WINNER OF THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE 2019 AN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR A CBC BOOK OF THE YEARThe extraordinary story of an indomitable 95-year-old woman – and of the most extraordinary century in Ethiopia’s history. A new Wild SwansA hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her worl ...
A history of the English East India company.During 200 years the East India Company grew from a loose association of Elizabethan tradesmen into «the grandest society of merchants in the universe». As a commercial enterprise it came to control half the world's trade and as a political entity it administered an embryonic empire. Without it there would have been no British India and no British Empire. In a tapestry ranging from Southern Africa ...
Paul Kennedy’s international bestseller is a sweeping account of five hundred years of fluctuating economic muscle and military might, explaining the journey to the present among the great powers of the world.Kennedy’s masterwork begins in the year 1500, at a time of various great centres of power including Minh China, the Ottomans, the rising Mughal state, the nations of Europe. But it was the latter which, through competition, economic growth ...
“We are a trading community, a commercial people. Murder is doubtless a very shocking offence, nevertheless as what is done is not to be undone, let us make our money out of it.” Punch.Murder in nineteenth-century Britain was ubiquitous – not necessarily in quantity but in quality. This was the era of penny-bloods, early crime fiction and melodramas for the masses. This was a time when murder and entertainment were firmly entwined.In this meticu ...
Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, Richard Holmes’s dazzling portrait of the most exciting period in British history is a groundbreaking achievement.The book opens with Joseph Banks, botanist on Captain Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, who stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769 fully expecting to have located Paradise. Back in Britain, the same Romantic revolution that had inspired Bank ...
[Previously published as ‘Went The Day Well’]A sweeping political, social, military and cultural overview of the United Kingdom on the eve, and then the day, of the greatest battle fought by British arms.Midnight, Sunday, 17 June 1815. There was no town in England that had not sent its soldiers, hardly a household that was not holding its breath, not a family, as Byron put it, that would escape ‘havoc’s tender mercies’ at Waterloo, and yet at th ...
Winston Churchill rages against time and his own mortality, in conflict with friend and foe alike, in this tumultuous political drama of his last ten years of public life. Here is Churchill at his most outrageous, maddening and devious – but also at his most human, courageous, and defiant.At the end of July 1945, Churchill was a defeated man – hurled from power by the British people after a war in which he had saved his country.‘Churchill Defian ...
‘Some battles change nothing. Waterloo changed almost everything.’On the 18th June 1815 the armies of France, Britain and Prussia descended upon a quiet valley south of Brussels. In the previous three days the French army had beaten the British at Quatre-Bras and the Prussians at Ligny. The Allies were in retreat.The blood-soaked battle of Waterloo would become a landmark in European history, to be examined over and again, not least because unti ...
A magnificent and timely examination of an age of fear, subversion, suppression and espionage, Adam Zamoyski explores the attempts of the governments of Europe to police the world in a struggle against obscure forces, seemingly dedicated to the overthrow of civilisation.The French Revolution and the blood-curdling violence it engendered terrified the ruling and propertied classes of Europe. Unable to grasp how such horrors could have come about, ...
