In 1509 Krishnadevaraya, a prince from humble origins, ascended the throne of Vijayanagara. The empire he inherited was weak from two messy dynastic successions and ambitious enemy kings loomed large on all sides. Krishnadevaraya quickly rose to the challenge, and in the course of his remarkable twenty-year reign, he changed history forever. He won every single battle he fought and unified the whole of south India under his banner. Krishnadevaraya is remembered today as one of India’s greatest kings. He presided over an Indian renaissance, when ancient texts and traditions were reinvigorated and infused with a fresh and modern vitality. This fascinating and riveting book is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Based on Portuguese and Persian chronicles, as well as many overlooked Telugu literary sources, Raya is the definitive biography of one of the world’s greatest leaders.
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
Winner of the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2023
‘Epic, moving and important’ ROBERT HARRIS
'A modern classic’ OBSERVER
‘An unforgettable epic of a book’ DAILY MAIL
From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father’s devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.
Daniel’s mother Mirjam Wiener was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarete Wiener. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded the Netherlands. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed and sent to starve in Bergen-Belsen
Daniel’s father Ludwik was born in Lwów, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, Ludwik’s father was arrested and sentenced to hard labour in the Gulag. Meanwhile, deported to Siberia and working as a slave labourer on a collective farm, Ludwik survived the freezing winters in a tiny house he built from cow dung.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about Finkelstein’s parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the twentieth century. It is a story of persecution; survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.
‘Danny Finkelstein has written an elegant, moving account of the history of one family, and in doing so shines light on the history of the 20th century. If you want to understand Hitler and Stalin, read this book about people whose lives were upended by both of them’ ANNE APPLEBAUM, author of Gulag: A History, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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‘A gripping new collection from Max Hastings that puts you at the heart of the battle … Compelling’ Daily Mail
‘An unmissable read’ Sunday Times
Soldiers is a very personal gathering of sparkling, gripping tales by many writers, about men and women who have borne arms, reflecting bestselling historian Max Hastings’s lifetime of studying war. It rings the changes through the centuries, between the heroic, tragic and comic; the famous and the humble. The nearly 350 stories illustrate vividly what it is like to fight in wars, to live and die as a warrior, from Greek and Roman times through to recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here you will meet Jewish heroes of the Bible, Rome’s captain of the gate, Queen Boudicca, Joan of Arc, Cromwell, Wellington, Napoleon’s marshals, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton and the modern SAS. There are tales of great writers who served in uniform including Cobbett and Tolstoy, Edward Gibbon and Siegfried Sassoon, Marcel Proust and Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and George MacDonald Fraser. Here are also stories of the female ‘abosi’ fighters of Dahomey and heroic ambulance drivers of World War I, together with the new-age women soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stories reflect a change of mood towards warfare through the ages: though nations and movements continue to inflict terrible violence upon each other, most of humankind has retreated from the old notion of war as a sport or pastime, to acknowledge it as the supreme tragedy.
This is a book to inspire in turn fascination, excitement, horror, amazement, occasionally laughter. Max Hastings mingles respect for the courage of those who fight with compassion for those who become their victims, above all civilians, and especially in the twenty-first century, which some are already calling ‘the Post-Heroic Age’.
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History in the House pulls back the curtains on Christ Church, Oxford and reveals its great and lasting historical significance.
This is an exciting new historiographical study from the much-acclaimed historian Richard Davenport-Hines. It shows the evolution of historical ideas, purposes and methods in a clerisy that has enjoyed conspicuous influence in England for six centuries. There was growing recognition, in Tudor England, that the study of history especially improved the minds, enlarged the imaginations and broadened the vicarious experience of princes, noblemen and administrators. History showed, by precept and example, good government and bad, virtue and vice in rulers, and the reasons for the success or failure of states.
History in the House looks at the temperaments, ideas, imagination, prejudices, intentions and influence of a select and self-regulated group of men who taught modern history at Christ Church: Frederick York Powell, Arthur Hassall, Keith Feiling, J. C. Masterman, Roy Harrod, Patrick Gordon Walker, and Hugh Trevor-Roper (a Victorian radical, a staunch legitimist of the protestant settlement, a conservative, a Whig, a Keynesian, a socialist, and a contrarian).
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In 1995, James W. Loewen penned the classic work of criticism, Lies My Teacher Told Me, a left-leaning corrective that addressed much of what was sanitized and omitted from American history books.
But in the more than two decades that followed, false leftist narratives—as wrong as those they supplanted—have come to dominate American academia and education.
Now, in the spirit of that original book, Professor Wilfred Reilly demolishes the academic myths propagated by the left. In Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me, he offers fresh angles on “established” events, turning what we think we know about the nation’s history on its head.
Reilly explains how there actually were communists in Hollywood; how the cultural stereotype of Native American culture as completely peace loving is both untrue and patronizing; and how, while history was almost always bad for Black Americans, history was much worse for everyone than we realize.
Smart, irreverent, and deeply researched, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me will revolutionize our understanding of America’s past while offering a refreshing way to teach and think about history.
