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The Wars of the Roses didn't start on the battlefield: Blood Roses traces it back to the beginning. Starting in 1245 with the founding of the House of Lancaster, Kathryn Warner follows a twisted path of political intrigue, bloody war, and fascinating characters over 200 years. From the Barons' Wars to the overthrowing of Edward II, Eleanor of Castile to Isabella of France, and true love to Loveday, Blood Roses reframes some of the biggest events of the medieval era—not as stand-alone conflicts, but as part of a long-running family feud that would have drastic consequences.

Modern nationalism in northeastern Europe has often led to violence and then reconciliation between nations with bloody pasts. In this fascinating book, Timothy Snyder traces the emergence of Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belarusian nationhood over four centuries, discusses various atrocities (including the first account of the massive Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansings of the 1940s), and examines Poland's recent successful negotiations with its newly independent Eastern neighbors, as it has channeled national interest toward peace.

In May 1940, Group Captain Peter Townsend took command of 85 Squadron, tasked with preparing it for the defense of Great Britain against German bombers. It was the beginning of the long, hot, lethal summer in which the RAF and the Luftwaffe fought to the death over England in the furious conflict which ultimately saved Britain from Nazi invasion. Peter Townsend's epic Duel of Eagles is widely acknowledged as the classic account of the Battle of Britain—the desperate, defining clash which would become one of the greatest triumphs in British military history.

The Renaissance was only a short period in European history, but it was the revolution needed to move from the Middle Ages to the modern world. It was full of new philosophies and art, new architecture and inventions, and new governments and churches. In a short span of time, the Europeans found themselves creating, acting, and living in completely new ways. People now had access to new ideas, and Europe would never be the same again.

During the spring and summer of 1918, with World War I still undecided, British, French and American agents in Russia developed a breathtakingly audacious plan. Led by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane thirty-year-old Scot, they conspired to overthrow Lenin’s newly established Bolshevik regime, and to install one that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front. In the back streets of Petrograd and Moscow, in nightclubs, in cells beneath Lubianka prison, the conspirators engaged in a deadly game of wits for the highest possible stakes.

Before 1871, Germany was not a nation but an idea. Its founder, Otto von Bismarck, had a formidable task at hand. How would he bring thirty-nine individual states under the yoke of a single Kaiser, convincing proud Prussians, Bavarians and Rhinelanders to become Germans? Once united, could the young European nation wield enough power to rival the empires of Britain and France—all without destroying itself in the process?

Do you remember collecting shrapnel and listening to Children's Hour? Carrying gas masks or sharing your school with evacuees from the city? The 1940s was a decade of challenges for everyone who lived through it. The hardships and fear created by a world war were immense. Britain's towns and cities were being bombed on an almost nightly basis, and many children faced the trauma of being parted from their parents and sent away to the country to live with strangers. For just over half of this decade the war continued, meaning food and clothing shortages became a way of life.

La convivialità dei banchetti, il ricorso a pratiche divinatorie, la condizione emancipata della donna, la proprietà privata terriera, la pianta della città basata su cardo e decumano: elementi disparati di una medesima eredità, quella che ci deriva da un popolo fra i più affascinanti, gli Etruschi.

In 1921, Britain's most illustrious highway, the Great North Road, ceased to exist – on paper at least. Stretching from London to Edinburgh, the old road was largely replaced by the A1 as the era of the motor car took hold. A hundred years later, journalist and cyclist Steve Silk embraces the anniversary as the perfect excuse to set off on an adventure across 11 days and 400 miles. Travelling by bike at a stately 14 miles per hour, he heads north, searching out milestones and memories, coaching inns and coffee shops.

Some say Charlemagne was a great king, while others believe the many atrocities committed under his reign make him the first in a line of political disasters throughout Europe. This debate has been going on for over a millennium.

A Short History of England sheds light on all the key individuals and events, bringing them together in an enlightening and engaging account of the country's birth, rise to global prominence and then partial eclipse. There have been long synoptic histories of England, but until now there has been no standard short work covering all significant events, themes and individuals.

More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek city-states, led by Athens and Sparta, laid the foundation for much of modern science, the arts, politics, and law. But the influence of the Greeks did not end with the rise and fall of this classical civilization. As historian Roderick Beaton illustrates, over three millennia Greek speakers produced a series of civilizations that were rooted in southeastern Europe but again and again ranged widely across the globe.

Tasked with choosing a pontiff to replace a previous incumbent (Paul IV) whose reign was marked by repression and brutality, and faced with the growing challenge of the Protestant Reformation, the conclave faced a critically important decision for the future of the Roman Catholic Church and was faction-ridden even by the standards of such polarised gatherings. France and Spain, both looking to extend their power in Italy and beyond, had very different ideas of who the new pope should be, as did the Italian cardinals.

Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.

In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement.

Cosa si puo dire di Benito Mussolini che non sia gia stato detto? È possibile raccontare la sua parabola politica, dagli esordi come socialista e anarchico alla sua trasformazione in accanito interventista, dalla costituzione dei Fasci di combattimento alla tragica evoluzione in dittatore e all'epilogo in piazzale Loreto? Marco Lucchetti - esperto di storia militare - analizza, attraverso 101 episodi più o meno noti della vita del duce, non soltanto la sua vicenda personale, ma anche le radicali trasformazioni subite dall'Italia durante il Ventennio.

"Je savais où je voulais vivre, avec qui je voulais vivre, et comment je voulais vivre. À mes yeux médusés d'enfant, le mot France brillait de tous les feux : histoire, littérature, politique, guerre, amour, tout était rassemblé et transfiguré par une même lumière sacrée, un même art de vivre mais aussi de mourir, une même grandeur, une même allure, même dans les pires turpitudes."

Despite suffering at the hands of invading Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans, and tyrannical kings and queens, Britons have been renowned since Queen Boudicca for their fierce commitment to the liberty of the individual. Britain's 700-year-old parliamentary democracy has developed from a passion for fairness and the rule of law. In an atmospheric and vivid narrative, Rebecca Fraser takes listeners through key events in the nation's history.

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined.

Eighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the "rational" exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands.