for peace. It was Operation Chiffon that finally helped make it possible. Operation Chiffon takes us inside the top-secret intelligence operation whose roots go back to the bloodiest years of the conflict in the early 1970s, involving officers from MI6 and, later in the 1990s, MI5. The remarkable story is now revealed by legendary BBC journalist Peter Taylor.

There are few women in English history more famous or controversial than Queen Anne Boleyn. In this vivid and engaging account of the triumphant and harrowing final year of Queen Anne Boleyn's life, the author reveals a very human portrait of a brilliant, passionate, and complex woman.

It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The Ancient Mariner and ‘Kubla Khan’, as well as Coleridge’s unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, Wordsworth’s revolutionary verses in Lyrical Ballads and the greatness of ‘Tintern Abbey’, his paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding.

Evoking a pivotal moment at the birth of modernity, a time of fear, conspiracy and uprising, and featuring some of the most unusual and brilliant personalities of the eighteenth century, Every Valley tells the story behind the creation of Handel’s Messiah: a cinematic and moving drama of hope in the darkness and the entangled lives that shaped a masterpiece.

Peter Marshall was born in Orkney. His ancestors were farmers and farm labourers on the northern island of Sanday – where, in 1624, one of them was murdered by a witch. In an expansive and enthralling historical account, Marshall looks afresh at a small group of islands that has been treated as a mere footnote, remote and peripheral, and in doing so invites us to think differently about key events of British history.

Marking the centenary of the Titanic, A Shape of Ice is an utterly compelling exploration of the lives on board the most famous ship in history. The RMS Titanic was built as one of the world's largest and most luxurious liners. A marine Ritz, it was a 45,000 ton hotel of thin steel plates, travelling at a speed of 21 knots across the unforgiving ocean.On the night of 14 April 1912, the seemingly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg. It sustained a 300 feet gash and six compartments were wrenched open to the sea.

It is January of 1879. While three columns of British soldiers and their African allies cross the Uminyathi River to commence the invasion of the Zulu Kingdom, a handful of redcoats from B Company, 2/24th Regiment are left to guard the centre column's supply depot at Rorke's Drift. On the morning of 22 January, the main camp at Isandlwana, just 10 miles to the east, comes under attack from the entire Zulu army and is utterly destroyed.

How did descendants of Viking marauders came to dominate Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East? It is a tale of ambitious adventures and fierce freebooters, of fortunes made and fortunes lost. The Normans made their influence felt across all of western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land. In Empires of the Normans we discover how they combined military might and political savvy with deeply held religious beliefs and a profound sense of their own destiny.

For over four decades the story of the extraordinary evil that occurred at the Kincora Boys’ Home in East Belfast in the 1970s and the shocking attempts by MI5 to cover it up have haunted our political and social terrain for decades.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip enjoyed seventy-three years of happy married life together—the longest marriage of any royal British couple in history. But how did they meet? What did their families think of their burgeoning relationship? What obstacles did the young couple face before and after their marriage? And how did a childhood friendship grow into the love story of the century? In The Queen and Prince Philip royal biographer Helen Cathcart superbly reconstructs the early years of Elizabeth and Philip's relationship.

As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed.

Ireland is Britain's closest neighbour - the sea crossing from Scotland measures only 12 miles. It was also its first captive in what became Britain's empire. The two nation's stories have been intertwined since Anglo-Norman invaders crossed the Irish Sea during the 12th century. These Troubled Isles tells the extraordinary history of the past century in this tumultuous relationship, from the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922 to the present day.

1757 - Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious publication detailing the names and 'specialties' of the capital's prostitutes, eventually became one of the 18th century's most successful literary works as well as an essential accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure. Beyond its titillating passages lay a glimpse into the sex lives of those who lived and died by the list's profits during the Georgian era. The Covent Garden Ladies tells the story of three unusual characters whose colourful lives were brought together by this publication.

Britain was once a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands shaped our identities, built our communities and defined our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that used to govern every aspect of life on these shores. From the Isles of Scilly to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox travels the length of Britain to seek out the country’s last great craftspeople.

This riveting new history shows how having an empire and losing it has shaped modern Britain. Drawing on a mass of original research into the thoughts and feelings of the British people, pop culture, sport and media, Imperial Island tells a story of people on the move and of people trapped in the past, of the end of empire and the birth of multiculturalism, a chronicle of violence and a testament to togetherness. It is the story that best explains Britain today.

Nova Reid, author of The Good Ally, delves into the untold stories of extraordinary, unsung Black women who created and shaped pivotal moments in world history, British culture and society. Through powerful storytelling, personal insights and new research, Nova delves into the lives of pioneers, journalists and rule-breakers who made vital contributions to civil rights, yet have been mythologised, are unknown or erased from history.

In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes the association of Jews with the economy by focusing on one specific time and place - the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil.

Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.