19th Century

Twilight of Splendor 10% off

King, Gregory Normal price £19.99 — Discount price £17.99 — You save £2.00  <convert> 

The first comprehensive look at the court of Britain's longest-reigning monarch Royalty and the Victorian era are perennially captivating subjects for readers. "Twilight of Splendor" features both, with unprecedented coverage of the people, pageantry, and power of Queen Victoria's court. Beginning with the Queen's 1897 Diamond Jubilee, the book moves back in time to describe her long reign. From the queen's family relationships and daily life to her palaces and holiday retreats, it paints a revealing portrait of a unique ruler at the height of empire.

Black Diamonds 20% off

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Wentworth is in Yorkshire and was surrounded by seventy collieries employing tens of thousands of men. It is the finest and largest Georgian house in Britain and belonged to the Fitzwilliam family. It is England's forgotten palace and belonged to Britain's richest aristocrats. "Black Diamonds" tells the story of its demise: family feuds, forbidden love, class war, and a tragic and violent death played their part. But coal, one of the most emotive issues in twentieth-century British politics, lies at its heart. This is the extraordinary story of how the fabric of English society shifted beyond recognition in fifty turbulent years in the twentieth century.

Savage Border 15% off

Stewart, Jules Normal price £19.99 — Discount price £16.99 — You save £3.00  <convert> 

For centuries, Pakistan's North West Frontier has been seen as a lawless wilderness, which more recently has given sanctuary to Osama Bin Laden and other fundamentalist Muslim leaders. This, the first significant book on the territory for 40 years, includes first hand accounts of life and soldiering on the Frontier since the Second World War. It also tells how the British and invaders before and after the Raj, attempted to deal with this unpredictable land of the Pathans. "The Savage Border" provides an in-depth, highly accessible account of life and conflict on the North West Frontier, covering not only the century of British rule since 1849, but also events since the creation of Pakistan in 1947. The author addresses key questions including 'What makes the Pathan so warlike and belligerent to outsiders, from Darius the Great in the 6th century BC to the US Marines in the 21st century AD?' and 'Can these tribesmen ever be brought into society's fold and persuaded to give up their terrorist comrades? The author is a specialist in North West Frontier affairs, who has travelled extensively in Pakistan.

Dr. Livingstone, I Presume? 15% off

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"Livingstone's Missionary Tales" had already been a bestseller. He now wanted to outdo other explorers and find the sources of the Nile. But after 5 years of travelling he was widely assumed to be dead. At that point, Stanley turned up with his Stars and Stripes flag and a caravan of much-needed supplies. In a brilliant book Claire Pettitt tells the story of their meeting and what led up to it, and the reactions to it of contemporaries and afterwards. The 'truth' is complicated. Livingstone, the crusading missionary had often cooperated with the slave-traders. He had made only one convert and his greatest achievement of exploration - the discovery of the source of the Nile - was in fact a misidentification. It is a fascinating story of conflict and paradox taking us into the extraordinary history of British engagement with Africa...and shows both the darkest side of imperialism and the popular myth-making of the music hall jokes, the cartoons etc. This is a launch title in the new "Profiles in History" series, edited by Mary Beard. This series explores classic moments of world history - those 'ring-a-bell' events that we always know less about than we think!

Rites of Peace 20% off

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Following on from his epic and bestselling '1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow' Adam Zamoyski has written the dramatic story of the Congress of Vienna [1813-15], which was to bring about the political reshaping of Europe and whose legacy affected international relations for a century. In the wake of his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, Napoleon's imperious grip on Europe began to weaken, raising the question of how the Continent was to be reconstructed after his defeat. There were many who dreamed of a peace to end all wars, in which the interests of peoples as well as those of rulers would be taken into account. But what followed was an unseemly and at times brutal scramble for territory by the most powerful states, in which countries were traded as if they had been private and their inhabitants counted like cattle. The results, fixed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, not only laid the foundations of the European world we know; it put in place a social order and a security system that lie at the root of many of the problems which dog the world today.

Blackest Streets 20% off

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'The place deserved destruction - a district of almost solid poverty and low life, in which the houses were as broken down and deplorable as their unfortunate inhabitants.' So wrote the pioneering social reformer Charles Booth of the Old Nichol, a notorious fifteen acre slum in London's East End. In 1887, Government inspectors were sent in to explore the thirty or so streets and horrifying - often lethal - living conditions. Among much else they found that the rotting 100-year-old houses were among the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords. Peers of the Realm, local politicians, churchmen and lawyers were making profits on these death-traps of as much as 150 per cent per annum. Before long, the old Nichol became a focus of public attention. Journalists, the clergy, charity workers and others condemned its 6,000 inhabitants for their drunkenness and criminality. The solution to this 'problem' lay in internment camps, said some, forced emigration - even policies designed to prevent breeding.

Workhouse 10% off

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We are all familiar with the moment when Oliver Twist dares to ask for more and his subsequent abuse at the hands of the workhouse system. Charlie Chaplin was another workhouse inmate and Florence Nightingale an outspoken critic of the system. These were institutions, we popularly believe, where families were torn asunder and the sick and needy subjected to the grimmest of regimes. What kind of society saw a solution in this uneasy mix of compassion and deterrence? And why did the workhouse strike terror into people's hearts so long into this century? This popular history conducts a full tour of the workhouse from 1696 to 1948. It draws upon the Archives' unique and personal accounts of inmates and staff.

First Total War 15% off

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World War I has been called 'the war to end all wars', the first time combatants were mobilized on a massive scale to ruthlessly destroy an enemy. But as David A. Bell argues in this tour de force of interpretive history, the Great War was not, in fact, the first total war. For this, we need to travel back to the era of muskets and sailing ships, the age of Napoleon. According to Bell, it was then that warfare was transformed into the hideous spectacle that seems ever present today. Indeed, nearly every modern aspect of war took root in that time: conscription, unconditional surrender, total disregard for the rules of combat, mobilization of civilians, guerrilla warfare, and the perverse notion of war fought for the sake of peace. The revolutionaries were leading 'the last crusade for universal liberty'. A war for such stakes could only be apocalyptic - and terribly bloody. With a historian's keen insight and a journalist's flair for detail, Bell brings this period to life while keeping an eye on our own 'war of liberation' in Iraq. The parallels are astonishing, making this vivid narrative history as timely and important as it is unforgettable.

London in the Nineteenth Century 20% off

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London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. In one hour's walk from west to east, London revealed a cavalcade of life chances - from all the prizes that civilisation could offer on the one hand to a barbarous struggle for existence on the other. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. The nineteenth century was London's greatest so far. It was a century of genius - poets, novelists, journalists in the front rank, but also architects, scientists, philanthropists, and politicians too. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday, Barnardo and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. And it was in the nineteenth century that Londoners began to address the contradictions and extremes of metropolitan life and try to impose some order on their turbulent city. The story of London in these hectic decades must first of all uncover how far the war on disorder succeeded. And how far it failed.

The Rreal Oliver Twist, John Waller
10% off

The Indian
Mutiny,
Saul David
20% off

The Last Mughal The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857,
William
Dalrymple
15% off

Rome or Death,
Daniel Pick
25% off


Victorian London,
Liza Picard
25% off