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"From the acclaimed author of India After Gandhi: a group biography of seven remarkable men and women who arrived in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to join the freedom movement and struggle for a country and people other than their own"--

"From the acclaimed author of India After Gandhi: a group biography of seven remarkable men and women who arrived in India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries…

George III, Britain's longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as 'the cruellest tyrant of this age' (Thomas Paine, eighteenth century), 'a sovereign who inflicted more profound and enduring injuries upon this country than any other modern English king' (WEH Lecky, nineteenth century), 'one of England's most disastrous kings' (JH Plumb, twentieth century) and as the pompous, camp and sinister monarch of the musical 'Hamilton' (twenty-first century).

Andrew Roberts's magnificent new biography takes entirely the opposite view. It convincingly portrays George as intelligent, benevolent, scrupulously devoted to the constitution of his country and (as head of government as well as head of state) navigating the turbulence of eighteenth-century politics with a strong sense of honour and duty. He was a devoted husband and family man, a great patron of the arts and sciences, keen ('Farmer George') to advance Britain's agricultural capacity and determined that her horizons should be global.

The book gives a detailed, revisionist account of the American War of Independence, amongst other things persuasively taking apart a significant proportion of the Declaration of Independence. In a later war, it shows how George's support for William Pitt was crucial to the battle against Napoleon. And it makes a credible, modern diagnosis of George's terrible malady which robbed him of his mind for the last 10 years of his life - his other main claim to the popular imagination.

Roberts argues that, far from being a tyrant or incompetent, George III was one of our most admirable monarchs. George III shows one of Britain's premier historians at his sparkling best.

George III, Britain's longest-reigning king, has gone down in history as 'the cruellest tyrant of this age' (Thomas Paine, eighteenth century), 'a sovereign who inflicted more…

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The first comprehensive biography of the most influential, controversial, and celebrated Palestinian intellectual of the twentieth century



As someone who studied under Edward Said and remained a friend until his death in 2003, Timothy Brennan had unprecedented access to his thesis adviser's ideas and legacy. In this authoritative work, Said, the pioneer of postcolonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, eloquent advocate of literature's dramatic effects on politics and civic life.

Charting the intertwined routes of Said's intellectual development, Places of Mind reveals him as a study in opposites: a cajoler and strategist, a New York intellectual with a foot in Beirut, an orchestra impresario in Weimar and Ramallah, a raconteur on national television, a Palestinian negotiator at the State Department, and an actor in films in which he played himself. Brennan traces the Arab influences on Said's thinking along with his tutelage under Lebanese statesmen, off-beat modernist auteurs, and New York literati, as Said grew into a scholar whose influential writings changed the face of university life forever. With both intimidating brilliance and charm, Said melded these resources into a groundbreaking and influential countertradition of radical humanism, set against the backdrop of techno-scientific dominance and religious war. With unparalleled clarity, Said gave the humanities a new authority in the age of Reaganism, one that continues today.

Drawing on the testimonies of family, friends, students, and antagonists alike, and aided by FBI files, unpublished writings, and Said's drafts of novels and personal letters, Places of Mind synthesizes Said's intellectual breadth and influence into an unprecedented, intimate, and compelling portrait of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

The first comprehensive biography of the most influential, controversial, and celebrated Palestinian intellectual of the twentieth…

Gaunt was son of Edward III, brother to the Black Prince, father to Henry IV and the sire of all those Tudors. He’s had a pretty bad press: supposed usurper of Richard II’s crown and the focus of hatred in the Peasants’ Revolt (they torched his home, the Savoy Palace). Helen Carr will paint a complex portrait of a man who held the levers of power on the English and European stage, passionately upheld chivalric values, pressed for the Bible to be translated into English, patronised the arts … and, if you follow Shakespeare, gave the most beautiful oration on England (‘this sceptred isle… this blessed plot’). An engrossing drama of political machinations, violence, romance and tragedy played out at the cusp of a new era.

