Great Britain History

De la reine Victoria à la disparition du prince Philip en passant par la naissance de l'héritier George et la crise du "Megxit", le roman vrai d'une famille extraordinaire, aux prises avec le tragique de l'histoire comme avec les drames intimes. Dans leurs bonheurs comme dans leurs malheurs, ils continuent de nous fasciner par un unique mélange de traditions et d'audaces. Windsor ? Une passionnante saga britannique.

Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of A Short History of Drunkenness by Mark Forsyth, read by Richard Hughes. Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there's drink there's drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. It can be religious, it can be sexual, it can be the duty of kings or the relief of peasants. It can be an offering to the ancestors or a way of marking the end of a day's work. It can send you to sleep or send you into battle.

Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a fascinating reconstruction of Anne’s life and an illuminating look at her afterlife in the popular imagination. Why is Anne so compelling? Why has she inspired such extreme reactions? What did she really look like? Was she the flaxen-haired martyr of Romantic paintings or the raven-haired seductress of twenty-first-century portrayals? (Answer: Neither.) And perhaps the most provocative questions concern Anne’s death more than her life.

The year 1916 was one of the great turning-points in British history: as the youthful hopes of a generation were crushed in a desperate struggle to survive and traditional attitudes to authority were destroyed for ever. On paper, few battles have ever been so meticulously planned. Yet while there were good political reasons to launch a joint offensive with a French Army demoralised by huge casualties at Verdun, the raw troops on the ground knew nothing of that.

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the British Empire withdrew from India, igniting the exhilaration and turmoil of a newly free society. In this vivid, atmospheric popular history, Alex von Tunzelmann chronicles these times through the most prominent figures.

At the outbreak of World War II, MI6 spymaster Thomas Kendrick arrived at the Tower of London to set up a top secret operation: German prisoners' cells were to be bugged and listeners installed behind the walls to record and transcribe their private conversations. This mission proved so effective that it would go on to be set up at three further sites - and provide the Allies with crucial insight into new technology being developed by the Nazis. In this astonishing history, Helen Fry uncovers the inner workings of the bugging operation.

More than a century later, historians still argue about this controversial and misunderstood World War I naval battle off the coast of Denmark. It was the 20th century's first engagement of dreadnoughts - and while it left Britain in control of the North Sea, both sides claimed victory and decades of disputes followed. This book not only retells the story of the battle from both a British and German perspective based on the latest research, but also helps clarify the context of Germany's inevitable naval clash and the aftermath after the smoke had cleared.

Ronald Hutton is known for his colorful, provocative, and always exhaustively researched studies on original subjects. This work is no exception: the first full-scale scholarly study of the only religion England has ever given the world, that of modern pagan witchcraft, which has now spread from English shores across four continents. Hutton examines the nature of that religion and its development, and offers a microhistory of attitudes to paganism, witchcraft, and magic in British society since 1800.

From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realize that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine.

Margaret Tudor, the elder sister of her more famous brother Henry VIII, is the single most important Tudor figure of this era that historians have consistently overlooked. Married at thirteen to the charismatic James IV of Scotland, a man more than twice her age, she would learn the skills of statecraft that would enable her to survive his early death, and to construct a powerful position in her adopted country of Scotland as she dealt with domestic issues as well as navigating international relations with England and France.

In this boldly drawn portrait of 18th-century England, Roy Porter defines a nation from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered run the gamut, covering diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.

Anne Bonny and Mary Read, pirate queens of the Caribbean. Tipu Sultan, the Indian ruler who kept the British at bay. Olaudah Equiano, the former slave whose story shocked the world. Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist who fought for women’s rights. Ladies of Llangollen, the lovers who built paradise in a Welsh valley. With 12 epic tales from Britain’s wildest century, this is a rapid journey through those who made history between 1714 and the 1830s.

The RMS Titanic sailed from Southampton en route for New York on her maiden voyage with 2,228 passengers and crew on board. On 14 April, 1912, at twenty minutes before midnight, sailing at almost full speed, she struck an iceberg and sank in just two and a half hours. Over 1500 lives were lost. This is the story of a great tragedy described by the surviving passengers, officers, and crew who were on board that night. Firsthand accounts help to explain why so few of the passengers took to the lifeboats.

“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most puzzling murder investigations. Incredibly, at the time the words of the world’s most famous fictional detective appeared in print in the Strand Magazine, a real-life Canadian doctor, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, was stalking and murdering women in London’s downtrodden Lambeth neighborhood. In this book, Dean Jobb reveals how bungled investigations, corrupt officials and failed prosecutions allowed Cream to evade detection or freed him to kill, again and again.

The political upheaval of the mid-17th century has no parallel in English history. Other events have changed the occupancy and the powers of the throne, but the conflict of 1640-60 was more dramatic: The monarchy and the House of Lords were abolished, to be replaced by a republic and military rule. In this wonderfully listenable account, Blair Worden explores the events of this period and their origins while aiming to reveal something more elusive: the motivations of contemporaries on both sides and the concerns of later generations.

Mary Boleyn was the mistress of two kings, Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England, and sister to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife. In this astonishing and riveting biography, Alison Weir’s extensive research gives a new and detailed portrayal, in which she recounts that, contrary to popular belief, Mary was entirely undeserving of her posthumous notoriety as a great whore.

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

Starring Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II and John Lithgow as Winston Churchill, Netflix's original series The Crown, created by Peter Morgan and growing out of his Oscar-winning movie The Queen starring Helen Mirren, paints a unique and intimate portrait of Britain's longest-reigning monarch. This official companion to the show's first season is an in-depth exploration of the early years of Elizabeth II's time as queen, complete with extensive research and additional material.

There is a corner of every town and city in Britain where the air is tangy with vinegar and thick with the scent of frying. It is almost impossible not to follow this mesmeric vapour trail, fuelling a nostalgic rush of parents across the land declaring ‘Chippy tea!’, followed by the golden anticipation of the chip shop queue. In this lively and relatable book, acclaimed author Daniel Gray ponders the magic of chippies and rejoices in the delights they have sprinkled among us over the last 150 years.