The Lost World of British Communism is a vivid account of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Raphael Samuel, one of post-war Britain's most notable historians, draws on novels of the period and childhood recollections of London's East End, as well as memoirs and Party archives, to evoke the world of British Communism in the 1940s. Samuel conjures up the era when the movement was at the height of its political and theoretical power, brilliantly bringing to life an age in which t...

Most studies of the interwar years have focussed upon literary elites, rendering that past and its literature in almost exclusively male terms. In Forever England Alison Light argues that we cannot make sense of Englishness in the period, or understand the changes within literary culture, unless we recognise the extent to which the female population represented the nation between the wars.From the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, Forever England traces t...

Yvonne Kapp, best known today for her biography of Eleanor Marx, was a remarkable woman whose life spanned virtually the entire twentieth century. Time Will Tell charts her life: 'enfant terrible' in London, the literary editor of Vogue in France in the late 1920s, work for anti-fascist refugee committees in 1930s' London, research for the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the British Medical Research Council, then, in her later years, work as a translator and a biographe...

When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own in 1929, she established her reputation as a feminist, and an advocate for unheard voices. But like thousands of other upper-class British women, Woolf relied on live-in domestic servants for the most intimate of daily tasks. That room of Woolf's own was kept clean by a series of cooks and maids throughout her life. In the much-praised Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light probes the unspoken inequality of Bloomsbury homes...

**Winner of the 2014 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for the Best Work of History"Brilliant…the most challenging and intelligent book on the Great War and our perceptions of it that any of us will read." —John Charley, The Times [London]**One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War...

Eric Hobsbawm is considered by many to be our greatest living historian. Robert Heilbroner, writing about Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes 1914-1991 said, “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” Skeptical, endlessly curious, and almost contemporary with the terrible “short century” which is the subject of Age of Extremes, his most widely read book, Hobsbaw...

The hilariously accurate, witty and indispensable manual for everyone who longs to attain True Britishness'Got me in tears of laughter' 5***** Reader Review'Laugh-out-loud hilarious, witty and insightful' 5***** Reader Review_______Born in Hungary, George Mikes eventually spent more than forty years in the Britain observing behaviours and misbehaviours of local and foreign Brits.With essential chapters...

Sir Peter Ustinov's beautifully crafted autobiography is told with exquisite wit and insight. From his birth in April 1921, it spans his extraordinary career as actor, playwright, film star and director, confirming his early belief that he is 'irrevocably betrothed to laughter'. Ustinov's renowned gift for mimicry is exploited to the full in Dear Me. Eccentric relatives, school masters, sergeant majors and manic Hollywood moguls are all brought unforgettably to life.

From the award-winning author of The Gentleman's Daughter,a witty and academic illumination of daily domestic life in Georgian England.In this brilliant work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist ...

'Beautifully written.' Valerie Grove, The Times 'Martini-dry wit.' Irish Times 'Often pure Wodehouse.' Financial Times 'Uncompromising.' A.N. Wilson, Sunday Telegraph 'It has all her charm.' Laura Thompson, A Good Read, BBC Radio 4 'Brilliant.' Evening Standard 'A Life of Contrasts is a candid, page-turning memoir, written by a woman who will—without any doubt—be viewed by history as one of the most fascinating personalities of the Twentieth Century.' Mary S. Lovell 'Lady Mosley writes ext...

The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.Anarchist ideas are so much at variance with ordinary political assumptions and the solutions anarchists offer so...

An intellectual who did not like intellectuals, a socialist who did not trust the state, a writer of the left who found it easier to forgive writers of the right, a liberal who was against free markets, a Protestant who believed in religion but not in God, a fierce opponent of nationalism who defined Englishness for a generation. Aside from being one of the greatest political essayists in the English language and author of two of the most famous books in twentieth century literature, Georg...