Историческая литература
12705 кн.
A magisterial chronicle of the calamity that crippled Europe in 1914.1914: a year of unparalleled change. The year that diplomacy failed, Imperial Europe was thrown into its first modernised warfare and white-gloved soldiers rode in their masses across pastoral landscapes into the blaze of machine–guns. What followed were the costliest days of the entire War. But how had it happened?In Catastrophe: 1914 Max Hastings, best-selling author of the acclaimed All Hell Let Loose, answers at last how...
| Автор | Макс Хейстингс |
A Sunday Times BestsellerEngland’s Forgotten Queens‘O’Brien cleverly intertwines the personal and political in this enjoyable, gripping tale.’The TimesPhilippa of Hainault selects a young orphan from a convent. Alice Perrers, a girl born with nothing but ambition. The Queen has a role waiting for her at court.‘I have lifted you from nothing Alice. Now you repay me.’Led down the corridors of the royal palace, the young virgin is secretly delivered to King Edward III – to perform the wifely duties...
| Автор | Anne O'Brien |
A novel of intrigue, violence and conflicted loyalties from the author of The Street Philosopher.What price to take hold of the devil’s right hand?Spring, 1853. After a triumphant display at the Great Exhibition in London, the legendary American entrepreneur and inventor Colonel Samuel Colt expands his gun-making business into England. He acquires a riverside warehouse in Pimlico and sets about converting it into a pistol works capable of mass producing his patented revolvers on an unprecedented...
| Автор | Matthew Plampin |
Reissue of Philippa Gregory’s disturbing novel of passion and betrayal in Tudor England.A haunting story of a woman’s desire in a time of turbulence.Alys joins the nunnery to escape hardship and poverty but finds herself thrown back into the outside world when Henry VIII’s wreckers destroy her sanctuary. With nothing to support her but her looks, her magic and her own instinctive cunning, Alys has to tread a perilous path between the faith of her childhood and her own female power.When she falls...
| Автор | Philippa Gregory |
From the author of four bestselling autobiographies and a number of equally successful novels, comes another moving tale.A triumph of innocence over hypocrisy…Alicia Woodman was born into a home that should have been filled with comfort and joy. Her mother Elizabeth was bright and vivacious, Humphrey Woodman was a prosperous businessman. But Alicia was not Humphrey’s child and he would have nothing to do with her, and before long Elizabeth, too, turned her back on her daughter.It was left to...
| Автор | Helen Forrester |
A superb collection of short stories from Reginald Hill, the award-winning author of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels and ‘the best living male crime writer in the English-speaking world’ (Independent)In suburban Luton, a private detective on his first case discovers that curiosity can kill more than just the cat…Meanwhile, in wartime Boulogne, one officer will do anything to ensure that his men are ready to kill for their country…And in Stalinist Moscow, Inspector Chislenko must find out why three...
| Автор | Reginald Hill |
Books 4-6 in George MacDonald Fraser’s uproarious bestselling Flashman series, now available in one ebook for the first time.FLASHMAN AND THE MOUNTAIN OF LIGHT: 1845-1846Given the choice between defending Britannia’s frontier against the mighty Sikh army and pleasuring a ravishing maharani in the Court of the Punjab, Flashman knew where he’d rather be. Of course, that was before he found out about the torture chambers or the malevolent influence of the Mountain of Light…FLASH FOR FREEDOM!:...
| Автор | George Fraser MacDonald |
A critically acclaimed, Booker long-listed novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration Trilogy’.Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice’s cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with...
| Автор | Derek Beaven |
This sweeping historical novel tells the dramatic tale of that most intriguing of Renaissance women, Lucrezia Borgia.Incest. Poison. Betrayal. Three wedding presents for the Borgia bride…Italy 1492 Pope Alexander VI is elected. And so begins the Borgia reign of terror.Alexander murders, bribes and betrays to establish his dynasty. No one is immune. Rome is a hotbed of accusation and conspiracy. Every day, the River Tiber is full of new bodies.Sancha de Aragon, daughter of King Alfonso II of...
| Автор | Jeanne Kalogridis |
An authoritative and entertaining account of the earliest ambassadors, who were at once diplomats, explorers and chroniclers of exotic civilisations.In this book of extraordinary journeys and epochal encounters, Jonathan Wright traces the ambassadors’ story from Ancient Greece and Ashoka’s empire in India to the European Enlightenment and the birth of the nation state. He shows us Byzantine envoys dining with Attila the Hun, 13th-century monks journeying from Flanders to the Asian steppe, and...
| Автор | Jonathan Wright |
Can the secrets of one woman’s past change another woman’s future?Endsleigh House stands, crumbling and gracious, on the south-west coast of England, its rooms shut up and dusty. But what secrets do they hold?Cate, an exile from New York, is sent to help value the contents of the once-grand Georgian house. Cataloguing its' contents with Jack – a man with his own dark past, she comes across a hidden shoebox containing an exquisite pair of dancing shoes from the 1930s, along with a mysterious...
| Автор | Kathleen Tessaro |
Pre-eminent military historian Max Hastings presents Winston Churchill as he has never been seen before.Winston Churchill was the greatest war leader Britain ever had. In 1940, the nation rallied behind him in an extraordinary fashion. But thereafter, argues Max Hastings, there was a deep divide between what Churchill wanted from the British people and their army, and what they were capable of delivering. Himself a hero, he expected others to show themselves heroes also, and was often...
