Europe

Putin's best-selling biographer reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy....

A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes - the consequences of which still resonate today....

The loss of British bombers over Occupied Europe began to reach alarming levels in 1941....

A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency....

This is your opportunity to appreciate the results of the Italian Renaissance and gain an understanding of the underlying social, political, and economic forces....

The fourth and last volume in Churchill's famous account spans 1815 to 1901...

Spanning 1940 to 1965, this volume picks up shortly after Winston Churchill became prime minister - when Britain stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany....

From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs. Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder's vivid third book, Danubia. Thrillingly informative, Danubia is a treat that listeners will be eager to dip into....

Winston Churchill understood and wielded the power of words throughout his six decades in the public eye....

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question....

New York Times best-selling author Alison Weir is one of the most popular chroniclers of British and European royal history....

In Becoming Hitler, Weber brilliantly charts this tragic metamorphosis, dramatically expanding our knowledge of how Hitler became a lethal demagogue....

The terrible conflict that dominated the mid-19th century, the Crimean War, killed at least 800,000 men and pitted Russia against a formidable coalition of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire. It was a war for territory, provoked by fear that if the Ottoman Empire were to collapse then Russia could control a huge swathe of land from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. But it was also a war of religion, driven by a fervent, populist and ever more ferocious belief by the Tsar and his ministers that it was Russia's task to rule all Orthodox Christians and control the Holy Land.  

During the late years of the 18th century, the spirit of Enlightenment thinking and revolution were in the air. The world was changing, moving away from ingrained beliefs about religion, reason, society, and the rights of the individual and turning more toward the laws of nature as interpreted by the scientific method. Nowhere was the influence of this radical new way of thinking more apparent than in France, and the upheaval this caused would come to bloody fruition in the form of revolution. 

 Learn the history and legends of ancient Rome!

Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-17th century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English.

Despite the Roman Empire's famous 500-year reign over Europe, parts of Africa and the Middle East, Italy does not have the same long national history as states such as France or England. Divided for much of its history, Italy's regions have been, at various times, parts of bigger, often antagonistic empires, notably those of Spain and Austria. In addition, its challenging and varied terrain made consolidation of political control all the more difficult.  

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested by the Nazis. Along with his 16-year old son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany, where a new concentration camp was being built. It was the beginning of a five-year odyssey almost without parallel. They helped build Buchenwald, young Fritz learning construction skills which would help preserve him from extermination in the coming years. But it was his bond with his father that would ultimately keep them both alive. When the 50-year old Gustav was transferred to Auschwitz - a certain death sentence - Fritz was determined to go with him.