History - British

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Great Fire of London is a key moment in English history. Adrian Tinniswood looked at the fire and its consequences, and has produced a highly readable re-creation of what happened to the people when the streets of London ran with fire.

After WW2 ended, Britain's new Labour government took an unprecedented step - the introduction of compulsory military service in peacetime. When national service ended in 1963 over two million young men had been called up. The experiences of over 100 men, some hilarious others harrowing, are recorded in this book.

In 1943 the war effort was in danger of grinding to a halt because of a lack of coal. In answer Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, compulsorily sent 20,000 18-year-olds, who'd expected to fight for their country, down the mines. The author paints a picture of the arduous life below ground for the Bevin Boys and the tightly-knit communities, which in some cases welcomed them but in others treated them with hostility.

The castle has long had a pivotal place in British life, associated with lordship, landholding, and military might, and today it remains a powerful symbol of history. But castles have never been merely impressive fortresses - they were hubs of life, activity, and imagination.

John Goodall weaves together the history of the British castle across the span of a millennium, from the eleventh to the twenty-first century, through the voices of those who witnessed it. Drawing on chronicles, poems, letters, and novels, including the work of figures like Gawain Poet, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and P. G. Wodehouse, Goodall explores the importance of the castle in our culture and society.

In 2018 Britain will celebrate the centenary of women getting the vote. Here, six centenarians who lived that change, tell of what they saw, how they were treated, who they loved, what they did and where they are now.

Built as a temporary refuge in case of air raid attacks, Churchill's secret bunker was under the heart of central London and it became a second home to civil servants, military personnel and Churchill himself. This book includes first-hand accounts of people who lived there, revealing what life was like for them in the underground shelter.

In the winter of 1939, Britain's wartime leader, Winston Churchill, called for the development of a completely new kind of warfare. He recruited a band of free-thinking warriors to become the first secret operatives to strike behind enemy lines, offering these volunteers nothing but the potential for glory and all-but-certain death.

In his memoir of growing up in post-war North of England, Hunter Davies captures the dreariness of life amid the immense damage wrought by the Second World War. He recalls the struggle to make ends meet on rationing, when chocolate was scarce, and bananas a pipe dream!

The gripping account of how the Royal family really operates from the man who has spent years studying them in his role as Royal correspondent for The Times. Valentine Low asks the important questions: who really runs the show and, as Charles III begins his reign, what will happen next?

Throughout history, the British monarchy has relied on its courtiers - the trusted advisers in the King or Queen's inner circle - to ensure its survival as a family, an ancient institution, and a pillar of the constitution. Today, as ever, a vast team of people hidden from view steers the royal family's path between public duty and private life. Queen Elizabeth II, after a remarkable 70 years of service, saw the final seasons of her reign without her husband Philip to guide her. Meanwhile, newly ascended Charles seeks to define what his future as King, and that of his court, will be.

The question of who is entrusted to guide the royals has never been more vital, and yet the task those courtiers face has never been more challenging. With a cloud hanging over Prince Andrew as well as Harry and Meghan's departure from royal life, the complex relationship between modern courtiers and royal principals has been exposed to global scrutiny. As the new Prince and Princess of Wales, William and Kate - equipped with a very 21st century approach to press and public relations - now hold the responsibility of making an ancient institution relevant for the decades to come.

Courtiers reveals an ever-changing system of complex characters, shifting values and ideas over what the future of the institution should be. This is the story of how the monarchy really works, at a pivotal moment in its history.

Kensington Palace is now most famous as the former home of Diana, Princess of Wales, but the palace's glory days came between 1714 and 1760, during the reigns of George I and II.

In the eighteenth century, this palace was a world of skulduggery, intrigue, politicking, etiquette, wigs, and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like switchblades and unusual people were kept as curiosities.

Lucy Worsley's The Courtiers charts the trajectory of the fantastically quarrelsome Hanovers and the last great gasp of British court life. Structured around the paintings of courtiers and servants that line the walls of the King's Staircase of Kensington Palace, The Courtiers goes behind closed doors to meet a pushy young painter, a maid of honor with a secret marriage, a vice chamberlain with many vices, a bedchamber woman with a violent husband, two aging royal mistresses, and many more.