| Автор | Макс Хейстингс |
The darkest secrets of World War II… finally revealed. The Number One bestseller returns with his most explosive book to date.Europe is ablaze. America is undecided about joining the fight against Nazism. And James Zennor, a brilliant, troubled, young Oxford don is horrified. He returns one morning from rowing to discover that his wife has disappeared with their young son, leaving only a note declaring her continuing love.A frantic search through wartime England leads James across the Atlantic...
| Автор | Sam Bourne |
A stunning novel of female friendship, forbidden love and evolution from the bestselling author of Girl with a Pearl Earring.In the early nineteenth century, a windswept beach along the English coast brims with fossils for those with the eye…From the moment she’s struck by lightning as a baby, it is clear Mary Anning is different. Her discovery of strange fossilized creatures in the cliffs of Lyme Regis sets the world alight. But Mary must face powerful prejudice from a male scientific...
| Автор | Tracy Chevalier |
Downton Abbey portrays a world of elegance and decadence, a world of duty and obedience and a world of romance and rivalry: this official companion book to series 1 and 2 takes fans deeper into that world than ever before.Using a thematic structure to highlight the main storylines, such as the family, daily life, war, servitude, society and style, different characters come to life in each chapter. The text also gives insights into the political and social history of the period, and real-life...
| Автор | Jessica Fellowes |
She holds the key to a kingdom’s future…When young Mary Howard receives the news that she will be leaving her home for the grand court of King Henry VIII, to attend his mistress Anne Boleyn, she is ecstatic. Everything Anne touches seems to turn to gold, and Mary is certain Anne will one day become Queen. But Mary has also seen the King’s fickle nature and how easily he discards those who were once close to him…Discovering that she is a pawn in a carefully orchestrated plot devised by her...
| Автор | Darcey Bonnette |
A powerful saga from the author of DAUGHTER OF MINE and DANNY BOY, in which a young girl is forced to give up her true love and marry for security – except that it leads her to danger and heartbreak before she finds happiness.Maria is a girl with a great talent for fabric design, and while the world becomes embroiled in war, all she can think of is her scholarship to the prestigious Grafton Academy. But then her father has a dreadful accident and her mother breaks down in guilt and grief. Maria,...
| Автор | Anne Bennett |
A fascinating narrative excursion into a bizarre episode in 19th century Ethiopian and British imperial history, featuring a remote African despot and his monstrous European-built gun.Towards the end of 1867, Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia burnt his own capital, took his vast mortar – named 'Sevastopol' – and began a retreat to the mountain stronghold of Mekdala. For months thousands of his followers struggled to build a road for the great gun, levelling the soil of the high plains, hacking out...
| Автор | Philip Marsden |
Set in England in the early 1760s, this is a chilling and deliciously dark tale of manipulation, sex, and seduction.When Richard Fenwick, a young man without family or means, returns to London from the Grand Tour, his wealthy godfather, James Gilbert, has an unexpected proposition. Gilbert has led a fastidious life in Worcestershire, but now in his advancing years, he feels the urge to experience, even vicariously, the extremes of human feeling—love and passion, adultery and deceit—along with...
| Автор | Michael Irwin |
A fictionalised account of the Kaiser Wilhelm’s last years in Nazi-occupied Holland.It is 1940 and the exiled Kaiser is living in Holland, at his palace Huis Doorn.The old German king spends his days chopping logs and musing on what might have been.When the Nazis invade Holland, the Kaiser’s Dutch staff are replaced by SS guards, led by young, eager Untersturmfuhrer Krebbs, and an unlikely relationship develops between the king and his keeper. While they agree on the rightfulness of German...
| Автор | Alan Judd |
George MacDonald Fraser’s hilarious stories of the most disastrous soldier in the British Army – collected together for the first time in one volume.Private McAuslan, J., the Dirtiest Soldier in the Word (alias the Tartan Caliban, or the Highland Division’s answer to the Pekin Man) first demonstrated his unfitness for service in The General Danced at Dawn. He continued his disorderly advance, losing, soiling or destroying his equipment, through the pages of McAuslan in the Rough. The final...
| Автор | George Fraser MacDonald |
From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’, ‘The Blue Flower’ and ‘Innocence’, this is a funny, touching, authentic story of life at Broadcasting House during the Blitz.The human voices of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel are those of the BBC in the first years of the World War II, the time when the Concert Hall was turned into a dormitory for both sexes, the whole building became a target for enemy bombers, and in the BBC – as elsewhere – some had to fail and some had to die.It does not...
| Автор | Penelope Fitzgerald |
Social mores come under bestselling author Philippa Gregory’s acute scrutiny in this reissue of a long-unavailable novel of betrayal, revenge and liberation…Alice Hartley can no longer arouse the interest of her pompous husband, the adulterous professor. Despite her efforts, she still leaves him cold.Just as she is compelled to face this chilling truth, she meets Michael, a young student with an excessive libido. In Michael, Alice discovers an endless supply of all she has sought: revenge, sex...
| Автор | Philippa Gregory |
The bestselling social history of Victorian domestic life, told through the letters, diaries, journals and novels of 19th-century men and women.Some images were unavailable for this electronic edition.The Victorian age is both recent and unimaginably distant. In the most prosperous and technologically advanced nation in the world, people carried slops up and down stairs; buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mould forming; wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. This drudgery...
| Автор | Judith Flanders |