''Janina Ramirez is a born storyteller, and in Femina she is at the peak of her powers. This is bravura narrative history underpinned by passionate advocacy for the women whom medieval history has too often ignored or overlooked. Femina is essential reading'' - Dan Jones, bestselling author of The Plantagenets and Powers and Thrones ''I am the fiery life of divine substance, I blaze above the beauty of the fields, I shine in the waters, I burn in sun, moon and stars'' - Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179) The middle ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings: a patriarchal society which oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the ''dark'' ages were anything but. Oxford and BBC historian Janina Ramirez has uncovered countless influential women''s names struck out of historical records, with the word FEMINA annotated beside them. As gatekeepers of the past ordered books to be burnt, artworks to be destroyed, and new versions of myths, legends and historical documents to be produced, our view of history has been manipulated. Only now, through a careful examination of the artefacts, writings and possessions they left behind, are the influential and multifaceted lives of women emerging. Femina goes beyond the official records to uncover the true impact of women like Jadwiga, the only female King in Europe, Margery Kempe, who exploited her image and story to ensure her notoriety, and the Loftus Princess, whose existence gives us clues about the beginnings of Christianity in England. See the medieval world with fresh eyes and discover why these remarkable women were removed from our collective memories. Lire la suite Fermer

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literaturebr>br>''Absolutely essential and heartbreaking reading. There''s a reason Ms. Alexievich won a Nobel Prize'' - Craig Mazin, creator of the HBO / Sky TV series Chernobylbr>br>br>- A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised text -br>br>In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. br>br>A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.br>br>''Beautifully written. . . heart-breaking'' - Arundhati Roy, Elle br>br>''One of the most humane and terrifying books I''ve ever read'' - Helen Simpson, Observer> Lire la suite Fermer

Geert Mak (Author) Geert Mak is a journalist and historian, and the internationally acclaimed author of In Europe, In America , Amsterdam and The Bridge . He is one of the Netherlands'' bestselling authors, has twice been awarded Historian of the Year and his books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, and received her doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1933, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, after which she fled Germany for Paris, where she worked on behalf of Jewish refugee children. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship, and in 1941 she left France for the United States. Her many books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she coined the famous phrase ''the banality of evil''. She died in 1975.>

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose personalities had somehow given them the ability to do whatever they wished.br>br>Ian Kershaw''s new book is a compelling, lucid and challenging attempt to understand these rulers, whether those operating on the widest stage (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini) or with a more national impact (Tito, Franco). What was it about these leaders and the times they lived in that allowed them such untrammelled and murderous power? And what brought that era to an end? In a contrasting group of profiles (Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Kohl) Kershaw uses his exceptional skills to think through how other, strikingly different figures wielded power.>
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Meet the world's most dangerous man.

Who is the real Vladimir Putin? What does he want? And what will he do next?

Despite the millions of words written on Putin's Russia, the West still fails to truly understand one of the world's most powerful politicians, whose influence spans the globe and whose networks of power reach into the very heart of our daily lives.

In this essential primer, Professor Mark Galeotti uncovers the man behind the myth, addressing the key misperceptions of Putin and explaining how we can decipher his motivations and next moves. From Putin's early life in the KGB and his real relationship with the USA to his vision for the future of Russia - and the world - Galeotti draws on new Russian sources and explosive unpublished accounts to give unparalleled insight into the man at the heart of global politics.
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Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II. This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle
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Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron. A Visiting Research Fellow at King''s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist for the Washington Post and hosts the podcast Tommies and Jerries on British-German relations together with Oliver Moody. She was born in East Germany and is now based in the UK.>

Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reportage and memoir by our greatest writer about European affairs.

Drawing on half a century of interviews and experience, Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - how, having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945, it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe ''whole, free and at peace''. And then faltered.

Humane, expert and deeply felt, Homelands is full of encounters, conversations and anecdote. It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself, from his father''s experience on D-Day, to his teenage French exchange, to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerillas and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe, and the US.

Homelands is both a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, all the way from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. It culminates in an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.


Timothy Garton Ash was 17 when Britain joined the European Community and 64 when Britain left it. In the intervening years he has lived and breathed European politics, witnessing some of the most dramatic scenes in its history, interviewing many of its key players and analysing how life has evolved for ordinary Europeans across the breadth of the continent.