England, 1647. Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army has routed the Royalists, and the King, having fled to Scotland, has been ransomed, sent back across the border and imprisoned. It seems the war is over, but there is trouble ahead. Parliament wants to disband the army and install its own militia - an act that looks, to Cromwell's loyal soldiers, like outright betrayal.

As dissent grows within the ranks, agitators such as Francis White and John Reynolds, and leading Leveller John Lilburne, step up to speak for the common man. What began with a dispute over army demobilisation soon becomes far more, and a radical faction arises demanding freedom, equality and power to the people. But for Cromwell and his Commander-in-Chief, Thomas Fairfax, this is a challenge to Parliament's authority, and smacks of revolution. Facing a schism within the army, Cromwell is torn - but when the King escapes from custody, he and his troops have a new threat to deal with...

Meanwhile, the women at home have troubles of their own. Clever, independent Penelope White is subject to the whims of her intransigent father, who wants her to marry a man of his choosing. And Lilburne's wife, Elizabeth, must risk her life each time she smuggles forbidden political papers into his cell in the Tower of London. As their men prepare to fight once more, what does the future hold for them?

Set between the pivotal years of 1647 and 1649, this classic Civil War drama stars Bernard Hepton as Cromwell, Nigel Anthony as Fairfax, Graham Blockey as Francis White, Christian Rodska as Lilburne, William Eedle as Charles I, Deborah Makepeace as Penelope and Maureen O'Brien as Elizabeth.

The monarchy is one of Britain's longest surviving institutions - as well as one of its most tumultuous and revered. In this masterful book, David Starkey looks at the monarchy as a whole, charting its history from Roman times, to the Wars of the Roses, the chaos of the Civil War, the fall of Charles I and Cromwell's emergence as Lord Protector - all the way up until the Victorian era when Britain's monarchs came face-to-face with modernity.

This is the story of ordinary men and women involved in the Jacobite Rising of 1745, who were described on the gaol registers and regimental rosters of the time as 'Common Men'. The detail comes from regimental Order Books and manuals, from the letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers, and the personal stories of the victims themselves. Culloden is the story not of a Prince, but of a people.

Born in 1521, Bess of Hardwick, businesswoman, money-lender and property tycoon, established herself as one of the richest and most powerful women in England, second only to Queen Elizabeth. Her wealth took form in her passion for building and she oversaw the construction of her four houses including Hardwick New Hall, which stands today as a celebration of her triumphant progress through Elizabethan England.

Was Macbeth really a king of Scotland? What sticky end befell Edward II? Find the answers to these questions and other facts about Britain's monarchs with this witty guide.

On September 2nd 1666 London was destroyed by the Great Fire. This is a vividly written, historical detective story using modern forensics and investigative techniques to explain the events of 1666.

Lincolnshire is England's second-largest county-and one of the least well-known. Yet its understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, and unique landscapes: its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful; its marshlands and dynamic coast are metaphors of constant change. From plesiosaurs to Puritans, medieval ghosts to eighteenth-century explorers, poets to politicians, and Vikings to Brexit, this marginal county is central to England's identity. Canute, Henry IV, John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford all called Lincolnshire home. So did saints, world-famed churchmen and reformers-Etheldreda, Gilbert, Guthlac and Hugh, Robert Grosseteste, John Wycliffe, John Cotton, John Foxe and John Wesley-as well as Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, John Harrison and George Boole. Lincolnshire explorers went everywhere: John Smith to Jamestown, George Bass and Matthew Flinders to Australia, and John Franklin to a bitter death in the Arctic. Artists and writers have been inspired-including Byrd, Taverner, Stukeley, Stubbs, Eliot and Tennyson-while Thatcher wrought neo-liberalism. Extraordinary architecture testifies to centuries of both settlement and unrest, from Saxon towers to sky-piercing spires; evocative ruined abbeys to the wonder of the Cathedral. And in between is always the little-known land itself-an epitome of England, awaiting discovery.