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THE SUNDAY TIMES #1 BESTSELLER A Book of the Year in The Times and Financial Times ‘This isn’t a book; it’s a case for revolution’ CAMILLA LONG, SUNDAY TIMES ‘A damning cannonball of truth through the York ramparts’ MAIL ON SUNDAY ‘Surely has a claim to the title of book of the year, for its seismic impact’ JANINE GIBSON, FINANCIAL TIMES ‘This book has changed the way its readers think. Possibly the most important book that touches on the British monarchy since the days of Thomas Payne’ WILL LLOYD ‘As represented in the book’s pages, the royal family, with its appendages and penumbra, can be seen as an impossible entity, toxic to those in it and attached to it, and subtly contaminating the rest of us.’ DAVID AARONOVICH Drawing on four years of research, numerous FOI requests and interviews with over a hundred people who have never spoken out before, the book traces the lives of the late Queen’s second son and his ex-wife through their childhoods, courtship, marriage, divorce, careers, and royal and charitable activities. Having still lived together until their departure from Royal Lodge in 2025, they claimed to be "the happiest divorced couple in the world". The book investigates the reality of their relationship and their love lives. It charts Andrew’s record in the Falklands, his business activities and reveals details of how the couple have been able financially to sustain their extravagant lifestyles. It also recounts the full story of their links with Jeffrey Epstein. Chronicling their lives in parallel, the picture that emerges is of a spoilt former prince unable to connect and a former duchess pushed by her insecurities into a desperate need to maintain the attention her ‘royal’ status brought. Rigorously researched and packed full of revelations, this is eye-watering biography at its best. ‘This isn't just a royal biography. It's a study in reputational collapse and the danger of unchecked power inside Britain's most protected institution' THE STANDARD ‘A catalyst for Andrew’s de-princing’ THE TIMES

This fully illustrated study pits Germany’s Panzer I against the Soviet T-26 in the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, as Spain descended into civil war, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sent tanks to aid the opposing sides, keen to see how they fared in combat. Armed with twin machine guns, Germany’s Panzer I fought alongside Nationalist troops, while the 45mm-armed Soviet T-26 took the field with Republican forces, with captured examples soon equipping the Nationalists. In this book, Jacek Zabielski reveals the origins, development and combat history of these two types, which remained in front-line service in 1941 as Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union. While both types were soon outclassed by better-armed and -armoured successors, the lessons learned in Spain would shape German and Soviet combined-arms doctrine on the Eastern Front during and after Operation Barbarossa. Featuring specially commissioned artwork, full-colour mapping and archive photographs alongside the authoritative text, this study reveals how the Panzer I and T-26 performed in battle, and their technical and tactical influence throughout World War II.

BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK'A teeming chronicle of those scorching months. Superbly researched.' THE TIMES'Scorching, animated and essential reading. Superb.' THE MAIL ON SUNDAY'Grippingly captures the three months that shook Britain's cultural landscape' PAULINE BLACK'Scorching, seething and scintillating, Heatwave conjures a slow-burning collage of a country on the brink. I lived through those cruel months, and Williams recreates them with intense skill' SIMON GARFIELD'An absolute joy' PETE PAPHIDES'Engrossing...powerful...goes way beyond nostalgia' DAVID KYNASTONWith temperatures soaring to 35oC, severe water shortages and a sunburned population queuing at the standpipes, the summer of 1976 was always remembered as Britain's hottest. But the wave that hit the UK that year was also cultural and political, with upheaval on the streets, in parliament, on the cricket pitch and on the radios and TV sets of a nation at a crossroads. Before this blistering summer, Britain seemed stuck in the post-war era, a country where people were all in it together - as long as you were white, male and straight. In July, Tom Robinson writes a song called Glad to be Gay, and by August bank holiday, Black youth are making the police run for their lives in the almighty riot at the Notting Hill Carnival. But with the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson suddenly quitting, the pound sinking and the economy tanking, a restless immigrant population and increasing dissatisfaction in the old world order, the weather seemed to boil up the country to the point where the lid blows off. Weaving a rich tapestry of the news stories of the year, with social commentary and dozens of first-person interviews with those that were there at the time, Williams's reappraisal of the summer of '76 is an evocative, sometimes nostalgic but always an unflinching read. Heatwave takes us back to relive the events of that summer and asks - have we really moved on as much as we would have liked?