Gaunt was son of Edward III, brother to the Black Prince, father to Henry IV and the sire of all those Tudors. He’s had a pretty bad press: supposed usurper of Richard II’s crown…

A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world

Bruno Lohse (1911–2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history. Appointed by Hermann Göring to Hitler’s special art looting agency, he went on to supervise the systematic theft and distribution of over 22,000 artworks, largely from French Jews; helped Göring develop an enormous private art collection; and staged twenty private exhibitions of stolen art in Paris’s Jeu de Paume museum during the war. By the 1950s Lohse was officially denazified but back in the art dealing world, offering looted masterpieces to American museums. After his death, dozens of paintings by Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro, among others, were found in his Zurich bank vault and adorning the walls of his Munich home.

Jonathan Petropoulos spent nearly a decade interviewing Lohse and continues to serve as an expert witness for Holocaust restitution cases. Here he tells the story of Lohse’s life, offering a critical examination of the postwar art world.

A charged biography of a notorious Nazi art plunderer and his career in the postwar art world

Bruno Lohse (1911–2007) was one of the most notorious art plunderers in history.…

From one of the most beloved and distinguished historians of the British monarchy, here is a lively, intimately detailed biography of a long-overlooked king who reimagined the Crown in the aftermath of World War I and whose marriage was an epic romance.

The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, King George V ruled the British Empire from 1910 to 1936, a period of unprecedented international turbulence. Yet no one could deny that as a young man, George seemed uninspired. As his biographer Harold Nicolson famously put it, he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps." The contrast between him and his flamboyant, hedonistic, playboy father Edward VII could hardly have been greater.

However, though it lasted only a quarter-century, George's reign was immensely consequential. He faced a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of thirteen European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II during the Russian Revolution, and he facilitated the first Labour government. And, as Jane Ridley shows, the modern British monarchy would not exist without George; he reinvented the institution, allowing it to survive and thrive when its very existence seemed doomed. The status of the British monarchy today, she argues, is due in large part to him.

How this supposedly limited man managed to steer the crown through so many perils and adapt an essentially Victorian institution to the twentieth century is a great story in itself. But this book is also a riveting portrait of a royal marriage and family life. Queen Mary played a pivotal role in the reign as well as being an important figure in her own right. Under the couple's stewardship, the crown emerged stronger than ever. George V founded the modern monarchy, and yet his disastrous quarrel with his eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, culminated in the existential crisis of the Abdication only months after his death.

Jane Ridley has had unprecedented access to the archives, and for the first time is able to reassess in full the many myths associated with this crucial and dramatic time. She brings us a royal family and world not long vanished, and not so far from our own.

From one of the most beloved and distinguished historians of the British monarchy, here is a lively, intimately detailed biography of a long-overlooked king who reimagined the…

The definitive biography of John F. Kennedy, from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall. This is the untold story of how the rise of President Kennedy and the rise of the United States mirror one another - from 1917, when Kennedy was born, to 1963, when he died and the US was at the peak of its power. Full of new material from sources including a huge number of Oval Office tapes, a large volume of interviews with Jackie Kennedy, and never-before-seen CIA documents, Harvard professor Logevall focuses on international relations more so than any other biographer of this misunderstood figure. For example, he uncovers detailed material not only on President Kennedy's father as ambassador to Britain but also on his rapidly-established relationship with Harold Macmillan, and on his and Jackie's relationships with individuals in the United Kingdom. Peerlessly authoritative, this is a biography for the ages.

The definitive biography of John F. Kennedy, from Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Fredrik Logevall. This is the untold story of how the rise of President Kennedy and the rise of…

The Haitian revolution began in the French colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in November 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black republic. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture became the leader of the colony's black population, commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. Treacherously captured by Napoleon's invading army a year later and imprisoned, he ended his days as the revolution's most eminent martyr. Louverture confronted the mighty forces of his age - slavery, settler colonialism, imperial domination, racial hierarchy and European cultural supremacy - and bent them to his will.

Sudhir Hazareesingh draws on a wealth of archival material, much of it overlooked by previous biographers, to follow every step in Louverture's singular career, to capture his voice and the force of his personality. To a greater extent than any previous biography, Black Spartacus understands Louverture's vision and leadership not solely in the context of events in Europe and imported Enlightenment ideals, but in a world of hybrid slave culture and African and Caribbean influences.

