World War One had a devastating, cataclysmic impact on the world and the British people. As its reverberations were so long-lasting and significant, it is easy to assume that the social consequences were as profound.In this highly readable and moving survey of life back at home during the First World War, Gerard DeGroot challenges this assumption, finding pre-war social structures were surprisingly resilient. Despite economic and technological changes, the British peoplemanaged to ...

Before 1966, the idea of Reagan in politics provoked widespread scorn. To most people, he seemed a has-been actor, a right-wing extremist and a 'dunce'. Journalists therefore ridiculed his aspirations to be governor of California. No one, however, doubted his incredible ability to communicate with a crowd. In order to succeed in his campaign, Reagan had to be packaged as an outsider - an antidote to politics as usual. A highly sophisticated team of marketers and ad-men turned the scary rig...

Before the Bomb, there were simply 'bombs', lower case. But it was the twentieth century, one hundred years of almost incredible scientific progress, that saw the birth of the Bomb, the human race's most powerful and most destructive discovery.In this magisterial and enthralling account, Gerard DeGroot gives us the life story of the Bomb, from its birth in the turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early...

Peter Clarke brilliantly challenges the commonly held view of Britain in the twentieth century as a nation in decline. Adopting a wide perspective, he examines the political. social and economic changes that transformed Britain. He looks at how jobs and prices, food and shelter, and education and welfare, shaped society and explores such areas as architecture, sport and popular culture. Embracing a century of national experience, Hope and Glory superbly conveys the diverse aspects of three...

Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionFinalist for The California Book Award in NonfictionThe San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year ListForeign Affairs Best Books of the YearIn These Times “Best Books of the Year"Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books ListLitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week”

The Will of the People is an incisive, in-depth look at Winston Churchill’s lifelong commitment to parliamentary democracy. First elected at twenty-five, Churchill was still in the House of Commons sixty-four years later. By far the largest part of his life – of his working days and nights – was spent in the cut and thrust of debate in the service of the people, whose instrument he believed Parliament to be. “I am a child of the House of Commons,” he told a joint session o...

Innovation, the sixth and final volume in Peter Ackroyd's magnificent History of England series, takes readers from the Boer War to the Millennium Dome almost a hundred years later.Innovation brings Peter Ackroyd's History of England to a triumphant close. Ackroyd takes readers from the end of the Boer War and the accession of Edward VII to the end of the twentieth century, when his great-granddaughter Elizabeth II had been on the throne for almos...

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...

John Curtin, prime minister during the darkest days of the Second World War, is remembered as the reluctant hero of Australian politics. In the Australian story he is the recovering alcoholic and the accidental prime minister who saved Australia from invasion by Japan, overrode the opposition of Churchill and Roosevelt to bring home Australian troops from the Middle East, and created the Australian alliance with the United States. However, there is much more to the Curtin story than this.

A first-person account of the Manhattan Project by the general who hired, and worked alongside, Robert Oppenheimer.General Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer were the two men chiefly responsible for the building of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, code name the Manhattan Project. As the ranking military officer in charge of marshaling men and material for what was to be the most ambitious, expensive engineering feat in history, it was General Groves who hir...

The history of the Conservative party has, extraordinarily, rarely been written in a single volume for the general reader. There are academic multi-volume accounts and a multitude of smaller books with limited historical scope. But now, Robin Harris, Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter and party insider, has produced this authoritative but lively history book which tells the whole story and fills a gaping hole in Britain's historiographical record.Taking as his starting point the larg...

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a riveting account of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War.In the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of nuclear war, until Gorbachev boldly launched a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons, setting the stage for the 1986 Reykjavik summit and the incredible events that followed. In this thrilling, authoritative narrative, Richard Rhodes draws on personal interviews with both Soviet ...