‘An exceptional piece of work; powerful, vivid and compelling’ Rowland White, author of Vulcan 607The Second World War was not only fought in the skies above Europe or on distant beaches. Between 1939 and 1945, Hitler’s aerial onslaught crashed into lives across the UK night after night, killing more than 60,000 civilians and leaving millions homeless. May 2026 marks the 85th anniversary of the end of the Night Blitz. But the aerial assault on Britain did not stop in May 1941. For too long, ‘The Blitz’ – from the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ or lightning war – has been framed as a few desperate months from September 1940 that mainly affected London. In reality, the scope of the attack on the home front was far more widespread, and far more devastating. Now, John Nichol tells this supposedly familiar narrative – one of the most important events in British history – afresh.  Beginning with a search to understand his mother’s experiences of the blitz on Tyneside – drawing on fragments of memory and the unanswered questions she left behind – Nichol ranges outward to reveal a truly national history. From Dover to Glasgow, Cardiff to Manchester, he uncovers astonishing accounts of catastrophe and resilience. Of ‘ordinary’ men, women and children catapulted into harm’s way. Of heroic firefighters battling infernos, the unflinching bravery required to defuse unexploded bombs, families wiped out in an instant, communities left bereft by a single blast. Using interviews with survivors, official records and eyewitness testimonies, Nichol gives voice to the unsung heroes who endured explosions, fire and fear, but found the courage to run towards danger. He brings the story up to date by speaking to people involved in similar situations: mass casualty events, the deadly blaze at Grenfell Tower, bomb disposal in modern warfare and individual acts of astonishing bravery. And as new military threats emerge, Nichol asks whether the country still has such resilience today. At once gripping and compassionate, BLITZ is the definitive account of a nationwide struggle that shaped the course of the war and the spirit of a generation. The book includes maps, colour endpapers, and two plate sections with 38 photos and archival images. ‘The story of a whole nation as only Nichol can write, BLITZ is a wonderful book perfectly anchored in the human experience’ Dr Robert Lyman MBE FRHistS, co-author of Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918–40‘A truly powerful and engaging narrative. The way Nichol weaves the story of the Blitz with more recent accounts makes for an excellent read’ Andy Saunders, military historian and author‘An important book which takes the myth of the storybook Blitz Spirit and redefines it. Absolutely fantastic’ Professor Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles: Searching for Hope After Disaster

Treasures of the Vikings explores the material culture of the Viking Age, and the raiders and traders who plundered and purchased across Europe and Central Asia. From battles in Estonia in the mid 8th-century and the apocalyptic Viking attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne on the remote northeast coast of Anglo-Saxon England in 793, until the demise of Scandinavian control of Shetland in 1472, Viking groups played a central role in history, as pirates, traders and mercenaries, leaving a trail of destruction, settlements and treasure from Newfoundland to the shores of the Black Sea. In between, Vikings traded along the great rivers of Russia and Ukraine, conquered in Britain and France, settled in Iceland and Greenland, and enriched Scandinavia with loot. Marvel at a Frankish Ulfberht high-carbon steel sword, prized by Viking warriors for its strength and lightness, and see the remarkable walrus ivory and whale tooth Lewis Chess Pieces, found on the eponymous Scottish isle in the 19th century. Packed with photographs of fascinating objects and sites, Treasures of the Vikings is ideal for any enthusiast for all things Viking.

