History - British

Henry V is regarded as the great English hero. With his victory at Agincourt and his rigorous application of justice, he was elevated by Shakespeare into a champion of English nationalism. But does he deserve to be thought of as 'the greatest man who ever ruled England?' Here Ian Mortimer portrays the dramatic events of 1415, offering the fullest, most precise and least romanticised view we have of Henry and what he did.

1815 was the year of Waterloo, the British victory that ended Napoleon's European ambitions and ushered in a century largely of peace for Britain. But what sort of country were Wellington's troops fighting for? Overseas, the bounds of Empire were expanding; while at home the population endured the chill of economic recession.

A delightful compendium of memories which will appeal to all who grew up in this post-war decade, whether in town or country, wealth or poverty. Games and hobbies, holidays, music and fashion, all bring back this decade of childhood, and jog memories about all aspects of life.

To the young people of today, the 1960s seem like another age. But for those born around this time, this era of childhood is like yesterday. From James bond to Barbie dolls and frilly shirts, life was very different to how it is now. This delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all who grew up in this incredible decade, whether in town or country, wealth or poverty.

Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.

Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.

Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.

The Battle of Agincourt in October 1415, was a turning-point not only in the Hundred Years War between England and France but also in the history of weaponry. This landmark study looks behind the action on the field to paint a portrait of the age, moving from the ambition of kings to the dynamics of daily life in peace and war.

The landscape of the British Isles is filled with history, much of which we miss as it flashes past the car window. Do we even realise that we're following the same path as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, or that we're driving past the exact spot where King Harold was killed, shot through the eye with an arrow?

As a lover of both history and the British countryside, Charlie Connelly decided to rectify this, and set out on a series of walks that recreate famous historical journeys. En route he retells the story of the original trip while discovering who and what now inhabit these iconic routes.

Told with Charlie's customary charm and wit, And Did Those Feet will reveal the historical secrets hidden in the much-loved coastal, country and urban landscapes of Britain.

The landscape of the British Isles is filled with history. Charlie Connelly sets out on a series of walks that recreate famous historical journeys. En route he reveals the historical secrets hidden in the much-loved coastal, country and urban landscapes of Britain.

The half millennium between the creation of the English nation in around 550 and the Norman Conquest in 1066 was a formative one. This groundbreaking series rediscovers the Anglo-Saxons through vivid portraits of thirty incredible men and women, as told by their contemporary admirers. 

Nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney discusses the Beowulf bard; former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams focuses on St Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury; Michael Wood celebrates Penda, the much-maligned last pagan king of England; Barbara Yorke tells the story of Hild of Whitby, the powerful abbess and largely forgotten pre-feminism model; and writer David Almond investigates the oldest surviving English poet, Caedmon.

From royalty to peasants, the women behind the Bayeux Tapestry to rebellious nuns, Anglo-Saxon Portraits unravels the mysteries of a too often forgotten period in British history.

Sixteen hundred years ago Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Grand cities and luxurious villas were deserted and left to crumble, and civil society collapsed into chaos. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea, and established themselves as its new masters. The Anglo-Saxons traces the turbulent history of these people across the next six centuries. It explains how their earliest rulers fought relentlessly against each other for glory and supremacy, and then were almost destroyed by the onslaught of the vikings. It explores how they abandoned their old gods for Christianity, established hundreds of churches and created dazzlingly intricate works of art. It charts the revival of towns and trade, and the origins of a familiar landscape of shires, boroughs and bishoprics.

It is a tale of famous figures like King Offa, Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, but also features a host of lesser known characters - ambitious queens, revolutionary saints, intolerant monks and grasping nobles. Through their remarkable careers we see how a new society, a new culture and a single unified nation came into being. Drawing on a vast range of original evidence - chronicles, letters, archaeology and artefacts - renowned historian Marc Morris illuminates a period of history that is only dimly understood, separates the truth from the legend, and tells the extraordinary story of how the foundations of England were laid.

Doomed queen of Henry VIII, mother to Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn was the most controversial and scandalous woman ever to sit on the throne of England. From her early days at the imposing Hever Castle in Kent, to the glittering courts of Paris and London, Anne caused a stir wherever she went. This is the compelling story of one of history's most charismatic, controversial and tragic heroines.

Anne of Cleves was Henry VIII's least favourite wife - but the one who outlived them all. 'I like her not!' was the verdict of Henry VIII on meeting his fourth wife for the first time. But Anne was both intelligent and practical, ensuring that, whilst she was queen for the shortest period, she was the last of all Henry VIII's wives to survive.

In Ashes and Stones we visit modern memorials and standing stones, and roam among forests and hedge mazes, folklore and political fantasies. From fairy hills to forgotten caves, we explore a spellbound landscape. Allyson Shaw untangles the myth of witchcraft and gives voice to those erased by it. Her elegant and lucid prose weaves together threads of history and feminist reclamation to create a vibrant memorial.

