'Delighted to learn from this very enjoyable new book that the first ever game of football played in Austria was won by the Vienna Cricket Club.' - Tom Holland, Historian and BroadcasterHave we matched Wembley 1966 and 2022, or lost again on penalties? As a football fan in the Home Nations, there is at least one thing of which you can be sure. Even if sometimes other countries play it better than us, they'll forever have to thank Britain f...

Explores the link between King Arthur's kingdom and the rise of Mercia, uncovering lost battlefields. England today is a rich, complex mix of identities, cultures, and heritages. However, in the decades after Roman Britain collapsed in the fifth century, the cultures of the Angles and of the Saxons, with significant degrees of homogeneity, spread rapidly westwards across much of eastern, southern and central England. Then it stopped. Or was stopped. For the area then still beyond Anglo-Sax...

Italy Invades, full of restless adventurers, canny generals, and the occasional scoundrel, is a fast-paced and compelling read, the perfect sequel to America Invades.Recreating their success with America Invades, Christopher Kelly and Stuart Laycock take another global tour, this time starting from Italy and exploring that country's military involvements throughout the ancient and modern worlds. From the empire building of the Romans, through the globe-sp...

The centuries after the end of Roman control of Britain in AD 410 are some of the most vital in Britain's history - yet some of the least understood. " Warlords" brings to life a world of ambition, brutality and violence in a politically fragmented land, and provides a compelling new history of an age that would transform Britain. By comparing the archaeology against the available historical sources for the period, " Warlords" presents a coherent picture ...

Attempts to understand how Roman Britain ends and Anglo-Saxon England begins have been undermined by the division of studies into pre-Roman, Roman and early medieval periods. This groundbreaking new study traces the history of British tribes and British tribal rivalries from the pre-Roman period, through the Roman period and into the post-Roman period. It shows how tribal conflict was central to the arrival of Roman power in Britain and how tribal identities persisted thro...

Many Britons like to think they have a basic understanding of Britain’s amazing history. The Roman invasion, Alfred and the Danes, 1066, Magna Carta, Bannockburn, Agincourt, the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII and his wives, the Reformation, etc., etc. The trouble is that concentrating on just a few over-familiar landmarks like these can give a distorted picture of the land we live in. What would our history look like if, instead of looking at all the bits everybody knows, we started telling...

Did you know?• The first African community to arrive in England was stationed at Aballava on Hadrian's Wall to keep out the Picts.• Admiral Robert FitzRoy, creator of the Met Office, was so upset by criticism of his weather forecasts that he shot himself.• While studying at Cambridge, Charles Darwin formed the 'Glutton Club' for the purpose of eating unusual animals.• Ada Lovelace wrote a computer code in the nineteenth century, before a wor...

Roman Britain is usually thought of as a land full of togas, towns and baths with Britons happily going about their Roman lives under the benign gaze of Rome. This is, to a great extent, a myth that developed after Roman control of Britain came to an end, in particular when the British Empire was at its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.In fact, Britain was one of the least enthusiastic elements of the Roman Empire. The northern part of Br...

Have you ever wondered why some towns in Texas have French names? Or why there's a statue of a Shawnee chief at the US Naval Academy? Or what coastal wildlife refuges have to do with American fears of invasion? And what the Olive Oil Riot in Montana was really all about? America Invaded has the answers to these intriguing questions, and so many more. Ever since they first set foot on the North American continent, humans have explored, discovered, established boundaries - and subsequently i...

The Roman Empire has been a source of fascination to political thinkers, the obsession of some of the greatest historians, and has influenced art down the ages. Now, in a fresh new take on the era, historian Stuart Laycock sums up the subject in 100 haikus. These original poems are sometimes witty, sometimes sad, sometimes playful, sometime serious, but with only a few syllables to play with they are always concise and to the point. Read them in order for a sense of the vast sweep of Roman...

Discover the evidence that Vikings walked on American soil—centuries before Columbus.When Columbus claimed to have discovered America in 1492 and the Borgia pope declared it a New World for Catholic Spain, the Vatican started a five-hundred-year conspiracy to conceal the true story of Viking America.In this groundbreaking new work by the author of The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland, the true extent of the Viking discovery and colon...

The authoritative and fascinating history of the rise and fall of the state-owned British Rail'Wolmar's book is impeccably organised and makes a fast, enjoyable read' THE TIMES Literary Supplement________British Rail wasn't how we're asked to remember it . . .From ancient rolling stock to patchy service, stale sandwiches to the wrong kind of snow, British Rail - our last great state-owned or...