A global history of commercial and cultural exchange between two great powers of the medieval ageIn the mid-thirteenth century, Europe was shaken by the Mongol invasions. Realizing the immense potential for accessing remote markets in the East, Venetian merchants, diplomats, and seafarers established far-flung commercial networks with the Mongol Empire. Venice and the Mongols tells the story of this dynamic new era in world history, one that saw one of the most advanced maritime powers of the age bridge East and West in a new global marketplace created by the Mongol conquests. In a panoramic narrative spanning nearly two centuries, Nicola Di Cosmo and Lorenzo Pubblici describe how Mongolian support of European merchants allowed for the exchange of goods and ideas across their vast empire, and how cooperation with the khans enabled the Venetian city-state to trade safely, grow its influence, and expand its territory eastward while opening Europe to new markets. Di Cosmo and Pubblici shed light on trade practices, legal structures, and cultural relations, and share new perspectives on Marco Polo’s travels in Mongol-controlled territories. They examine Venetian strategies in the face of Mongol and Genoese rivalry and show how the city-state adapted to the challenges posed by the decline of Mongol authority and the ascendance of the Ottomans in the latter half of the fourteenth century. Blending vivid storytelling with rich archival research, Venice and the Mongols challenges conventional perspectives on the Mongols as mere agents of destruction and shows how Venice ushered in a new era of commerce and diplomacy in an interconnected medieval world.

Organized by type, World War II Military Aircraft includes more than 50 of the best- known aircraft to fly for all nations from 1939 to 1945, from classic fighters such as the Messerschmitt 109, Supermarine Spitfire and North American P-51 Mustang, through the great bombers of the era, including the Avro Lancaster, Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and Heinkel He 111H, to the aircraft that fought across the vastness of the Pacific Theatre, such as the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Grumman F4F Wildcat and Douglas SBD Dauntless torpedo bomber. World War II Military Aircraft also features 12 large-scale gatefolds of key types, including the multirole German Junkers Ju-88 fighter-bomber, the British rocket-armed Hawker Typhoon, which proved essential in winning the battle for Normandy, and the Soviet Yak fighter, the first in one of the longest-running aircraft production programs in history. Each entry includes a dozen annotations detailing aspects of the type’s technology, from powerplant and armament to crew compartment and aerodynamic elements. Featuring the greatest aircraft of World War II, this book is the perfect gift for military aviation enthusiasts and modellers.

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a throng of counterprotesters, killing a young woman and injuring dozens. Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker has written a riveting and panoptic account of what unfolded that weekend, focusing less on the rally’s far-right leaders than on the story of the city itself. University, local, and state officials, including law enforcement, were unable or unwilling to grasp the gathering threat. Clergy, activists, and organizers from all walks of life saw more clearly what was coming and, at great personal risk, worked to warn and defend their city. To understand why their warnings fell on deaf ears, Baker does a deep dive into American history. In her research, she discovers an uncannily similar event that took place decades before when an emissary of the poet and fascist Ezra Pound arrived in Charlottesville intending to start a race war. In Charlottesville, Baker shows how a city more associated with Thomas Jefferson than civil unrest became a flashpoint in a continuing struggle over our nation’s founding myths.

In Fear No Pharaoh, the journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. He tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis’s trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall’s rival rabbis - Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy to avoid attracting attention, and David Einhorn, whose fiery sermons condemning bondage led to a pro-slavery mob threatening his life. We also meet August Bondi, a veteran of Europe’s 1848 revolutions, who fought with John Brown in Bleeding Kansas and later in the Union Army, and the Polish émigré Ernestine Rose, a feminist, atheist, and abolitionist who championed “emancipation of all kinds.”As he tracks these characters, Kreitner illuminates the shifting dynamics of Jewish life in America - and the debates about religion, morality, and politics that endure to this day.

Settling Debt overturns the familiar tale of early antislavery as a pure moral triumph by revealing its uneasy ties to colonial ambition and economic anxiety. Cameron Seglias shows how, from the late seventeenth century through the American Revolution, settlers and religious writers condemned slavery as a threat to their own prosperity and salvation. Debt, understood both as money owed and moral obligation, anchored their vision of freedom and shaped how they justified seizing Indigenous lands while denouncing racial bondage. Drawing from neglected books, pamphlets, poems, and dramatic protests, like the radical acts of Benjamin Lay, Seglias weaves literary close readings with sharp historical insights to expose how freedom and dispossession were two sides of the same coin. At once readable and provocative, Settling Debt compels us to see how the language of moral debt masked the building of a colonial order rooted in inequality. In revisiting this past, Seglias offers a timely reminder: The debts of America's founding have yet to be settled.