The Haitian revolution began in the French colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in November 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's…

In early 1900, the paths of three British writers--Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle--crossed in South Africa, during what's become known as Britain's last imperial war. Each of the three had pressing personal reasons to leave England behind, but they were also motivated by notions of duty, service and patriotism.
Sarah LeFanu compellingly opens an unexplored chapter of these writers' lives, at a turning point for Britain and its imperial ambitions. Was the South African War, as Kipling claimed, a dress rehearsal for the Armageddon of World War One? Or did it instead foreshadow the anti-colonial guerrilla wars of the later twentieth century?
Weaving a rich and varied narrative, LeFanu charts the writers' paths in the theatre of war, and explores how this crucial period shaped their cultural legacies, their shifting reputations, and their influence on colonial policy.

In early 1900, the paths of three British writers--Rudyard Kipling, Mary Kingsley and Arthur Conan Doyle--crossed in South Africa, during what's become known as Britain's last…

J. B. S. Haldane’s life was rich and strange, never short on genius or drama—from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, who first instilled in him a devotion to the scientific method; to his time in the trenches during the First World War, where he wrote his first scientific paper; to his numerous experiments on himself, including inhaling dangerous levels of carbon dioxide and drinking hydrochloric acid; to his clandestine research for the British Admiralty during the Second World War. He is best remembered as a geneticist who revolutionized our understanding of evolution, but his peers hailed him as a polymath. One student called him “the last man who might know all there was to be known.”


He foresaw in vitro fertilization, peak oil, and the hydrogen fuel cell, and his contributions ranged over physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, mathematics, and biostatistics. He was also a staunch Communist, which led him to Spain during the Civil War and sparked suspicions that he was spying for the Soviets. He wrote copiously on science and politics in newspapers and magazines, and he gave speeches in town halls and on the radio—all of which made him, in his day, as famous in Britain as Einstein. It is the duty of scientists to think politically, Haldane believed, and he sought not simply to tell his readers what to think but to show them how to think.


Beautifully written and richly detailed, Samanth Subramanian’s A Dominant Character recounts Haldane’s boisterous life and examines the questions he raised about the intersections of genetics and politics—questions that resonate even more urgently today.

J. B. S. Haldane’s life was rich and strange, never short on genius or drama—from his boyhood apprenticeship to his scientist father, who first instilled in him a devotion to the…

The first study of Sir Lewis Namier for thirty years, and the first to integrate all aspects of his life and writings, this biography is based on a vast range of documentary sources, including entirely new archival material. Namier was one of the most important historians of the 20th century, whose 'revolutionary' approach gave a new word to the English language: to Namierise. He played a significant part in public affairs, and was on terms of close friendship with the leading figures of his day, including T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill and Isaiah Berlin. The book gives a new account of Namier's background, examines his role in the Foreign Office in the First World War and in the Zionist movement and shows the origins and development of his ideas, and the subjects which preoccupied him: nationalism, empire, and human motivation.

The first study of Sir Lewis Namier for thirty years, and the first to integrate all aspects of his life and writings, this biography is based on a vast range of documentary…

A spirited biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who helped build the foundations of the modern world.

Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclop�die into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity--for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality. One of Diderot's most attentive readers during his lifetime was Catherine the Great, who not only supported him financially, but invited him to St. Petersburg to talk about the possibility of democratizing the Russian empire.

In this thematically organized biography, Andrew S. Curran vividly describes Diderot's tormented relationship with Rousseau, his curious correspondence with Voltaire, his passionate affairs, and his often iconoclastic stands on art, theater, morality, politics, and religion. But what this book brings out most brilliantly is how the writer's personal turmoil was an essential part of his genius and his ability to flout taboos, dogma, and convention.

A spirited biography of the prophetic and sympathetic philosopher who helped build the foundations of the modern world.

Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long…

The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the twentieth century. But little has been written about his extraordinary life. In this long-awaited first biography, Oliver Soden weaves a century-spanning narrative of epic scope and penetrating insight.

