What was it that the British people believed they were fighting for in 1914–18? This compelling history of the British home front during the First World War offers an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war. Drawing on official archives, memoirs, diaries and letters, Adrian Gregory sheds new light on the public reaction to the war, examining the role of propaganda and rumour in fostering patriotism and hatred of the enemy. He shows the importance of the e...

This book examines how the British people came to terms with the massive trauma of the First World War. Although the literary memory of the war has often been discussed, little has been written on the public ceremonies on and around 11 November which dominated the public memory of the war in the inter-war years. This book aims to remedy the deficiency by showing the pre-eminence of Armistice Day, both in reflecting what people felt about the war and in shaping their memories of it. It show...

**The acclaimed account of the English people, now updated with two new chapters'Masterful, an enormously readable narrative of the English people from the Anglo-Saxons to the present' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year**In The English and their History, the first full-length account to appear in one volume for many decades, Robert Tombs gives us the history of the English people, and of how the stories they have told about themselves have ...

**WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING****WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHY***Book of the year: The Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Evening Standard*'Outstanding . . . We still live in the society that was shaped by Clement Attlee' Robert Harris, Sunday Times'The best book in the ...

‘Zeppelin Nights is social history at its best… White creates a vivid picture of a city changed forever by war’ The Times2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. In those four decisive years, London was irrevocably changed. Soldiers passed through the capital on their way to the front and wounded men were brought back to be treated in London’s hospitals. At night, London plunged into darkness for fear of Zeppeli...

Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.The extraordinary and forgotten story of the building of the World War One cemeteries, due to the efforts of one remarkable man, Fabian Ware.Before WWI, little provision was made for the burial of the war dead. Soldiers were often unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave; officers shipped home for burial.The great cemeteries of WWI came about as a result of the efforts of one in...

Before Easter 1916 Dublin had been a city much like any other British city, comparable to Bristol or Liverpool and part of a complex, deep-rooted British world. Many of Dublin's inhabitants wanted to weaken or terminate London's rule but there remained a vast and conflicting range of visions of that future: far more immediate was the unfolding disaster of the First World War that had put 'home rule' issues on ice for the duration. The devastating events of that Easter changed everything. B...

This book is a collection of essays arising out of the Zealandias Great War conference organised by the New Zealand Military History Committee in November 2003. In 32 essays by distinguished military historians from New Zealand and around the world, various aspects of New Zealands involvement in World War One are discussed. Subjects include the Pioneer Maori Battalion, women who opposed the war, the early years of the RSA, Gallipoli, the infantry on the Somme, New Zealands involvement in t...

Benjamin Disraeli was the most gifted parliamentarian of the nineteenth century and a superb orator, writer and wit - but how much do we really know about the man behind the words?'As Douglas Hurd and Edward Young point out in their splendidly written, finely judged and thoroughly persuasive book, a vast chasm yawned between the real Disraeli and his posthumous reinvention' Dominic Sandbrook, SUNDAY TIMES'Not only, they tell us in this vigorously debunking ...

Written by Philip Ziegler, one of Britain's most celebrated biographers, George VI is part of the Penguin Monarchs series: short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulers in a collectible formatIf Ethelred was notoriously 'Unready' and Alfred 'Great', King George VI should bear the title of 'George the Dutiful'.Throughout his life, George dedicated himself to the pursuit of what he thought he ought to be doing rather than what he wanted to do. In...

The best political biography of the year' Jonathan Sumption, Spectator'Wonderful . . . A Life so nearly complete it need never be written again' Ferdinand Mount, Times Literary SupplementBy the author of the Orwell Prize-winning Citizen ClemDamned in coruscating verse by Shelley and Byron, his coffin hissed at during his funeral, Lord Castlereagh has one of the blackest reputations in Britis...

"A sweeping riveting history that manages to capture the essence of the conflict, as well as the contributions of particular schools and individuals." — HMC Insight MagazineIn this pioneering and original book, Anthony Seldon and David Walsh study the impact that the public schools had on the conduct of the Great War, and vice versa. Drawing on fresh evidence from 200 leading public schools and other archives, they challenge the conventional wisdom...