We discover what civil war, revolution and counter-revolution actually felt like from inside both camps. The contours of the war take shape through the words of the eyewitnesses. The atmosphere of events is vividly recaptured. And though the lived experience of the participants is revealed the uniquely tragic essence of all civil war. 'Fascinating and brilliantly unorthodox. ' Hugh Thomas,...

Andrew Rawnsley's Servants of the People is a timely and fascinating look at New Labour. Every new government promises to represent a new dawn, but for New Labour it was the Covenant that Tony Blair made with Britain. The party that won a landslide victory on May Day 1997 made the special claim that it represented a decisive break with...

At midnight on 14 August 1947, Britain finally granted independence to the peoples of India. Throughout the world, the end of the colonial era was in sight. India was the first great domino to fall, setting off a train of events that was so spread across Asia and Africa, culminat-ing in the collapse of th Soviet empire. The story of...

'This is his most powerful book since THE USES OF LITERACY and. . . deserves to be equally widely read. ' SUNDAY TIMES Richard Hoggart is one of Britain's most distinguished cultural critics. In this clear-eyed and controversial book he sets himself to take the temperature of the nation at the end of the 20th century - to test its...

The first three volumes of Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL (the western empire) were published by Everyman in 1993. Volumes 4-6 complete the set which is now available for the first time in many years. This year is the bicentenary of Gibbon's death, which has been widely noticed in the press, but even after two hundred years his book is still...

From 1861 to 1908 a woman, the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi, born the daughter of a minor mandarin, held the supreme power in China. Opportunistic, ruthless, malicious, she ruled over four hundred million people. Marina Warner's biography lays bare her complex personality: her extreme conventionalism; her hatred of foreigners; her passion for power and intrigue; her vanity and her delight in...

Florence in the fifteenth century was the undisputed centre of the Italian Renaissance. Its legacy is apparent today in every aspect of human endeavour. Our art and science, our learning and literature, our Christianity and our civic liberties, even our conception of what constitutes a gentleman, have all been shaped by Florentine thought and deed. In this brilliant and absorbing...

__________________________ Adventure, ingenuity, courage and disaster beneath the sea: the remarkable reality of Cold War submarine warfare In Blind Mans Bluff, veteran investigative journalist Sherry Sontag and award-winning New York Times reporter Christopher Drew reveal an extraordinary underwater world. Showing for the first time how the American Navy sent submarines wired with self-destruct charges into the heart of Soviet seas...

In this pioneering and important book, Philippe Aries surveys children and their place in family life from the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. The first section of the book explores the gradual change from the medieval attitude to children, looked upon as small adults as soon as they were past infancy, to the seventeenth and eighteenth...

In 1593, the brilliant and controversial young playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house. The circumstances were shady, the official account - a violent quarrel over the bill, or 'recknynge' - long regarded as dubious. For the first time tracing Marlowe's shadowy political and intelligence dealings, Charles Nicholl uncovers critical new evidence about that fatal...

'The first example of non-fiction, the text that underlies the entire discipline of history ... it is above all a treasure trove' Tom Holland One of the masterpieces of classical literature, The Histories describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the...

Situated in an area roughly corresponding to present-day Iraq, Mesopotamia is one of the great, ancient civilizations, though it is still relatively unknown. Yet, over 7,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the very first cities were created. This is the first book to reveal how life was lived in ten Mesopotamian cities: from Eridu, the Mesopotamian Eden, to that potent symbol...

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. The pace of the time itself, the sense of time passing and an end approaching gave a special quality to the Thirties. The public world pressed insistently on the private world. For those who came of literary...

Angelica Garnett may truly be called a child of Bloomsbury. Her Aunt was Virginia Woolf, her mother Vanessa Bell, and her father Duncan Grant, though for many years Angelica believed herself, naturally enough, the daughter of Vanessa's husband Clive. Her childhood homes, Charleston in Sussex and Gordon Square in London, were both centres of Bloomsbury activity, and she grew up...

In a corner of south-western France, a young rose grower nurtures a private passion to breed an exotic new flower. But the year is 1789, and the world is about to change... The Rose Grower throws a subtle, slanting light on the underside of history, as a young woman and her family are caught up in the bloodthirsty years of...