Great Britain History

Here is the whole of recorded British royal history, from the legendary King Alfred the Great onwards, including the monarchies of England, Scotland, Wales and the United Kingdom for over a thousand years. Fascinating portraits are expertly woven into a history of division and eventual union of the British Isles - even royals we think most familiar are revealed in a new and sometimes surprising light.This edition includes biographies of the royals of recorded British history, plus an overview of the semi-

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'.

John Milton (1608-1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defenses of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost - but would first justify the killing of a king.

Since time immemorial, royal marriages have had little to do with love—and almost everything to do with diplomacy and dynasty. Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France’s Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge.

A life of Matilda - empress, skilled military leader, and one of the greatest figures of the English Middle Ages.

What was daily life in Nelson's navy really like, for everyone from the captain down to the rawest recruit? What did they eat? What songs did they sing? What was the schedule of watches? How were the officers and crew paid, and what was the division of prize-money? These questions and many more are answered in Patrick O'Brian's elegant narrative, which includes wonderful anecdotal material on the battles and commanders that established Britain's naval supremacy.

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—showing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe.

Some historians have called the Seven Years’ War the first true world war, and they make a good point. Ultimately, this globally coordinated war involved five continents and at least 29 states and tribal confederacies, with a casualty toll in the millions and the maps forever altered. As part of the Seven Years’ War, the French and Indian War was the last in a long series of colonial conflicts between the French and British and also changed the map in America. At the end of the war, disputed borders were finally settled, and both empires were left reeling from the costs of war.

Born in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret Beaufort became the greatest heiress of her time. She survived a turbulent life, marrying four times and enduring imprisonment before passing her claim to the crown of England to her son, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs.

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: Neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne’s death more than her life.

The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.

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.

From the author of The Sisters, a chronicle of the most brutal, turbulent, and exuberant period of England's history. Bess Hardwick, the fifth daughter of an impoverished Derbyshire nobleman, did not have an auspicious start in life. Widowed at sixteen, she nonetheless outlived four monarchs, married three more times, built the great house at Chatsworth, and died one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in English history.

Spanning the end of the Regency, Ackroyd takes listeners from the accession of the profligate George IV, whose government was steered by Lord Liverpool, whose face was set against reform, to the "Sailor King" William IV, whose reign saw the modernization of the political system and the abolition of slavery. But it was the accession of Queen Victoria, at only 18 years old, that sparked an era of enormous innovation. Technological progress - from steam railways to the first telegram - swept the nation, and the finest inventions were showcased at the first Great Exhibition in 1851.

Ten years after the walk across Central Asia and Afghanistan that he memorialized in The Places in Between, Rory Stewart set out on a new journey, traversing a thousand miles between England and Scotland. Stewart was raised along the border of the two countries, the frontier taking on poignant significance in his understanding of what it means to be both Scottish and English, of his relationship with his father, who's lived on this land his whole life, and of his ties to the rich history and culture of the region.

Get a backstage pass and see Judas Priest like you’ve never seen them before in this electrifying memoir by the band’s cofounder and former lead guitarist. Judas Priest formed in the industrial city of Birmingham, England, in 1969. With its distinctive twin-guitar sound, studs-and-leather...

For fans of the Netflix series The Crown, a meticulously researched historical tour de force about the secret ties among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Adolf Hitler before, during, and after World War II. Andrew Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward...

Somewhere in the dim void between the departure from Britain of the Roman legions at the start of the fifth century and the days of the venerable Bede, the kingdoms of Early Medieval Britain were formed. But by whom? And out of what? Max Adams scrutinises the narrative handed down to us by later historians and chronicles, stripping away the most lurid nonsense about Arthur and synthesising the research of the last 40 years to tease out strands of reality from myth.

De la reine Victoria à la disparition du prince Philip en passant par la naissance de l'héritier George et la crise du "Megxit", le roman vrai d'une famille extraordinaire, aux prises avec le tragique de l'histoire comme avec les drames intimes. Dans leurs bonheurs comme dans leurs malheurs, ils continuent de nous fasciner par un unique mélange de traditions et d'audaces. Windsor ? Une passionnante saga britannique.

To those who travel there today, the West Indies are unspoiled paradise islands. Yet that image conceals a turbulent, dramatic, and shocking history. For some 200 years after 1650, the West Indies became the strategic center of the Western world, witnessing one of the greatest power struggles of the age as Europeans made and lost immense fortunes growing and trading in sugar - a commodity so lucrative it became known as "white gold".