Cape Town is a place between. Between two oceans, between first and third worlds, between east and west. So too the majority of its citizens, a peo...

'I read this as a young pilot about to embark on a career flying military helicopters. It should have put me off for life. Robert Mason tells a gri...

From the monarchical terror of the Middle Ages to the mangled Europe of the twenty-first century, A People's History of Modern Europe tells the his...

The British plan to settle Australia was a high-risk venture. We now take it for granted that the first colony was the basis of one of the most suc...

The American West, 1860-1890: years of broken promises, disillusionment, war and massacre.Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos and ending wi...

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores...

Scientists, and their research, are often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. Kuljian explores this trend in South A...

The prize was great -- not just land, but the riches it held, in the form of diamonds and gold. What became a country called South Africa was, unti...

The dictator who grew so rich on his country's cocoa crop that he built a 35-storey-high basilica in the jungles of the Ivory Coast. The austere, i...

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent The penultimate volume of Peter Ackroyd's masterful History of Engla...

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent The penultimate volume of Peter Ackroyd's masterful History of Engla...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR IN FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW YORK TIMES, WAS...

ECONOMIST, SUNDAY TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES AND GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017'Comprehensive and compelling ... A nuanced, landmark study that has de...

'Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing from start to finish. A tour de force that explains how Europe'...

Having written enthralling biographies of London and of its great river, the Thames, Peter Ackroyd now turns to England itself. This first volume o...

1959 was the year James Currey arrived in South Africa and found a nation in crisis. Hopes of change rose and foundered over the next five years. L...

Winner of the Moore Prize 2020 In Going Home, Orwell Prize winning author Raja Shehadeh travels Ramallah and records the changing face of the city...

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th cen...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE'The best history of Greece around... Beautifully written and packed with insights about the culture...

Thomas Gresham was arguably the first true wizard of global finance. He rose through the mercantile worlds of London and Antwerp to become the hidd...

Histories of the Unexpected not only presents a new way of thinking about the past, but also reveals the world around us as never before.Traditiona...

Histories of the Unexpected not only presents a new way of thinking about the past, but also reveals the world around us as never before.Traditiona...

'More than 70 years ago I was a "gift" for Adolf Hitler. I was stolen as a baby to be part of one of the most terrible of all Nazi experiments: Leb...

When Winston Churchill accepted the position of Prime Minister in May 1940, he insisted in also becoming Minister of Defence. He was not going to p...

Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks - those that are honest ...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 CUNDILL HISTORY PRIZE'Remarkable ... this brilliant book stands as an important monument to an almost forgotten world' Wil...

For two hundred years, the abolition of slavery in Britain has been a cause for self-congratulation - but no longer. In 1807, Parliament outlawed t...

King of Heists is a spellbinding and unprecedented account of the greatest bank robbery in American history, which took place on October 27, 1878, ...

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, King Leopold's Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruine...

'One of our most accomplished, erudite and prolific historians of modern Russia.' Rodric Braithwaite, New StatesmanVladimir Putin has dominated Rus...

Perhaps the most explosive issue in South Africa today is the question of land ownership. The central theme in this country’s colonial history is t...

'I was riveted: this is a fascinating social history.' NIGELLA LAWSON'Five stars... history on a scale at once intimate and grand.' TELEGRAPHA pano...

The Middle Ages were a time of wonder. They gave us the first universities, the first eyeglasses and the first mechanical clocks as medieval thinke...