In The Latecomer's Rise, Muyang Chen reveals the nature and impact of a rapidly growing form of international lending: Chinese development finance. Over the past few decades, China has become the world's largest provider of bilateral development finance. Through its two national policy banks, the China Development Bank (CDB) and the Export-Import Bank of China (China Exim), it has funded infrastructure and industrial projects in numerous emerging markets and developing countries. Yet this very surge and magnitude of capital has raised questions about the characteristics of Chinese bilateral lending and its repercussions on the international order. Drawing on a variety of novel Chinese primary sources, including interviews and official bank documents, Chen pinpoints the distinctiveness of Chinese bilateral development finance, explains its origins, and analyzes its effects. She compares Chinese policy banks with their foreign counterparts to show that the CDB and China Exim, while state-supported, are in fact also market-oriented - they are as much government organs as they are profit-driven financial agencies that serve both state and firms' interests. This approach, which emerged out of China's particular economic history, suggests that Chinese overseas lending is not merely a tool of economic statecraft that challenges Western-led economic regimes. Instead, China's responses to extant rules, norms, and practices across given issue areas have varied between contestation and convergence. Rich with empirical detail and penetrating insights, The Latecomer's Rise demystifies the little-known workings of Chinese development finance to revise our conceptions of China's role in the international financial system.

The London Borough of Newham was created in 1965 by the merger of the County Borough Councils of East Ham and West Ham. At first, industry was concentrated on the banks of the river Lea (or Lee). The coming of the railways coupled with the rise of new technologies in the Victorian era, and legislation prohibiting many of the smellier and noisier industries from operating within London led to the rapid growth of industry and population within Newham from the 1840s onwards. The area grew rich from industry, with famous names such as Tate & Lyle and Trebor Sweets, railway engineering at Stratford and the docks. Marshland south of Plaistow and East Ham was drained to create the docks and the industrial areas of Canning Town and Silvertown, the latter named after a local entrepreneur. Much of this industry fell into decline from the late twentieth century. When the docks closed in 1981 and relocated to Tilbury, the London Docklands Development Corporation was set up to regenerate the Docklands area with London City Airport and a new University of East London campus taking their place, and retail became the major employer in the area.Newham at Work explores the working life of this borough in London and its people and the industries that have characterised it through the years. The book will appeal to all those with an interest in the history of Newham.

In the Tudor court, love blossomed when Henry Percy met Anne Boleyn. However, their romance was abruptly torn apart by Cardinal Wolsey, who chastised Percy, an earl’s son, for choosing to marry the daughter of a mere knight. Despite a spirited defence, Percy was ordered to no longer see her. Percy was forced into marrying Mary Talbot, daughter of the fourth Earl of Shrewsbury. The loveless match proved acrimonious and bitter, culminating in Mary accusing her husband of trying to poison her. After a quarrel in which Percy, now sixth Earl of Northumberland, mentioned his betrothal to Anne Boleyn, Mary wrote to her father to warn King Henry VIII that her husband and Anne had been precontracted, hoping to stop the king marrying her. But there was more to Henry Percy than being Anne’s first love. Though often ill, he executed all the rough and arduous duties of Scottish border warfare, proving to be a strong and effective Warden of the North. His was a full life, though not a particularly happy one. In June 1537, aged thirty-five and old before his time, he died poor and ostensibly alone. He was buried on the same day he died, the crown denying him even the usual aristocratic funeral. In the first full-length biography of this fascinating man, Jan-Marie Knights tells a story of love, duty and loss.

Ipswich grew around its port, established during Anglo-Saxon times for trade with northwestern continental Europe. It became an important religious centre in the Middle Ages, in one of the most populated and wealthy areas of the country. Alongside the docks, and the two rivers, the Orwell and Gipping, industries grew up to support the local agricultural economy and the population migrated from surrounding areas as well as from further afield and abroad. The mix has given Ipswich a lively cultural history that remains to the present day and alongside the working dock area much of the waterfront has been redeveloped for leisure and housing but as with all large towns, particularly ports, Ipswich’s history also encompasses how it had to deal with justice, crime and punishment.Illustrated throughout, this accessible historical portrait of the transformation that Ipswich has undergone through the ages will be of great interest to residents, visitors and all those with links to the town.

