General & world history

From the bestselling author of Normandy '44 and Sicily '43 comes the untold story of the Sherwood Rangers. It took a certain type of courage to serve in a tank in World War Two. Encased in steel, surrounded by highly explosive shells, a big and slow-moving target, every crew member was utterly vu...

From the bestselling author of Normandy '44 and Sicily '43 comes the untold story of the Sherwood Rangers. It took a certain type of courage to serve in a tank in World War Two. Encased in steel, surrounded by highly explosive shells, a big and slow-moving target, every crew member was utterly vu...

Opening with the notorious bonfires of 'un-German' and Jewish literature in 1933 that offered such a clear signal of Nazi intentions, 'Burning the Books' takes us on a 3000-year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it.

On the morning of the 28th of January 1986, just 73 seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Like the assassination of JFK, the disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history - one that forever changed the way Am...

Charles Wheeler, the BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent, was one of Britain's greatest news reporters. For more than four decades, he reported for radio and television from most of the world's trouble spots. Present at many of the key episodes of the 20th century, he had a knack of being...

Operation Chastise, the destruction of the Mohne and Eder dams in north-west Germany by the RAF's 617 Squadron on the night of 16/17 May 1943, was an epic that has passed into Britain's national legend. Max Hastings grew up embracing the story, the classic 1955 movie and the memory of Guy Gibson,...

This is a powerful, fascinating, and ground-breaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary and most important military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States and her allies confronted the USSR during the Cold War.

In 'China After Mao', award-winning historian Frank Dikotter explores how the People's Republic of China was transformed from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today. His account is the first to be based on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, from the sec...

Kenneth Clark's 1969 BBC series 'Civilisation' is perhaps the most celebrated documentary series ever made, except that it was entirely of its time: patrician to the exclusion of women and western to the exclusion of all other cultures. 2018 sees an ambitious BBC re-make, embracing global civilis...