Soden has discovered troves of unpublished letters and manuscripts, and recorded moving interviews with Tippett's friends and colleagues. He paints a portrait of a powerful intellect and infectious personality: charming, stubborn, and great fun. But he also uncovers the sorrows and secrets that Tippett stowed away beneath his cheerfulness, not least the darker reaches of some tempestuous and often tragic love affairs.

Soden's achievement is to have enriched our understanding not only of Tippett but of his times. Figures such as T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Barbara Hepworth, and W.H. Auden jostle in the cast list. An Edwardian world of gaslight and empire cedes to turmoil and warfare; one startling revelation is the extent of Tippett's involvement in the fiery left-wing politics of the 1930s. The narrative roves from the mining villages of the north, blighted by unemployment, to a cell at Wormwood Scrubs, where Tippett was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. Later chapters uncover his operas' game-changing attitudes to gay and civil rights, against a backdrop of the Cold War and the Space Race. And singing from the page comes the music, through which Soden charts an exquisitely written course, offering lucid readings of Tippett's most famous works while resuscitating forgotten masterpieces. The result is a landmark in the study of twentieth-century culture, simultaneously an astonishing feat of scholarship and a story as enthralling as in any great novel.

The music of the British composer Michael Tippett - including the oratorio A Child of Our Time, five operas, and four symphonies - is among the most visionary of the twentieth…

In this companion biography to the acclaimed Victoria, A. N. Wilson offers a deeply textured and ambitious portrait of Prince Albert, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the royal consort’s birth.

For more than six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire at the height of its power. Beside her for more than twenty of those years was the love of her life, her trusted husband and father of their nine children, Prince Albert. But while Victoria is seen as the embodiment of her time, its values, and its paradoxes, it was Prince Albert, A. N. Wilson expertly argues, who was at the vanguard of Victorian Britain’s transformation as a vibrant and extraordinary center of political, technological, scientific, and intellectual advancement. Far more than just the product of his age, Albert was one of its influencers and architects. A composer, engineer, soldier, politician, linguist, and bibliophile, Prince Albert, more than any other royal, was truly a “genius.” It is impossible to understand nineteenth century England without knowing the story of this gifted visionary leader, Wilson contends.

Albert lived only forty-two years. Yet in that time, he fathered the royal dynasties of Germany, Russia, Spain, and Bulgaria. Through Victoria, Albert and her German advisers pioneered the idea of the modern constitutional monarchy. In this sweeping biography, Wilson demonstrates that there was hardly any aspect of British national life which Albert did not touch. When he was made Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in his late twenties, it was considered as purely an honorific role. But within months, Albert proposed an extensive reorganization of university life in Britain that would eventually be adopted, making it possible to study science, languages, and modern history at British universities—a revolution in education that has changed the world.

Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert’s voluminous correspondence, this brilliant and ambitious book offers fascinating never-before-known details about the man and his time. A superb match of biographer and subject, Prince Albert, at last, gives this important historical figure the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.

In this companion biography to the acclaimed Victoria, A. N. Wilson offers a deeply textured and ambitious portrait of Prince Albert, published to coincide with the 200th…

In six weeks in 1940, France's armies were decisively beaten by Germany. A junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18 June he spoke to his compatriots on the BBC, urging them rally to him in London. Through that broadcast, Charles de Gaulle entered into history. For the rest of the war, de Gaulle in London frequently bit the hand that fed him. Insisting on being treated as the true embodiment of France, he quarrelled violently with Churchill and Roosevelt. But through force of personality and willpower he managed to have France recognised as one of the victorious powers at the end of the War. For ten years after 1958 he was President of France's Fifth Republic, which he created and which endures to this day. Drawing on a vast range of published and unpublished documents, Julian Jackson's magnificent biography reveals this extraordinary figure as never before. The portrait which emerges is of a man of many paradoxes. Some considered him a delusional mystic and vainglorious showman; others a cynical Machiavellian with no fixed beliefs. The tension between reason and sentiment, ambition and moderation, visions of grandeur and respect for circumstance, lay at the core of his conception of political action. Few leaders have reflected more self-consciously on the nature of leadership. As he wrote of Napoleon: 'Once the balance between ends and means is snapped, the manoeuvres of a genius are in vain.' But although de Gaulle had a clear sense of what a leader should be, he was surprisingly flexible about what one should do. The man who did so much to make France what it is today was himself a battlefield on which the French fought out their history.