This is the untold story of the witches' monuments of Scotland and the women's lives they mark. Ashes and Stones is a trove of folklore linking the lives of contemporary women to the horrors of the past, a record of resilience and a call to choose and remember our ancestors.

For many people Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a turkey and trimmings, pudding and brandy butter. And yet it wasn't always that way. Gone are the gluttonous banquets featuring boar's head and brawn - but how did we get to the Christmas food of today?

Historian Annie Gray digs into the evolution of our festive meal, from the birth of the twelve-day celebration under Edward I and the the restoration of holiday splendour under Victoria to the present day. Organised by festive dish and illustrated throughout, At Christmas We Feast is a delectable trip through time - stuffed full of classic recipes, doused with history and tradition, and sprinkled with the joy of the feasts of Christmas past.

The formation of England happened against the odds - the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world. But King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex, his son Eadweard expanded it, and his grandson Æthelstan finally united Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and became Rex totius Britanniae. Tom Holland recounts this extraordinarily exciting story with relish and drama.

We meet the great figures of the age, including Alfred and his daughter Æthelflæd, 'Lady of the Mercians', who brought Æthelstan up at the Mercian court. At the end of the book we understand the often confusing history of the Anglo-Saxon kings better than ever before.

There have been many histories of the Cold War but Attack Warning Red is the first book to tell the domestic story of day-to-day life on the nuclear home front. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 changed the nature of war forever. The awesome power of the atomic blast and its deadly fallout meant that nowhere was safe: every town, village, street and home in Britain fell under the nuclear shadow, and the threat of annihilation coloured every aspect of ordinary life for the next forty years. As the media reported on the inevitability of approaching conflict with the Soviet Union, the British people were told to prepare for the coming apocalypse. Families were taught how to construct makeshift shelters in their homes and stockpile food and medicines; vicars and pub landlords were instructed to sound hand-wound sirens to deliver the Four Minute Warning. Schools and hospitals prepared for the worst, and thousands volunteered for civil defence organisations to be trained in nuclear first aid.

And while the British people were expected to look after themselves, bunkers were prepared for government officials and experts needed to ensure that life continued after the catastrophe. Looming nuclear war and the planning for it affected people's everyday lives: it informed their childhoods, structured their work, and inhabited their dreams and nightmares. Today, more than thirty years after the end of the Cold War, we read this story - with its Dad's Army comedy, endearing amateurism and futile measures for a war that was not survivable - with a sense of relief that the worst did not happen; but it is also a timely - and frightening - reminder that the nuclear threat will always be with us.

A rites-of-passage story that attempts to shed a largely humorous, but sometime serious light, on the relations between an ethnic minority and the wider community. The work is also a nostalgic record of growing up in a Jewish community in the East End during the postwar period.

In 1964 Mary Whitehouse became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement: the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. For almost forty years she waged war against the programme makers, pop stars and playwrights who she felt were dragging British culture into a sewer of blasphemy and obscenity. X rated, contains offensive language.

In 1938, 18-year-old Phyllis Ellsworth sets off from her quiet seaside home for Hackney Hospital in London's bustling East End, where she is to fulfill her dream to train as a nurse. But when Britain declares war on Germany, her eagerness to do good in the world brings her suddenly face to face with death and drama in all its many guises.

A ground-breaking new study brings us a very different picture of the Second World War, asking fundamental questions about ethical commitments

Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten.

Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war five of these individuals: Roy Ridgway, a factory clerk from Liverpool; Tom Burns, a teacher from east London; Stella St John, who trained as a vet and ended up in jail; Ronald Duncan, who set up a collective farm; and Fred Urquhart, a working-class Scottish socialist and writer. We meet many more objectors along the way -- people both determined and torn -- and travel from Finland to Syria, India to rural England, Edinburgh to Trinidad.

Although conscientious objectors were often criticised and scorned, figures such as Winston Churchill and the Archbishop of Canterbury supported their right to object, at least in principle, suggesting that liberty of conscience was one of the freedoms the nation was fighting for. And their rich cultural and moral legacy -- of humanitarianism and human rights, from Amnesty International and Oxfam to the US civil rights movement -- can still be felt all around us.

The personal and political struggles carefully and vividly collected in this book tell us a great deal about personal and collective freedom, conviction and faith, war and peace, and pose questions just as relevant today: Does conscience make us free? Where does it take us? And what are the costs of going there?

