The Sunday Times Bestseller and insipration behind David Mitchell's Unruly.'Entertaining and informative . . . Delightful' – IndependentThere are many reasons to be fascinated by Germany: forests, architecture and fairy tales, not to mention its history and inhabitants’ penchant for very peculiar food. Our distant and often maligned cousin, this is a place in which innumerable strange characters have held power, i...

Award-winning author Simon Winder takes us through the legacy of one of Britain's most influential and enduring cultural figures, James Bond.'An entertaining romp through the literary and cinematic heartland of James Bond country' – Sunday Times'A hilarious blend of cultural history, biography and memoir' – GuardianAfter victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatiz...

Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction'Funny, erudite, frequently irritating . . . and never boring' – Sarah Bakewell, Financial Times'An excellent, rich and amusing read' – The Times, Book of the WeekFor centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw o...

A Sunday Times History Book of the YearShortlisted for The Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award'No Briton has written better than Winder about Europe' - Sunday TimesIn AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ...

Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction'Funny, erudite, frequently irritating . . . and never boring' – Sarah Bakewell, Financial Times'An excellent, rich and amusing read' – The Times, Book of the WeekFor centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw o...

The Sunday Times Bestseller and insipration behind David Mitchell's Unruly.'Entertaining and informative . . . Delightful' – IndependentThere are many reasons to be fascinated by Germany: forests, architecture and fairy tales, not to mention its history and inhabitants’ penchant for very peculiar food. Our distant and often maligned cousin, this is a place in which innumerable strange characters have held power, i...

From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs. Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder's vivid third book, Danubia.Winder's approach is friendly, witty, personal; this is a narrative that, while erudite and well researched, prefers to be discursive and anecdotal. In his survey of the centuries of often incompetent Habsburg rule which have continued to shape the fate of Central Europe, Winder does not...

In Anglia, Simon Winder, the bestselling author of Germania and Lotharingia turns his attention toward home, untangling the strange and complicated history of a country defined by its traditions, obsessions, and contradictions.Traversing England from the industrial shipyards of Barrow-in-Furness, to the wind-whipped shores of Great Yarmouth, and the smoky jazz clubs of 1940s Soho, he reveals a place irrevocably shaped by its imperial past...

Sitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?"This book is an attempt to answer that question. Why spend time wandering around a country that remains a sort of dead zone for many foreigners, surrounded...

Award-winning author Simon Winder takes us through the legacy of one of Britain's most influential and enduring cultural figures, James Bond.'An entertaining romp through the literary and cinematic heartland of James Bond country' – Sunday Times'A hilarious blend of cultural history, biography and memoir' – GuardianAfter victory in World War II, Britain was a relieved but also a profoundly traumatiz...

A Sunday Times History Book of the YearShortlisted for The Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award'No Briton has written better than Winder about Europe' - Sunday TimesIn AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ...

Thunder at Twilight is a landmark historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna—and in the life of the twentieth century.It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived in Vienna on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler k...