In six weeks in 1940, France's armies were decisively beaten by Germany. A junior French general, refusing to accept defeat, made his way to England. On 18 June he spoke to his…

Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After Wolsey's fall, Henry VIII promoted him to a series of ever greater offices, such that in the 1530s he was effectively running the country for the King. That decade was one of the most momentous in English history: it saw a religious break with the Pope, unprecedented use of parliament, the dissolution of all monasteries, and the coming of the Protestantism. Cromwell was central to all this, but establishing his role with precision has been notoriously difficult.

Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography is the most complete life ever written of this elusive figure, making connections not previously seen and revealing the channels through which power in early Tudor England flowed. It overturns many received interpretations, for example that Cromwell and Anne Boleyn were allies because of their common religious sympathies, showing how he in fact destroyed her. It introduces the many different personalities contributing to these foundational years, all worrying about what MacCulloch calls the 'terrifyingly unpredictable' Henry VIII, and allows readers to feel that they are immersed in all this, that it is going on around them. For a time, the self-made 'ruffian', as he described himself - ruthless, adept in the exercise of power, quietly determined in religious revolution - was master of events. MacCulloch's biography for the first time reveals his true place in the making of modern England and Ireland, for good and ill.

Thomas Cromwell is one of the most famous - or notorious - figures in English history. Born in obscurity in Putney, he became a fixer for Cardinal Wolsey in the 1520s. After…

A landmark reconsideration of the iconoclastic war leader, based on extensive new material, from private letters to war cabinet meetings, by the bestselling, award-winning author of Napoleon and The Storm of War.

When we seek an example of unalloyed courage, the man who comes to mind is Winston Churchill: the visionary leader, immune from the consensus of the day, who stood firmly for his beliefs when everyone doubted him. But how did young Winston become Churchill? What gave him the strength to take on the superior force of Nazi Germany when bombs rained on London and so many others had caved? In The Storm of War, Andrew Roberts gave us a tantalizing glimpse of Churchill the war leader. Now, at last, we have the full and definitive biography, as personally revealing as it is compulsively readable, about one of the great leaders of all time.

Roberts was granted exclusive access to extensive new material: the transcripts of war cabinet meetings - the equivalent of the Nixon and JFK tapes - diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs, and detailed notes taken by the king after their bi-weekly meetings. Having read every one of Churchill's letters, including deeply personal ones that Churchill's son Randolph had previously chosen to withhold, and spoken to more than one hundred people who knew or worked with him, Roberts identifies the hidden forces fueling Churchill's drive. Churchill put his faith in the British Empire and fought as hard to preserve it as he did to defend London. Having started his career in India and South Africa, he understood better than most idealists how hard it can be to pacify reluctant people far from home.

We think of Churchill as a hero of the age of mechanized warfare, but Roberts's masterwork reveals that he has as much to teach us about the challenges we face today and the fundamental values of courage, tenacity, leadership, and moral conviction.

A landmark reconsideration of the iconoclastic war leader, based on extensive new material, from private letters to war cabinet meetings, by the bestselling, award-winning author…

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness.

In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man.

Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became -- in the process -- a New Negro himself.

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale…

A major biography of the queen who transformed Spain into a principal global power, and sponsored the voyage that would open the New World.

In 1474, when Castile was the largest, strongest, and most populous kingdom in Hispania (present day Spain and Portugal), a twenty-three-year-old woman named Isabella ascended the throne. At a time when successful queens regnant were few and far between, Isabella faced not only the considerable challenge of being a young, female ruler in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but also of reforming a major European kingdom riddled with crime, debt, corruption, and religious factionism. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon united two kingdoms, a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Their pivotal reign was long and transformative, uniting Spain and setting the stage for its golden era of global dominance.