In 1985, Tilquhillie Castle, in the picturesque Royal Deeside region in Aberdeenshire, was a ruinous Z-plan Scottish tower house. Originally built in the middle of the sixteenth century for the important local Douglas family, it had been derelict for nearly forty years, inhabited only by bats. John Coyne and his wife Kay had the vision and dedication to buy this property and restore it to its former glory, working together with talented local craftsmen over many years. The philosophy that guided the restoration was based on authenticity, informed by the building itself. During the process, a picture emerged of a building that was the product of an unknown but highly gifted master mason, probably a Frenchman. Details of his genius were evident everywhere in the building. He had designed and built a simple and elegant fortified dwelling for the Douglas laird, which stood in defiance of any potential foe and provided evidence of the social, political and historical norms of a bygone era. Although of modest proportions as castles go, Tilquhillie Castle is revealed as an architectural masterpiece of the period.

Reclaiming Turkmenistan from the margins of global attention, Hein offers a lively history of the ‘Mother of the World’ and its people. These days, it’s rare for news items to come out of Turkmenistan. It can be easy for us to assume that the country was always isolated, quirky or even irrelevant. But its real history paints a wildly different picture. Turkmenistan’s desert-dominated landscape has been an unheralded flashpoint at many key moments in history, whether as an integral but misunderstood part of the Soviet Empire, or as a major strategic prize in the brutal invasions of Genghis Khan. Sat exactly where East met West, yet often aloof from both, Turkmenistan was a key crossroads on the Silk Road, and once hosted the largest city on Earth, which doubled up as one of the world’s great seats of learning. It lays claim to conjuring up the world’s first monotheistic religion, and it may well have been one of the major players in that elusive turning point of history, the birth of civilisation—up there with Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley. No other nation can claim all of this, yet Turkmenistan’s past has long remained hidden from our understanding. This is the extraordinary story of a starkly beautiful land, its unique culture, and the wonderful people who now call it home.

Symbolika hebrejských znaků je jeden nekonečný chasidský příběh, který prostě stojí za to poznat. Ne nadarmo se stala také pevnou součástí a zároveň kořením talmudu, midrašů i kabalistické literatury – jak středověké, tak té současné. A poznat symboly jednotlivých znaků a jejich vzájemné souvztažnosti může dnešnímu čtenáři zároveň přiblížit biblický text ve zcela nových (nebo lépe řečeno staronových) souvislostech. Navíc si ověří, že tu nejde o nějaké biblické kódy, čarování s čísly nebo znásilňování textu, ale o vypracovaný systém znaků vycházející z nejstarších tradic lidstva, přírody a vesmíru. Není vyloučeno, že některým se předkládaná kniha stane dokonce vstupenkou k hlubšímu poznání jazyka bible.

How the modern world has understood the ancient Greeks and why they matter todayThe study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture in the twentieth century under totalitarian persecutions. Through the study of different historians, many of them unjustly forgotten, it shows the problematic nature of the Anglo-Saxon tradition and the importance of ideas from the continent of Europe, the ambiguities of democracy, and the impossibility of understanding the past or the present outside our common European heritage. It ends by offering suggestions for the future of the study of the Greeks in the context of world history.

A fascinating, exhaustive guide to London's private members' clubs - both old and new - and their culture. Uncover the hidden world of London's private members' clubs. This guide, by the leading historian on the subject, provides a fascinating glimpse into the inner worlds of these legendary institutions - from aristocratic haunts like Boodle's and Brooks's, to modern icons like Soho House and the Groucho Club. Exploring the culture, history and traditions of these enigmatic locations, London Clubland is the ultimate almanac to this world, from navigating the application process, to the unwritten rules that define these spaces - not to mention a wealth of trivia and entertaining anecdotes assembled over twenty years. Discover mottos, maps, songs and club recipes, as well as little-known facts that some of London's most iconic clubs probably wouldn't want you to know. Whether you are a long-standing member, a reciprocal visitor, an aspiring applicant or simply curious about this secretive world, step into a revealing tour of some of London's most discreet institutions.