In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident— unsettling and unexplained causes of death, a strange final ...

Told in the first person by a woman who lived the hard life as a cook in a number of England's country houses, this is the true story of what life was really like below the stairsPeople talk about feeling as if the modern world is s...

A history of England from 1810 to 1820, known as the Regency period. While his father declined into apparent madness at Windsor, George, Prince of Wales, served as Regent. This was the age of opulence at Carlton House and Brighton Pav...

The brutal murder of the Russian Imperial family on the night of July 16–17, 1918 has long been a defining moment in world history. This book gives a riveting day-by-day account of the last fourteen days of their lives, as the consp...

"The rise and fall of Venice's empire is an irresistible story and [Roger] Crowley, with his rousing descriptive gifts and scholarly attention to detail, is its perfect chronicler."—The Financial Times  The New York Times...

The Zhivago Affair is the dramatic, never-before-told story—drawing on newly declassified files—of how a forbidden book became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West.In May 1956, an Italian publishing ...

The reissue of Joseph and Frances Gies's classic bestseller on life in medieval villages.This new reissue of Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural pe...

Fans of Julian Fellowes' hit show can step back 100 years to the world of the pampered, privileged upper classes and take a look at exactly what goes on behind the magisterial doors of their favorite stately home Using the charact...

Frances Evelyn 'Daisy' Maynard was a renowned beauty when at the age of 18 she married Lord Brooke, heir to the Earl of Warwick. It was the wedding of the year, and what followed was a tempestuous and scandalous lifestyle lived in the...

"If ever there was a book to read in the company of a nice cuppa, this is it." -The Washington Post In the dramatic story of one of the greatest acts of corporate espionage ever committed, Sarah Rose recounts the fascinating...

Here at last is a history of England that is designed to entertain as well as inform and that will delight armchair travellers, tourists or anyone interested in history. No people have engendered quite so much acclaim or earned so muc...

"Michael Farquhar doesn't write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin's smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it."—Gene Weingarten,...

The family of George II has been ill-served by history and by most historians. He was a German, the last British monarch to have been born outside of Great Britain, but by the end of his long reign the House of Hanover was firmly esta...

The riveting true story of mother-and-daughter queens Catherine de' Medici and Marguerite de Valois, whose wildly divergent personalities and turbulent relationship changed the shape of their tempestuous and dangerous century.Set in m...

The story of the hero behind the attempt to kill Hitler, the subject of Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise, set for June 2008 release.By July of 1944, the Third Reich's days were numbered. Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a general staff in...

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Secret Rooms, the extraordinary true story of the downfall of one of England's wealthiest families Fans of Downton Abbey now have a go-to resource for fascinating, real-life stories of...

In 1936, the British monarchy faced the greatest threats to its survival in the modern era-the crisis of abdication and the menace of Nazism. The fate of the country rested in the hands of George V's sorely unequipped sons:•a stammer...

A captivating exploration of the role in which Queen Victoria exerted the most international power and influence: as a matchmaking grandmother.As her reign approached its sixth decade, Queen Victoria's grandchildren numbered over thir...

Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four Italian rural women gather in a stone house in the hills above Italy's Orvieto. There—along with their friend, Marlena—they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink the...

Renowned historian John Julius Norwich has crafted a bold tapestry of Europe and the Middle East in the early sixteenth century, when a quartet of legendary rulers―all born within a ten-year period―towered over the era. Francis I ...

England's Tudor monarchs―Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I―are perhaps the most celebrated and fascinating of all royal families in history. Their love affairs, their political triumphs, and their overturni...

Peter Ackroyd, one of Britain's most acclaimed writers, brings the age of the Tudors to vivid life in this monumental book. Tudors is the story of Henry VIII's relentless pursuit of both the perfect wife and the perfect heir; of how t...

In the summer and fall of 1991, Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain, took a three month road trip through the freshly independent borderlands of Eastern Europe. She deftly weaves the harrowing histo...

Is the traditional, accepted view of the life of Christ in some way incomplete?• Is it possible Christ did not die on the cross?• Is it possible Jesus was married, a father, and that his bloodline still exists?• Is it possible t...

"Riveting and poignant . . . The Winter Fortress metamorphoses from engrossing history into a smashing thriller . . . Mr. Bascomb's research and, especially, his storytelling skills are first-rate."—The Wall Street Journal...

Winner of the Adele Mellen Prize for Distinguished ScholarshipMarie Antoinette has remained atop the popular cultural landscape for centuries for the daring in style and fashion that she brought to 18th century France. For the better ...

In the early 1800s, on a Hebridean beach in Scotland, the sea exposed an ancient treasure cache: 93 chessmen carved from walrus ivory. Norse netsuke, each face individual, each full of quirks, the Lewis Chessmen are probably the most ...

The Queen Mother did not give one media interview in her 101 years. This is a brief glimpse into that wonderful world by a man who spent two years constantly at her side from 1994 to 1996 and then as a close friend until her death in ...

"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center.  As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life t...

The fighting that raged in the East during the First World War was every bit as fierce as that on the Western Front, but the titanic clashes between three towering empires--Russia, Austro-Hungary, and Germany--remains a comparatively ...