Acclaimed historian Giles Tremlett chronicles the life of Isabella of Castile as she led her country out of the murky Middle Ages and harnessed the newest ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to turn her ill-disciplined, quarrelsome nation into a sharper, truly modern state with a powerful, clear-minded, and ambitious monarch at its center. With authority and insight he relates the story of this legendary, if controversial, first initiate in a small club of great European queens that includes Elizabeth I of England, Russia's Catherine the Great, and Britain's Queen Victoria.

A major biography of the queen who transformed Spain into a principal global power, and sponsored the voyage that would open the New World.

In 1474, when Castile was the…

One needs to be a fox to recognize snares, and a lion to frighten the wolves

Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a fiercely competitive world, one where brute wealth, brazen liars and ruthless self-promoters seemed to carry off all the prizes; where the wealthy elite grew richer at the expense of their fellow citizens. In times like these, many looked to crusading religion to solve their problems, or they turned to a new breed of leaders - super-rich dynasties like the Medici or military strongmen like Cesare Borgia; upstarts from outside the old ruling classes. In the republic of Florence, Machiavelli and his contemporaries faced a choice: should they capitulate to these new princes, or fight to save the city's democratic freedoms?

Be Like the Fox follows Machiavelli's dramatic quest for political and human freedom through his own eyes. Masterfully interweaving his words with those of his friends and enemies, Erica Benner breathes life into his penetrating, comical, often surprising comments on events. Far from the cynical henchman people think he was, Machiavelli emerges as his era's staunchest champion of liberty, a profound ethical thinker who refused to compromise his ideals to fit corrupt times. But he did sometimes have to mask his true convictions, becoming a great artist of fox-like dissimulation: a master of disguise in dangerous times.

One needs to be a fox to recognize snares, and a lion to frighten the wolves

Niccolò Machiavelli lived in a fiercely competitive world, one where brute wealth, brazen liars and…

Like the travels of Marco Polo, those of Alexander Gardner clip the white line between credible adventure and creative invention. Either he is the nineteenth century's most intrepid traveler or its most egregious fantasist, or a bit of both. Contemporaries generally believed him; posterity became more skeptical. And as with Polo, the investigation of Gardner's story enlarged man's understanding of the world and upped the pace of scientific and political exploration.

Before more reputable explorers notched up their own discoveries in innermost Asia, this lone Scots-American had roamed the deserts of Turkestan, ridden round the world's most fearsome knot of mountains and fought in Afghanistan 'for the good cause of right against wrong'. From the Caspian to Tibet and from Kandahar to Kashgar, Gardner had seen it all. At the time, the 1820s, no other outsider had managed anything remotely comparable. When word of his feats filtered out, geographers were agog.

Historians were more intrigued by what followed. After thirteen years as a white-man-gone-native in Central Asia, Gardner reemerged as a colonel of artillery in the employ of India's last great native empire. He witnessed the death throes of that Sikh empire at close quarters and, sparing no gruesome detail, recorded his own part in the bloodshed (the very same featuring as the exploits of 'Alick' Gardner in the 'Flashman' series).

Fame finally caught up with him during his long retirement in Kashmir. Dressed in tartan yet still living as a native, he mystified visiting dignitaries and found a ready audience for the tales of his adventurous past. But one mystery he certainly took to the grave: the whereabouts of his accumulated fortune has still to be discovered.

Using much original material, including newly discovered papers by Gardner himself, this investigative biography by renowned historian John Keay takes the reader on a quest from the American West to the Asian East to unravel the greatest enigma in the history of travel.

Like the travels of Marco Polo, those of Alexander Gardner clip the white line between credible adventure and creative invention. Either he is the nineteenth century's most…

Victor Sebestyen's intimate biography is the first major work in English for nearly two decades on one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. In Russia to this day Lenin inspires adulation. Everywhere, he continues to fascinate as a man who made history, and who created a new kind of state that would later be imitated by nearly half the countries in the world.

Lenin believed that the 'the political is the personal', and while in no way ignoring his political life, Sebestyen focuses on Lenin the man - a man who loved nature almost as much as he loved making revolution, and whose closest ties and friendships were with women. The long-suppressed story of his ménage a trois with his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and his mistress and comrade, Inessa Armand, reveals a different character to the coldly one-dimensional figure of legend.

