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It is also a classic in the art of story-telling.'A real achievement, personal as well as literary.' David Pryce-Jones, The Times'A parable of the reality behind a vast amount of modern social and political fantasy, even in the most developed of countries.' David Holden, Sunday Times

It would use any means, however devious - even negotiate a humiliating, dishonourable settlement with Nazi Germany - to maintain its privileges, those of a decaying ruling class.

In 1815 Britain's crack troops, fresh from the victories against Napoleon, were stunningly defeated near New Orleans by a ragtag army of citizen-soldiers under the commander they dubbed 'Old Hickory', Andrew Jackson. It was this battle that defined the United States as a military power to be reckoned with and an independent democracy here to stay.

Wave upon wave of Christian pilgrims assault the growing power of the Muslims in the Holy Land and will do so for the next two hundred years. Uniting Christian Europe in a common cause, the crusades defined forever the spirit of the West.

A fascinating account of the life of one of the century's great eccentrics - the brilliant Antoine de Saint-Exupery. He flew reconnaissance missions in the War and wrote some strange and wonderful books, including the classic children's story THE LITTLE PRINCE, between theatrically executed airplane crashed.

Two years earlier, the Guinea trade had been prised loose by an Act of Parliament from the monopoly of the Royal African Company, and respectable burghers in a dozen small provincial ports seized what they saw as an opportunity for quick rewards from the slave trade.

Six historians focus on the major themes and most dramatic moments of the last two millenia: the rise and fall of empires; reformation, revolution and restoration; wars both civil and global; and the enduring question of what it means to be British. .

The seventeen months from April 1814 to August 1815 were an extraordinary period in European history; a period which saw two sieges of Paris, a complete revision of Europe's political frontiers. This title tells the story of these days through the perspectives of three very different European cities.

In this illuminating work of history, Shlaes follows the struggles of those now forgotten people, from a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal, to Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and Father Divine, a black cult leader.

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time.

Florence in the fifteenth century was the undisputed centre of the Italian Renaissance. In this brilliant and absorbing book Vincent Cronin brings vividly to life the people and myriad achievements of this astonishingly fruitful epoch in human history.

When she did declare herself - as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of the murdered Romanovs - she became the centre of a storm of controversy that still continues after her death in 1983.

In 1856 - just as Darwin was completing ORIGIN OF SPECIES - the fossilized remains of a stocky, powerful human-like creature were discovered in a cave in the Neander Valley in Germany.

For a man who longed for a quiet existence, Arthur Ransome led a remarkably adventurous life. His two marriages - first to an unstable fantasist and later to a formidable Russian who had been Trotsky's secretary - were, to say the least, stormy.

There are no big towns - Bournemouth was only wrenched out of Hampshire a few years ago to help with the rates and has no Dorset characteristics. From the first chapter Dorset is a county brimming with history - Iron Age forts, saxon churches, remnants of the Civil War.

The author examines every aspect of Wolsey's career: foreign policy, Church and State, law and order, social policy, relations with the Crown, with Parliament and the nobility. He gives the reader a very different Wolsey from the caricature of tradition.

A critical discussion of Pound's poetry.

Alan Moorehead was lionised as a literary man of action: the most famous war correspondent of the Second World War; Drawing on Moorehead's diaries and correspondence, as well as interviews with his family and friends, Tom Pocock tells the story of a thrilling, but ultimately tragic, life.

Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors.

In 1934, Igor Stravinsky was fifty-two, a Russian expatriate living in Paris and already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation. This work follows Stravinsky through the remainder of his long life, which he would spend largely in the United States. It also shows his increasingly complex and often agonised family life.

In 1900 just over a thousand British civil servants ruled a population of nearly 300 million people spread over a territory now covered by India, Pakistan, Burma and Bangladesh.

There had, of course, been other fires, Four Hundred and fifty years before, the city had almost burned to the ground. In five days that small fire would devastate the third largest city in the Western world. Adrian Tinniswood's magnificent new account of the Great Fire of London explores the history of a cataclysm and its consequences.

Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings. Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and of the illustrious lives that touched his.

Drawing widely on original material (all of it quoted in translation), he tells us how the Romans prayed, what happened at a sacrifice, what sort of gods they believed in, and how seriously they took their religion - a religion in which actions, , not dogma, was paramount.

In this remarkable book Jonathan Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience.

She died in 1869. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century.

Born in Ireland in 1864 Roger Casement acted as British Consul in various parts of Africa (1895-1904) and Brazil(1906-11) where he denounced atrocities among Congolese and Putumayo rubber workers.

Poetry of the Second World War brings to light a neglected chapter in world literature. The anthology has been arranged to bring out the chronological and cumulative human experience of the war: pre-war fears, air raids, the boredom, fear and camaraderie of military life;

In this clear-eyed and controversial book he sets himself to take the temperature of the nation at the end of the 20th century - to test its blood for health and heartiness, sample its imagination for largeness amd magnanimity, conduct examinations of its intelligence, judgement and moral sense.

How has the world changed in the last century? THE PIMLICO HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is a provocative and challenging analysis of the whole world in the twentieth century, combining a global sweep with an eye for detail and individual experiences.