An intimate and entertaining look at the private lives of monarchs from Elizabeth I to the current occupants of Buckingham Palace, uncovering five centuries of life at the English court. Exploring life as it was lived by clerks and courtiers and clowns and crowned heads we follow the power struggles and petty rivalries, the tension between duty and desire; the practicalities of cooking dinner for thousands, or ensuring the king always won when he played a game of tennis.

Hugo Vickers has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the royal family, and has had a fascination with the story of the Duchess of Windsor since he was a young man. There have been a number of books about the duchess, but this book brings a new perspective on the story by focusing on the later years of exile.

Using an impressive range of source materials, including literary memoirs, the transcripts of burglary trials and upholsterer's ledgers, this is a detailed insight to home life in Georgian England from a wide cross-section of society.

A colourful insight into the upstairs-downstairs world of domestic service, in which the author describes her progression from one large house to another to find her unassailable place in the strictly organized below-stairs hierarchy.

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery was perhaps the best-known, most highly respected and most controversial British general of World War II. He made an incalculable contribution to the Allied victory in Europe, and his leadership played a crucial role in transforming the British Army into a war-winning weapon.

This is a study of a flawed yet characterful Prince of Wales, seen through the eyes of the women in his life. Bertie's numerous mistresses included the society hostess Daisy Brook, Lillie Langtry and Alice Keppel. Edward VII was 59 when at last he came to the throne and was King of England for the final 10 years of his life.

The Carr's biscuit factory that towered over Carlisle might look like just another slice of the industrial North, but for the biscuit girls, it was a place where they worked hard but also where they gossiped, got into scrapes and made lifelong friends. Outside the factory walls, there might be difficult husbands or demanding kids, but they knew there would always be an escape from their troubles at Carr's.

In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean. This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put black British history at the centre of urgent national debate. Black and British is vivid confirmation that black history can no longer be kept separate and marginalised. It is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation and it belongs to us all.

Drawing on new genealogical research, original records, and expert testimony, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, Elizabethan 'blackamoors' and the global slave-trading empire. It shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars. Black British history is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. It is not a singular history, but one that belongs to us all. Unflinching, confronting taboos, and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how the lives of black and white Britons have been entwined for centuries.

Wentworth, today, is a crumbling and forgotten palace in Yorkshire. Yet just 100 years ago it was the ancestral pile of the Fitzwilliams – an aristocratic clan whose home and life were fuelled by coal mining. This is the story of their spectacular decline and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape.

The woman of Bletchley Park have a unique story to tell. Through the voices of the women themselves, this is a portrait of life in Britain's most secret organisation, beyond the celebrated code-breakers. The Bletchley Girls is the story of the women behind Britain's ability to consistently outsmart the enemy.

A remarkable series of accounts of living through the Blitz, not only in London, but in many other large cities, such as Plymouth, Bristol and Liverpool. The book includes many tales of solidarity, bravery and perseverance.

In this freewheeling history of modern Britain, Cathy Newman writes about the pioneering women who defied the odds to make careers for themselves and alter the course of modern history - women who achieved what they achieved while dismantling hostile, entrenched views about their place in society. Learn about a developmental biologist, a WW1 correspondent and an engineer, among others.

A handy and accessible guide to all of Britain's heads of government, from Sir Robert Walpole right through to Boris Johnson, lifting the veil of obscurity from an all-too-neglected cast of characters.

This is Winifred's story written as a tribute to her by her son. Poverty, tragedy, love and wry humour are all to be found in abundance. It is also the story of working class life in the first half of the 20th century and it portrays a culture, which although still within living memory, has long since disappeared.

In early 1461, a teenage boy won a battle on a freezing morning in the Welsh marches and claimed the crown of England. He was Edward IV, first king of the usurping house of York. The country, crippled by economic crisis, insurgency and a corrupt and bankrupt government, was in need of a new hero. Charismatic, able and ruthlessly ambitious, Edward and his two younger brothers, George, Duke of Clarence, and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became the figureheads of a spectacular ruling dynasty which laid the foundations for a renewal of English royal power. Yet a web of grudges and resentments grew between them, generating a destructive sequence of conspiracy, rebellion, deposition, usurpation and murder. The brutal end came on 22 August 1485 at Bosworth Field, with the death of the youngest brother, then Richard III, at the hands of a new usurper, Henry Tudor. The Brothers York is the story of three remarkable brothers, two of whom were crowned kings of England and the other an heir presumptive, whose fatal antagonism was fuelled by the mistrust and vendettas of the age that brought their family to power. The house of York should have been the dynasty that the Tudors became. Its tragedy was that it devoured itself.

William Cecil, Treasurer to Elizabeth 1st, built his family a magnificent home, Burghley House. Lady Victoria Leatham has lived in and managed the house for over 20 years. Here she tells the story of Burghley and it's treasures which have been collected by many generations of Cecils.