Told through the prism of Lenin's key relationships, Sebestyen's lively biography casts a new light on the Russian Revolution, one of the great turning points of modern history.

Victor Sebestyen's intimate biography is the first major work in English for nearly two decades on one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. In Russia to this…

An award-winning historian charts Hitler's radical transformation after World War I from a directionless loner into a powerful National Socialist leader

In Becoming Hitler, award-winning historian Thomas Weber examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement. The tragedy for Germany and the world was that Hitler found himself in Munich; had he not been in Bavaria in the wake of the war and the revolution, his transformation into a National Socialist may never have occurred.

In Becoming Hitler, Weber brilliantly charts this tragic metamorphosis, dramatically expanding our knowledge of how Hitler became a lethal demagogue.

An award-winning historian charts Hitler's radical transformation after World War I from a directionless loner into a powerful National Socialist leader

In Becoming Hitler,…

Clement Attlee was a slightly-built, bald, pipe-smoking and unassuming man who presided over the radical administration of 1945-51 and is sometimes referred to as Britain's greatest peace-time Prime Minster.

His cocooned suburban childhood and standing at university as 'the man who couldn't quite' were unlikely preparations for such a figure. Yet Attlee was often underestimated: he won over those who compared him unfavourably to his rival, Churchill, and undercut their doubt with dry wit and proof of his steady and ethical leadership.

His political awakening volunteering in the East End of London was instrumental in redrawing his map of Britain's class and economic system. Growing up in the comfortable coda of the Victorian era, he foresaw an epoch of change - one that he was pivotal to bring about in the post-war years. After serving at Gallipoli during the First Word War he rose through the ranks of the Labour Party and during the Second World War became Britain's first Deputy Prime Minister. In 1945, in the glow of Churchill's great war victory, Attlee won the election by a landslide. Alongside Bevin, Nye and Truman, his governance saw the end of the Empire in India, the foundation of the NHS and Britain's places in NATO and the nuclear arms race.

John Bew's brilliant biography will pierce the reticence of Attlee and explore the intellectual foundations and core beliefs of one of the most important, and least understood, figures in the history of the United Kingdom. It will reveal a public servant and patriotic socialist, who never lost sight of the national interest and whose view of humanity and belief in solidarity was grafted onto the Union Jack.

Clement Attlee was a slightly-built, bald, pipe-smoking and unassuming man who presided over the radical administration of 1945-51 and is sometimes referred to as Britain's…

The astonishing life of Kenneth Clark – the greatest British art historian of his time. As writer and presenter of the 13-part TV series Civilisation he was responsible for the greatest syntheses of art, music, literature and thought ever made – ‘a contribution to civilisation itself’.

Drawing on previously unseen archives, James Stourton reveals the formidable intellect and the complicated private man who wielded enormous influence on all aspects of the arts and drew into his circle a diverse group, many of whom he and his wife Jane would entertain at Saltwood Castle. These included E.M. Forster, Vivien Leigh, Margot Fonteyn, the Queen Mother, Winston Churchill, John Betjeman, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. Hidden from view, however, was his wife’s alcoholism and his own womanising.

From his time as Bernard Berenson’s protege at I Tatti in Florence to being the Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean aged 27 – by which time he had published The Gothic Revival, the first of his many books – to his appointment as the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery, Clark displayed precocious genius. During the war he arranged for the gallery’s entire collection to be hidden in slate mines in Wales, and organised packed concerts of German classical music at the empty gallery to keep up the spirits of Londoners. The war and the Cold War that followed convinced him of the fragility of culture and that, as a potent humanising force, art should be brought to the widest possible audience, a social and moral position that would inform the rest of his career.

No voice has exercised so much power and influence over the arts in Britain as Clark’s. James Stourton has written a dazzling biography of a towering figure in the art world, a passionate art historian of the Italian Renaissance and a brilliant communicator who, through the many mediums of his work, conveyed the profound beauty and importance of art, architecture and civilisation for generations to come.

The astonishing life of Kenneth Clark – the greatest British art historian of his time. As writer and presenter of the 13-part TV series Civilisation he was responsible for the…