Showing titles in Great Britain

On 16 March 1807, the British Parliament passed The Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. In the following year the Royal Navy's African Squadron was formed, its mission to stop and search ships at sea suspected of carrying slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Middle East. With typical thoroughness, the Royal Navy went further, and took the fight to the enemy, sailing boldly up uncharted rivers and creeks to attack the barracoons where the slaves were assembled ready for shipment.

As an unmarried heretic with no heir, Elizabeth I was regarded with horror by Catholic Europe, while her Stuart successors, James I and Charles I, were seen as impecunious and incompetent. The traumatic civil wars, regicide and a republican Commonwealth were followed by the floundering foreign-leaning rule of Charles II and his brother, James II, before William of Orange invaded England with a Dutch army and a new order was imposed.

From the Orwellian reach of an Amazon warehouse to the time trials of a council care worker and the grim reality behind the glossy Uber app, Hired is a clear-eyed analysis of a divided nation and a riveting dispatch from the very front line of low-wage Britain. We all define ourselves by our profession. But what if our job was demeaning, poorly paid, and tedious? Cracking open Britain's divisions, journalist James Bloodworth spends six months living and working across Britain, taking on the country's most gruelling jobs.

A triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

Step back in time and explore the captivating battles, clans, highlanders, myths, and legends that have shaped Scotland from ancient times to the present day. Through vivid storytelling, you'll be transported to the heart of Scotland's past to discover the customs and traditions of its clans. From the fierce Highland warriors to the cunning Lowland politicians, and how their actions shaped Scotland's identity.

In this remarkable book, Alison Weir recounts one of the greatest and most remarkable love stories of medieval England. It is the extraordinary tale of an exceptional woman, Katherine Swynford, who became first the mistress, and later the wife, of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. But Katherine Swynford was much more than that.

Stuart Maconie is one of the keenest observers of English identity. Who better to take the temperature of the nation at this uncertain waymark on our national journey? Deftly weaving history and politics in engaging, conversational prose, The Full English is a love-letter to England written in Maconie’s inimitable style. As we wend our way through towns and cities, by Megabus and Avanti train, we meet a rich cast of characters and delve into the seldom-explored crevices of our national psyche.

Despite suffering at the hands of invading Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans, and tyrannical kings and queens, Britons have been renowned since Queen Boudicca for their fierce commitment to the liberty of the individual. Britain's 700-year-old parliamentary democracy has developed from a passion for fairness and the rule of law. In an atmospheric and vivid narrative, Rebecca Fraser takes listeners through key events in the nation's history.

This is a story of the most well documented, most commented on love affair of our times. Yet the personalities behind the facade remain elusive and the nature of their relationship is an enigma. This is the first major biography of Charles and Camilla, two people who have battled against the curious lot that fate has thrown their way. Gyles Brandreth returns to the same ground as his last book, the bestselling "Philip and Elizabeth"; "Portrait of a Marriage".

1757 - Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, a salacious publication detailing the names and 'specialties' of the capital's prostitutes, eventually became one of the 18th century's most successful literary works as well as an essential accessory for any serious gentleman of pleasure. Beyond its titillating passages lay a glimpse into the sex lives of those who lived and died by the list's profits during the Georgian era. The Covent Garden Ladies tells the story of three unusual characters whose colourful lives were brought together by this publication.

They are the most chronicled family on the face of the globe. Their every move attracts headlines. Scores of books have tried and failed to penetrate the royal facade. Now Kitty Kelley has gone behind palace walls to provide the first three-dimensional, comprehensive, and evenhanded portrait of the men and women who make up the British Royal family.

In his brilliantly illuminating new book Sathnam Sanghera demonstrates how so much of what we consider to be modern Britain is actually rooted in our imperial past. In prose that is, at once, both clear-eyed and full of acerbic wit, Sanghera shows how our past is everywhere: from how we live to how we think, from the foundation of the NHS to the nature of our racism, from our distrust of intellectuals in public life to the exceptionalism that imbued the campaign for Brexit and the government's early response to the COVID crisis. And yet empire is a subject weirdly hidden from view.

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-

With a narrative that grips the reader like a detective story, Antonia Fraser brings the characters and events of the Gunpowder Plot to life. Dramatically recreating the conditions and motives that surrounded the fateful night of November 5, 1605, she unravels the tangled web of religion and politics that spawned the plot.

One of the classic volumes of autobiography, My Early Life is a lively and colourful account of a young man's quest for action, adventure and danger. Churchill's schooldays are undistinguished, but he is admitted to Sandhurst and embarks on a career as a soldier and a war correspondent, seeing action in Cuba, in India, in the Sudan - where he took part in the battle of Omdurman, of which he gives us a stirring account - and finally in South Africa.

The story of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is one of the most remarkable in history: a long courtship followed by a shotgun wedding and then a coronation, ending just short of three years later when a husband’s passion turned to such hatred that he simply wanted his wife gone. Missing from most accounts is how the turbulent nature of Anne and Henry’s relationship was tied almost completely to the major events of international politics at one of the great turning points of British and European history. This was a marriage that convulsed not just a nation, but a whole continent.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Thomas Cromwell by Diarmid MacCulloch, read by David Rintoul. Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, and by the end of the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King.

Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody.

The brilliantly compelling new biography of the treacherous and tyrannical King John, published to coincide with the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. Authoritative and dramatic, Marc Morris' King John offers a compelling portrait of an extraordinary king whose reign marked a momentous turning point in the history of Britain and Europe. King John is buried in Worcester Cathedral.

Bill Bryson is the world's funniest travel writer, and a master of comic observation. His hugely popular books, spanning topics from linguistics to Shakespeare to the human body, have sold over 16 million copies and been translated into 30 languages, and his 2003 science book A Short History of Nearly Everything won the prestigious Aventis and Descartes prizes.