British Memoirs

The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal’s story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal’s first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.

George Eliot was born Mary Ann Evans in the same year as Queen Victoria. Mary Ann might have lived a traditional Victorian-era life had she been pretty and ornamental. When she didn’t attract attention with her looks, however, she made use of her remarkable intelligence. By her early 20s, she translated articles from Latin and French into English and wrote her own reviews for a radical magazine. Discover a plethora of topics such as her life as a young radical, her journey to Switzerland, meeting George Henry Lewes, becoming George Eliot, and more.

Ed Owens has won for himself key roles as a historian of the monarchy and as a royal commentator, but one who is meticulously objective in his judgements. Nothing seems certain. Will the monarchy survive with its continuing echoes of an Imperial past? Will young people - disenchanted with the political status quo - find the ritual and practice of the monarchy quite so mesmerising as previous generations have done? What might a republican Britain look like?

In the summer of 2020 sportswriter David Walsh asked Pippa York if she’d be interested to be his travelling companion for the Tour de France. The deal was that he would sort out the logistics beforehand, the hotels, the transport details and she would do the day to day tasks of getting them about and adding her insight occasionally. It would also mean she would return to the race she had ridden eleven times as Robert Millar. This is the resulting book: a unique and entertaining sporting odyssey, The Escape uses the minutiae of Pippa and David’s trip.

On Valentine’s Day 1988, twenty-year-old Lynette White was brutally murdered in a dark corner of Cardiff’s world-famous, and infamous, Tiger Bay. Stigmatised by a bad reputation, the area was on the brink of major redevelopment which would change the historic community forever. South Wales Police launched its biggest murder hunt to date, and within weeks detectives released a photofit of a prime suspect seen outside the murder scene, his hands covered in blood. A white man. But as the months passed by and no arrest was made, the police came under inevitable pressure.

Royal Lodge is one of a scattered group of dwellings, mansions, forts, and follies in the southern recesses and environs of Windsor Great Park which have served royal pleasures and private needs ever since the carefree days of Charles II. It has been the home of artists and courtiers and farmers and foresters, the picnic pavilion of queens and the private abode of two kings. Meticulously researched, royal chronicler Helen Cathcart paints a vivid picture of the evolving architecture, changing decor, and esteemed inhabitants of Royal Lodge from earliest days through to the mid-twentieth century.

When 21-year-old Gwendoline Crockford signed up to join the Berkshire Constabulary in 1951, she had little idea of what she was getting herself into. Whether carrying a human skeleton out of the woods, finding a missing child, investigating thefts, or chasing an escaped zebra, every day brought fresh adventures. In this nostalgic, tender and honest account of post-war British society, we follow a bright, determined woman navigating a man's world, serving as many people as she can.

Discover the remarkable life of Virginia Woolf.... Virginia Woolf ranks among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Embracing the Post-Impressionist times in which she lived, her novels reflect the artistic shift from romanticism to abstract. Plot mattered very little to Woolf. Her writing was a stream of consciousness outside of time and place. Her novels, including her best-known work, Mrs. Dalloway, invariably dwell on gender roles and the concept of reality.

Arthur Hart-Synnot, a third-generation British officer, was sent to Japan in 1904 to learn the language of Britain's newest ally. Masa Suzuki, a beautiful Japanese woman scorned because of an early divorce, worked at the Tokyo Officers' Club. The two fell immediately in love and conceived a son before Arthur was whisked away by the military during World War I. Though Arthur would only see Masa little, he supported his Japanese family and kept alive the hope that he and Masa could live together blissfully.

Filled with roller coaster emotions and explosive revelations of covert operations, Charlie One provides a unique, detailed and unbiased account of the secret war fought in Northern Ireland. Seán Hartnett grew up in Cork in the 1970s where he observed the worst of the northern Troubles. Despite his family’s republican ties and his own attempt to join the IRA, Hartnett shocked family and friends when he joined the British Armed Forces.