He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford and a columnist for the Guardian. He has won many prizes and plaudits for his journalism and books, including The File, his riveting autobiographical account of investigating the contents of his Stasi file after the fall of East Germany. Lire la suite Fermer

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ''The Putin book that we''ve been waiting for'' Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland ''Books about modern Russia abound ... Belton has surpassed them all. Her much-awaited book is the best and most important on modern Russia'' The Times A chilling and revelatory expose of the KGB''s renaissance, Putin''s rise to power, and how Russian black cash is subverting the world. In Putin''s People , former Moscow correspondent and investigative journalist Catherine Belton reveals the untold story of how Vladimir Putin and his entourage of KGB men seized power in Russia and built a new league of oligarchs. Through exclusive interviews with key inside players, Belton tells how Putin''s people conducted their relentless seizure of private companies, took over the economy, siphoned billions, blurred the lines between organised crime and political powers, shut down opponents, and then used their riches and power to extend influence in the West. In a story that ranges from Moscow to London, Switzerland and Trump''s America, Putin''s People is a gripping and terrifying account of how hopes for the new Russia went astray, with stark consequences for its inhabitants and, increasingly, the world. ''A fearless, fascinating account ... Reads at times like a John le Carre novel ... A groundbreaking and meticulously researched anatomy of the Putin regime, Belton''s book shines a light on the pernicious threats Russian money and influence now pose to the west'' Guardian
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''Fascinating... One of the most astute political commentators on Putin and modern Russia'' Financial Times ''An amazing achievement'' Peter Frankopan Can anyone truly understand Russia? Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone''s ''other''. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war and peace, poets and revolutionaries. In this essential whistle-stop tour of the world''s most complex nation, Mark Galeotti takes us behind the myths to the heart of the Russian story: from the formation of a nation to its early legends - including Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great - to the rise and fall of the Romanovs, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, Chernobyl and the end of the Soviet Union - plus the rise of a politician named Vladimir Putin, and the events leading to the Ukrainian war. Lire la suite Fermer

Michael Pye's twelve previous books have been translated into fifteen languages; three have been New York Times 'Notable Books of the Year', two were British bestsellers and one became a Hollywood movie. He won various prizes

A NEW STATESMAN AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021br>br>''Deserves to remain the standard treatment of the subject in English for many decades to come'' Roderick Beaton, Times Literary Supplementbr>br>A thrilling history of the revolutionary birth of modern Greece from ''the preeminent historian of a generation'' (Misha Glenny)br>br>In the exhausted, repressive years that followed Napoleon''s defeat in 1815, there was one cause that came to galvanize countless individuals across Europe and the United States: freedom for Greece.br>br>Mark Mazower''s wonderful new book recreates one of the most compelling, unlikely and significant events in the story of modern Europe. In the face of near impossible odds, the people of the villages, valleys and islands of Greece rose up against Sultan Mahmud II and took on the might of the imperial Ottoman armed forces, its Turkish cavalrymen, Albanian foot soldiers and the fearsome Egyptians. Despite the most terrible disasters, they held on until military intervention by Russia, France and Britain finally secured the kingdom of Greece.br>br>Mazower brilliantly brings together the different strands of the story. He takes us into the minds of revolutionary conspirators and the terrors of besieged towns, the stories of itinerant priests, sailors and slaves, ambiguous heroes and defenceless women and children struggling to stay alive amid a conflict of extraordinary brutality. Ranging across the Eastern Mediterranean and far beyond, he explores the central place of the struggle in the making of Romanticism and a new kind of politics that had volunteers flocking from across Europe to die in support of the Greeks. A story of how statesmen came to terms with an even more powerful force than themselves - the force of nationalism - this is above all a book about how people decided to see their world differently and, at an often terrible cost to themselves and their families, changed history.br>br>''Exquisite, impressive'' The Timesbr>br>''Superbly subtle and thorough'' Daily Telegraph> Lire la suite Fermer

The extraordinary true story of the Stasi''s poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society.

''Engrossing.'' Observer ''Remarkable.'' The Times ''Magnificent.'' Phillipe Sands ''Gripping.'' Literary Review ''A history so outlandish and unlikely that you feel it must be true . . . [A] grippingly well-written book.'' Anthony Quinn, Observer Book of the Week In 1982, East Germany''s fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Once a month, a group of soldiers and border guards gathered in a heavily guarded military compound in East Berlin for meetings to learn how to write lyrical verse.

Journalist Philip Oltermann spent five years rifling through Stasi files, digging out lost volumes of poetry and tracking down surviving members of this Red poet''s society, to illustrate the little known story in which spies turned poets and poets spies. Lire la suite Fermer

''The book is a masterpiece'' The Spectator ''A gripping narrative history of one of the most complex episodes in modern Russian history'' Sunday Times ''Antony Beevor''s Russia is a masterpiece of history'' Daily Telegraph Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. An incompatible White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky''s Red Army and Lenin''s single-minded Communist dictatorship. Terror begat terror, which in turn led to even greater cruelty with man''s inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while armed forces from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia played rival parts. Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research, Antony Beevor, author of the acclaimed international bestseller Stalingrad, assembles the complete picture in a gripping narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the woman doctor in an improvised hospital. Lire la suite Fermer

The defining event of twentieth-century Europe - the extermination of millions of Jews - has been commemorated, institutionalised and embedded in our collective consciousness. But in this nuanced and perceptive new history, Dan Stone, Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, contends that the true dimension of the horror wrought by the Nazis is inadvertently brushed aside in our current culture of commemoration. This is due in part to practical or conceptual challenges, such as the continent-wide scale of the crime and the multiplicity of sources in many languages; and in part to an unwillingness to confront the reality that the Holocaust could not have happened without the assistance of numerous non-Nazi states and agents. br> Structured around four themes - trauma, collaboration, genocidal fantasy and post-war consequences - The Holocaust demonstrates the genocidal logic of much European thinking in the wake of WWI, explores how the Holocaust''s effects unfolded even after the liberation of the camps in 1945, and stresses the ways in which Europeans continue, even now, to draw on a reservoir of fascist vocabulary and imagery in times of crisis. It is a deeply researched and indispensable examination of a trauma that still reverberates today.> Lire la suite Fermer

The essential introduction to the Middle Ages by the bestselling author of The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England We tend to think of the Middle Ages as a dark, backward and unchanging time characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. By contrast we believe progress arose from science and technological innovation, and that inventions of recent centuries created the modern world.

We couldn't be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating book, people's horizons - their knowledge, experience and understanding of the world - expanded dramatically. Life was utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, marking the transition from a warrior-led society to that of Shakespeare.

Just as The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England revealed what it was like to live in the fourteenth century, Medieval Horizons provides the perfect primer to the era as a whole. It outlines the enormous cultural changes that took place - from literacy to living standards, inequality and even the developing sense of self - thereby correcting misconceptions and presenting the period as a revolutionary age of fundamental importance in the development of the Western world.

Praise for Ian Mortimer:

'The endlessly inventive Ian Mortimer is the most remarkable medieval historian of our time' - The Times Lire la suite Fermer

An intellectual tour de force: the major essays of the esteemed author of international bestseller The Sleepwalkersbr>br> Christopher Clark''s The Sleepwalkers has become one of the most influential history books of our century: a remarkable rethinking of the origins of the First World War, which has had a huge impact on how we see both the past and the present.br>br> For the many readers who found the narrative voice, craftsmanship and originality of Clark''s writing so compelling, Prisoners of Time will be a book filled with surprises and enjoyment. Bringing together many of Clark''s major essays, Prisoners of Time raises a host of questions about how we think about the past, and both the value and pitfalls of history as a discipline.br>br> The book includes brilliant writing on German subjects: from assessments of Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck to the painful story of General von Blaskowitz, a traditional Prussian military man who accommodated himself to the horrors of the Third Reich. There is a fascinating essay on attempts to convert Prussian Jews to Christianity, and insights into everything from Brexit to the significance of battles. Perhaps the most important piece in the book is ''The Dream of Nebuchadnezzar'', a virtuoso meditation on the nature of political power down the ages, which will become essential reading for anyone drawn to the meaning of history.> Lire la suite Fermer

Volker Ullrich is a historian and journalist whose previous books include biographies of Bismarck and Napoleon, as well as a major study of Imperial Germany, The Nervous Superpower, 1871-1918. Ullrich was for many years edi

Martyn Rady is Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London. He has written several major works on the history of Hungary, from the medieval period to the twentieth century, but has also written on topic

Russia is the largest country in the world, with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Over a thousand years this multifaceted nation of shifting borders has been known as Rus, Muscovy, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union. Thirty years ago it was reinvented as the Russian Federation. Russia is not an enigma, but its past is violent, tragic, sometimes glorious, and certainly complicated.. Like the rest of us, the Russians constantly rewrite their history. They too omit episodes of national disgrace in favour of patriotic anecdotes, sometimes more rooted in myth than reality. Expert and former ambassador Rodric Braithwaite unpicks fact from fiction to discover what lies at the root of the Russian story.

Astonishing . . . An indispensable part of Holocaust history . . . Gripping>