'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...

Pickup an old stamp album and flick through it. You'll find a host of exotic and unfamiliar names: Cyrenaica, Fernando Poo, Fiume, North Ingria, Obock, Stellaland, Tuva, – distant lands, vanished territories, lost countries. Do they still exist? If not, where were they? What happened to them?From My Old Stamp Album goes in search of the truth about these and many other amazing places. Stuart Laycock and Chris West unearth stories of many kinds. Some take y...

They say that history is written by the victors, and consequently there is a tendency for the Britons to be forgotten in the story of the end of Roman Britain and the post-Roman period. Warlord will redress this balance looking at the extraordinary lives of British leaders from 400-550 and the strategies they used to seize and hold power during these turbulent times. The book focuses on key figures who have been largely neglected in history over the last 30 years. Starting with Ge...

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 through the Roman per...

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...

Packed with thought-provoking and intriguing facts, an entertaining look at the UK's imperial past as you've never seen it beforeOut of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, the UK has invaded or fought conflicts in the territory of 171. That's not far off a massive, jaw-dropping 90 percent. Not too many Britons know that the UK invaded Iran in World War II with the Soviets. You can be fairly sure a lot more Iranians do. Or what about the time they arr...

When we think of Roman Britain we tend to think of a land of togas and richly decorated palaces with Britons happily going about their much improved daily business under the benign gaze of Rome. This image is to a great extent a fiction. In fact, Britons were some of the least enthusiastic members of the Roman Empire. A few adopted Roman ways to curry favor with the invaders. A lot never adopted a Roman lifestyle at all and remained unimpressed and riven by deep-seated tribal division. It ...

Out of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, we've invaded or fought conflicts in the territory of 171. That's not far off a massive, jaw-dropping 90 per cent. Not too many Britons know that we invaded Iran in the Second World War with the Soviets. You can be fairly sure a lot more Iranians do. Or what about the time we arrived with elephants to invade Ethiopia? Every summer, hordes of British tourists now occupy Corfu and the other Ionian islands. Find out ho...

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 of the...

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...