From his earliest days Winston Churchill was an extreme risk taker, and he carried this into adulthood. Today he is widely hailed as Britain’s greatest wartime leader and politician. Deep down though, he was foremost a warlord. In this audiobook, historian Anthony Tucker-Jones explores the record of Winston Churchill as a military commander, assessing how the military experiences of his formative years shaped him for the difficult military decisions he took in office. This audiobook assesses his choices in the some of the most controversial and high-profile campaigns of World War II.

The remarkably honest and brilliantly entertaining memoir of one of our finest acting Dames whose long and celebrated career includes her much-loved performance as Livia in I, Claudius and who was married for 20 years to the hell-raising Hollywood star Peter O'Toole. Siân Phillips has a long and celebrated career on both stage and screen. For the first time, her two best-selling volumes of memoir Private Faces and Public Places will be available as a single volume with a brand new foreword by the author.

For millions of people, both in Britain and across the world, Elizabeth II is the embodiment of monarchy. Her long life spans nearly a century of national and global history, from a time before the Great Depression to the era of COVID-19. Her reign embraces all but seven years of Britain's postwar history; she has been served by 15 UK prime ministers from Churchill to Johnson, and witnessed the administrations of 13 US presidents from Truman to Trump. The vast majority of Britons cannot remember a world without Elizabeth II as head of state and the Commonwealth.

Roaring Girls tells the game-changing life stories of eight formidable women whose grit, determination and radical unconventionality saw them defy the odds to forge their own paths. From the notorious cross-dressing thief Mary Frith in the 17th century to rebel slave Mary Prince and adventurer, industrialist and LGBT trailblazer Anne Lister in the 19th, these diverse characters redefined what a woman could be and what she could do in pre-20th-century Britain.

Tom Chandler arrived in Bogotá at the height of the cocaine boom. Pablo Escobar lay dead, the Cali Cartel had taken over much of the global supply and an avalanche of coke was poised to hit Europe. Now the British government wanted Chandler and his team to do the impossible: infiltrate the most powerful crime syndicates on earth and stop their drug shipments. It was a perilous assignment. The cartel bosses operated like a lethal multinational, with armies of hit men and myriad spies in ports, airports, police stations and government offices.

After being captured in Singapore and transported to the infamous Burma railway, Colonel Owtram was appointed the British Camp Commandant at Chungkai, one of the largest POW camps. Many ex-prisoners testified to the mental and physical courage that he showed protecting POWs from the worst excesses of their captors. Of course his account does not admit to this, but what is clear is that in addition to the deprivation and hardship suffered by all POWs, the author bore heavy responsibility for those under his charge and the daily trauma of dealing with the unpredictable Japanese.

Lost in time for generations, the story of a 19th-century English gentleman in British India - a family mystery of love found and loyalties abandoned, finally brought to light. In 1841, 20-year-old Nigel Halleck set out for Calcutta as a clerk in the East India Company. He went on to serve in the colonial administration for eight years before abruptly leaving the company under a cloud and disappearing in the mountain kingdom of Nepal, never to be heard from again.

When people think of the British Royal family, and more specifically where they live, the first image that often pops into mind is that of stately Buckingham Palace, with its changing of the guard and the occasional royal coach leaving or entering. Others may think of the royal country estate of Windsor Castle, a favorite of both Britain's longest-reigning and second longest-reigning monarchs.

Humorous situations, satirical observations, and philosophical reflections arise from the interactions between a British general manager of a bank, Mr. W.G.M. Anderson, and his protégé, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, an émigré from India, along with a diverse cast of characters including bankers, businessmen, bureaucrats, British expatriates, European diplomats, a donkey-cart driver, a cargo-ship captain, and an entrepreneur.

Killing Goldfinger charts the extraordinary rise and spectacular bullet-riddled fall of John Palmer, the richest, most powerful criminal ever to have emerged from the modern British underworld. Palmer earned his nickname Goldfinger after smelting (in his back garden) tens of millions of pounds worth of stolen gold bullion from the 20th century's most lucrative heist; the Brink's-Mat robbery. Palmer then used his share of the millions to become the vicious overlord of a vast illegal timeshare property empire in Tenerife.