General & world history

From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, and from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes, here is award-winning writer Simon Winchester's brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to ch...

Between its introduction in 1942 and the end of the Second World War, the Avro Lancaster flew more than 150,000 sorties, dropped more than 600,000 tons of explosives and took the Allied fight to Nazi Germany. The true workhorse of the RAF's bomber corps, the 'Lanc' featured on some of the most da...

'Land Between the Rivers' is the result of ten years of research, writing, and thinking about the subject. It is an enormous topic: five thousand years, beginning with Gilgamesh at the edge of historical time. We begin the story with ancient Sumer, and Gilgamesh building the walls of Uruk ('Iraq'...

Money. The object of our desires. The engine of our genius. Humanity's greatest invention. Whether we like it or not, our world revolves around money, but we rarely stop to think about it. What is money, where does it come from, and can it run out? What is this substance that drives trade, revolu...

1649. King Charles I had been executed. A quarter of a million had died in the Second English Civil War. Two hundred great houses stood in ruins, with hundreds of villages and towns left battered and broken. The monarchy, the House of Lords and the Church of England were all abruptly abolished. W...

On a sunny Friday morning in August 1945, a homemade cotton flag was raised, announcing the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first colonised country to declare its independence after t...

When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realised that she barely knew the place at all. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, bringing a lifetime's reading to bear on the place where she started, hundreds of...

From battlefields, cathedrals and museums to castles and stately homes, from the Lancastrians, Yorkists and Roundhead Royalists to an abundance of kings called George (and Henry!), the history of our island nation unravels its rich tapestry beneath our very feet - if only you know where to look. ...

Get the inside track on the incredible lives of history's must-know names: from Shakespeare to Oprah Winfrey, and Anne Frank to Julius Caesar. This book boasts more than 150 visual timelines, covering a diverse array of kings and queens, humanitarians, scientists, inventors, explorers, activists,...