On June 6, 1944, General Dwight Eisenhower addressed the thousands of American troops preparing to invade Normandy, exhorting them to embrace the “Great Crusade” they faced. Then, in a fleeting moment alone, he drafted a resignation letter in case the invasion failed.
In The Light of Battle, Michel Paradis, acclaimed author of Last Mission to Tokyo, paints a vivid portrait of Dwight Eisenhower as he learns to navigate the crosscurrents of diplomacy, politics, strategy, family, and fame with the fate of the free world hanging in the balance. In a world of giants—Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle, Marshall, MacArthur—it was a barefoot boy from Abilene, Kansas, who would master the art of power and become a modern-day George Washington.
Drawing upon meticulous research and a voluminous body of newly discovered records, letters, diaries, and firsthand accounts from three continents, Paradis brings Eisenhower to life, as a complicated man who craved simplicity, a genial cipher whose smile was a lethal political weapon.
With a page-turning pace and an eye for the overlooked, Paradis interweaves the grand arc of history with more human concerns, bringing readers into the private moments that led to Eisenhower’s most pivotal decisions. By deftly integrating the personal and the political, he reveals how Eisenhower’s rise both reflected and was integral to America’s rise as a global superpower.
An unflinching look at how character is forged, and leadership is learned, The Light of Battle breathes new life into the man who made “the leader of the free world” the mantle of the American presidency.
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What are the stories we tell ourselves about America?
How do they shape our sense of history,
cloud our perceptions,
inspire us?
America Redux explores the themes that create our shared sense of American identity and interrogates the myths we’ve been telling ourselves for centuries. With iconic American catchphrases as chapter titles, these twenty-one visual stories illuminate the astonishing, unexpected, sometimes darker sides of history that reverberate in our society to this very day—from the role of celebrity in immigration policy to the influence of one small group of white women on education to the effects of “progress” on housing and the environment to the inspiring force of collective action and mutual aid across decades and among diverse groups.
Fully illustrated with collaged archival photographs, maps, documents, graphic elements, and handwritten text, this book is a dazzling, immersive experience that jumps around in time and will make you view history in a whole different light.
You need to work to live.
That’s the truth for most people, and plenty of people in power have been abusing that truth for centuries.
Long before the first labor unions were formed, workers still knew what exploitation looked like. It looked like the enslavement of Black people. It looked like generations of children dying in dangerous jobs. It looked like wealthy people hiring private militaries to attack their employees.
But workers have always found a way to fight back. Lokono tribespeople resisted Columbus and his colonizers. Enslaved people led walkouts and rebellions. Textile workers demanded a wage that would let them have fun, not just survive. Miners died for the right to unionize. From 30,000 young seamstresses striking in the early 1900s to Uber drivers organizing for change today, people have learned we’re stronger when we are united.
Shift Happens is a smart, funny, and engaging look at the history of the worker actions that brought us weekends, pay equality, desegregation, an end to child labor, and so much more.
When ancient Greek friends Phoebe and Leon discover that a pentathlon athlete is cheating in the Olympic Games, they decide that they must stop him before it’s too late. But there are a lot of puzzles to solve along the way, from a mysterious message discovered in the temple to a suspicious conversation at the stadion. Will Phoebe and Leon be able to stop the villain before the winner is crowned? It’s a race to the finish line!
With beautifully detailed artwork by James Weston Lewis, fascinating facts about ancient Greece and a fold-out guide at the back of the book which explains how to read and write ancient Greek and contains an easy-to-use Greek dictionary, this is the perfect book for children who love history and hair-raising adventures.
Featuring:
-Ancient Greek messages to decode
– Maze
– Logic puzzles
– A page of solutions
– Fold-out dictionary and code-cracking guide
Other titles in the series include: British Museum The Curse of the Tomb Robbers, an Ancient Egyptian Puzzle Mystery (winner of the 2022 Creative Play Book Award) and British Museum The Plot Against the Emperor, an Ancient Roman Puzzle Mystery.
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The British Empire at its height governed more than half the world’s Muslims—some scholars have called it ‘the greatest Mohammedan power in the world’. It was crucial, therefore, for the Empire to present itself to Muslims as a friend and protector, and in this, few tasks were more important than engagement with the pilgrimage to Mecca.
Every year, tens of thousands of Muslims set out for Mecca from imperial territories throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Men and women representing all economic classes and scores of ethnic and linguistic groups made extraordinary journeys across waterways, deserts, and savannahs, creating huge challenges for officials charged with the administration of these pilgrims. They had to balance the religious obligation to travel against the desire to control the pilgrims’ movements, and they became responsible for the care of those who ran out of money. John Slight traces the British Empire’s complex interactions with the Hajj from the 1860s, when an outbreak of cholera led Britain to engage reluctantly in medical regulation of pilgrims, to the Suez Crisis of 1956. The story draws on a varied cast of characters— Richard Burton, Thomas Cook, the Begums of Bhopal, Lawrence of Arabia, and frontline imperial officials, many of them Muslim—and gives voice, throughout, to the pilgrims themselves. The Hajj and Britain’s Muslim Empire is a crucial resource for understanding how this episode in imperial history was experienced by rulers and ruled alike.