The first single-volume history of India since the 1950s, combining narrative pace and skill with social, economic and cultural analysis. Five millennia of the sub-continent’s history are interpreted by one of our finest writers on India and the Far East. This edition does not include illustrations.Older, richer and more distinctive than almost any other, India’s culture furnishes all that the historian could wish for in the way of continuity an ...
Three thousand years of Chinese history in an accessible and authoritative single volume.Despite the recent rise of China to a position of dominance on the world economic stage, Chinese history remains an elusive subject. Yet it is this vast narrative of appalling loss, superhuman endeavour and incredible invention that has made China the superpower it is today. From the dawn of legend to the succession of great dynasties, from Confucius to Chai ...
In his bestselling book 1421:The Year China Discovered the World, Gavin Menzies revealed that it was the Chinese that discovered America, not Columbus. Now he presents further astonishing evidence that it was also Chinese advances in science, art, and technology that formed the basis of the European Renaissance and our modern world.In his bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, Gavin Menzies presented controversial and compel ...
A family story of blood and memory and the haunting power of the past.2018 WINNER OF THE CHRISTOPHER EWART-BIGGS MEMORIAL PRIZE2017 WINNER OF THE NON-FICTION IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDA SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERAfter nearly three decades reporting conflict from all over the world for the BBC, Fergal Keane has gone home to Ireland to tell a story that lies at the root of his fascination with war. It is a family story of war and love, and how the ...
The dramatic story of the Warsaw Uprising, one of the last major battles of World War II, in which the Poles fought off German troops and police, street by street, for sixty-three days.In autumn 1944, German troops and police entered Warsaw to deport its inhabitants. Though the war was now all but lost, the demolition of Warsaw remained part of the Nazi racial plan of 'cleansing' central Europe for future German settlement. In the first five day ...
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘His masterpiece’ Antony Beevor, Spectator‘A masterful performance’ Sunday Times‘By far the best book on the Vietnam War’ Gerald Degroot, The Times, Book of the YearVietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of partici ...
A groundbreaking account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from one of our best historians, author of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot: The Last Victorian.Why did the great philosophical novelist George Eliot feel so self-conscious that her right hand was larger than her left?Exactly what made Darwin grow that iconic beard in 1862, a good five years after his contemporaries had all retired their razors?W ...
World War II affected the lives of ordinary men and women more directly than any other conflict before or since.This is an unprecedented look at the lives of twenty-one young men who answered their country’s call to arms and left their homes to fight in unfamiliar and far-reaching corners of the globe.Many never returned, and those who did found their homes and countries much changed by long years of war. Most discovered they had become differen ...
The first history of World War I to place centre-stage the British soldier who fought in the trenches, this superb and important book tells the story of an epic and terrible war through the letters, diaries and memories of those who fought it.Of the six million men who served in the British army, nearly one million lost their lives and over two million were wounded. This is the story of these men – epitomised by the character of Sgt Tommy Atkins ...