**The Times [UK] • Best Books of 2025 [So Far]“Beautifully written and supported by a treasure trove of new material” (Amanda Foreman), The Mirror of Great Britain is a major reassessment of King James, revealing the long origins of an uneasily united kingdom.**History has not been kind to King James. A cradle king who was crowned in Scotland in 1567 and England and Ireland in 1603, James VI and I has long been eclipsed in fame and reputation by his predec...

*WINNER OF THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE 2022***A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021, AS CHOSEN BY THE TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, TELEGRAPH AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT'A big historical advance. Ours, it turns out, is a very un-insular "Island Story". And its 17th-century chapter will never look quite the same again' John Adamson, Sunday TimesA ground-breaking portrait of the most turbulent century in English history**Among foreign obs...

The acclaimed Penguin Monarchs series: short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulersCharles II has always been one of the most instantly recognisable British kings - both in his physical appearance, disseminated through endless portraits, prints and pub signs, and in his complicated mix of lasciviousness, cynicism and luxury. His father's execution and his own many years of exile made him a guarded, curious, unusually self-conscious ruler. He lived through some...

King James, often overlooked or, more often, cruelly stereotyped, presents a fascinating figure: a diplomat whose long reigns encompassed extraordinary dramas. James identified himself with the "Mirror of Great Britain," a spectacular jewel commissioned upon his accession to the English throne, which not only furnished him with one of his favorite metaphors―that of the mirror, with its limitless capacity to magnify, illuminate, and distort―but gave symbolic endorsement to his vision of Bri...

Brought to you by Penguin.**A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021, AS CHOSEN BY THE TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, TELEGRAPH AND TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENTA ground-breaking portrait of the most turbulent century in English history**Among foreign observers, seventeenth-century England was known as 'Devil-Land': a diabolical country of fallen angels, torn apart by seditious rebellion, religious extremism and royal collapse. Clare Jackson's dazzling, origina...

The dramatic true story offive brilliant young soldiers from Harvard, this is a thrilling tale of combat and heroism.Five Lieutenantstells the story of five young Harvard men who took up the call to arms in the spring of 1917 and met differing fates in the maelstrom of battle on the western front in 1918. Delving deep into the motivations, horrific experiences, and ultimate fates of this Harvard-educated quintet—and by extension, of the brilliant young officer class that l...

A gripping, often startling biography of the Founding Father of an America that other Founding Fathers forgot--an America of women, African Americans, Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers, indentured workers, the poor, the mentally ill, and war veteransNinety percent of Americans could not vote and did not enjoy rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness when our Founding Fathers proclaimed, "all men are created equal." Alone among those who signed the Declarat...

Shortly after losing all of his wealth in a terrible 1884 swindle, Ulysses S. Grant learned he had terminal throat and mouth cancer. Destitute and dying, Grant began to write his memoirs to save his family from permanent financial ruin.As Grant continued his work, suffering increasing pain, the American public became aware of this race between Grant's writing and his fatal illness. Twenty years after his respectful and magnanimous demeanor toward Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, people...

A sweeping and insightful grand strategic overview of the American Revolution, highlighting Washington's role in orchestrating victory and creating the US ArmyLed by the Continental Congress, the Americans almost lost the war for independence because their military thinking was badly muddled. Following the victory in 1775 at Bunker Hill, patriot leaders were convinced that the key to victory was the home-grown militia -- local men defending their families and homes...

Marguerite Higgins was both the scourge and envy of the journalistic world. A longtime reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, she first catapulted to fame with her dramatic account of the liberation of Dachau at the end of World War II. Brash, beautiful, ruthlessly competitive, and sexually adventurous, she forced her way to the front despite being told the combat zone was no place for a woman.While the Herald Tribune exploited her feminine appeal—regularly fea...

The most horrific struggle of the American Revolution occurred just 100 yards off New York, where more men died aboard a rotting prison ship than were lost to combat during the entirety of the war.Moored off the coast of Brooklyn until the end of the war, the derelict ship, the HMS Jersey, was a living hell for thousands of Americans either captured by the British or accused of disloyalty. Crammed below deck -- a shocking one thousand at a time -- without ...

**A True West Magazine Best Book and Best Author of the YearA colorful and groundbreaking account of the most storied friendship of the American West: the bond between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday**Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday: Legendary gunfighters and friends who gained immortality because of a thirty-second shootout near a livery stable called the O.K. Corral. Their friendship actually began three years before that iconic 1881 gunfight, in the rollicking cattle to...