Hachette

This solemn, rhythmic intonation of the shipping forecast on BBC radio is as familiar as the sound of Big Ben chiming the hour. Since its first br...

Edward is throwing a dinner party with Binny , his mistress. Aware that she has long been denied those small intimacies that his wife takes for gra...

'This is one of Bainbridge's best books. The close observation and hilarity are underlain by a sense of tragedy as deep as any in fiction' The Time...

Alix, arrogant, middle-aged and angry comes home to the derelict port of Liverpool as her mother lies dying. Irritably resigned to living alone for...

The second volume of Woodruff's memoirs starts with him having arrived in Poplar in the early 1930s. On spec he turns up at a steel foundry and luc...

Paranoid, wilful, lazy, the young Adolf Hitler turns up in Liverpool to stay with his brother Alois and sister-in-law Bridget. Hailed by Alois as a...

THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classi...

In August 1930, on a boat trip from Bombay to England, the young Indian scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that certain stars could en...

The story of the fight to gain the vote for women is about much more than a peripheral if picturesque skirmish around the introduction of universal...

John Wesley led the Second English Reformation. His Methodist 'Connexion' was divided from the Church of England, not by dogma and doctrine but by...

Edwardian Britain is the quintessential age of nostalgia, often seen as the last long summer afternoon before the cataclysmic changes of the twenti...

PLAYING HARD BALL is a unique sports book, a cultural comparison of two national games - cricket, English in origin and American baseball - written...

His Holiness The Dalai Lama's indispensible advice for achieving wisdom, balance and happiness.

When Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, she left behind the beginnings of a new novel - twenty pages of a work in progress called Emma. Now, almost 150...

Sir James Brooke was an extraordinary 'eminent' Victorian, whose life was the stuff of legend.His curious career began in 1841 when he was caught u...

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent, aged six, to England, a desperately unhappy experien...

Each night when the House of Commons rises, throughout the Palace of Westminster policemen shout, 'Who goes home?', a relic of the days when Member...

When Ruth Padel saw an advert for a cheap break to India, she decided to visit what she had always wanted to see: tropical jungle and a wildlife sa...

31st December 1942. In the middle of the North Atlantic, the deadly 'gap' where aircraft cannot protect them, a destroyer and 4 corvettes are sheph...

While attempting to teach at an inner London comprehensive Will Randall is taken up by an elderly German woman who asks him to accompany her to Ind...

Tom Holland's bestselling account of the world's very first clash of civilisations between the Persians and the Greeks in 480BC'Magisterial... told...

The story of a Victorian philanthropist who reformed shipping laws, saved thousands of sailors' lives and became a national hero'A story of ambitio...

On a balmy summer's day in Oxford an old lady who once helped decipher the Enigma Code is killed. After receiving a cryptic anonymous note containi...

'A gripping account of a physicist whose speculations could prove as revolutionary as those of Albert Einstein . . . Its combination of erudition, ...