Historical & Political Biographies

A comprehensive, authoritative and highly original portrait of one of history's most unjustly infamous characters.

The memoirs of senior UK diplomat Sir Peter Westmacott, former ambassador in Turkey, France and the United States.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and bestselling author Malala Yousafzai introduces some of the faces behind the statistics and news stories we read or hear every day about the millions of people displaced worldwide.Malala's experiences visiting refugee camps caused her to reconsider her own displacement - first as an Internally Displaced Person when she was a young child in Pakistan, and then as an international activist who could travel anywhere in the world, except to the home she loved. In We Are Displaced, which is part memoir, part communal storytelling, Malala not only explores her own story of adjusting to a new life while longing for home, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her various journeys - girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they've ever known. In a time of immigration crises, war and border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder from one of the world's most prominent young activists that every single one of the 68.5 million currently displaced is a person - often a young person - with hopes and dreams, and that everyone deserves universal human rights and a safe home.

A selection of Mozart's letters, translated into English, complete with notes, linking commentary and chronology.

'Totally gripping'-- Simon Sebag Montefiore Pilecki is perhaps one of the greatest unsung heroes of the second world war ... this insightful book is likely to be the definitive version of this extraordinary life -- EconomistWould you sacrifice yourself to save thousands of others?In the Summer of 1940, after the Nazi occupation of Poland, an underground operative called Witold Pilecki accepted a mission to uncover the fate of thousands of people being interned at a new concentration camp on the border of the Reich. His mission was to report on Nazi crimes and raise a secret army to stage an uprising. The name of the detention centre -- Auschwitz.It was only after arriving at the camp that he started to discover the Nazi s terrifying plans. Over the next two and half years, Witold forged an underground army that smuggled evidence of Nazi atrocities out of Auschwitz. His reports from the camp were to shape the Allies response to the Holocaust - yet his story was all but forgotten for decades. This is the first major account to draw on unpublished family papers, newly released archival documents and exclusive interviews with surviving resistance fighters to show how he brought the fight to the Nazis at the heart of their evil designs.The result is an enthralling story of resistance and heroism against the most horrific circumstances, and one man s attempt to change the course of history.

Known from his collaboration on the Netflix documentary Age of Samurai, historian William de Lange returns to what he does best: highly anecdotal stories from one of the most exciting episodes in Japanese history: the Warring States period.De Lange takes the reader right back to the 16th century's closing decades. In the course of the ensuing journey we witness the major battles fought by the country's three great unifiers: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.Quoting directly and at length from a wide range of contemporary sources, De Lange paints events and figures like no other, 'so richly rendered,' according to one critic, 'that you'd swear De Lange was present at the time, taking notes.'Samurai Battles is an epic account of a dramatic period in Japanese history-a period in which the whole country was consumed by the fire of civil strife that raged hardest on the field of battle.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was praised for his military genius, his courage, and his charisma. In this landmark biography, Christopher Hibbert reveals how this iconic figure and architect of Italian unification earned the adulation of not only his fellow Italians, but people across the globe.

The son of white captive Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah Parker rose from able warrior to tribal leader on the Comanche reservation. In this crisp and readable biography, William Hagan presents a well-balanced portrait of Quanah Parker, the chief, and Quanah, the man torn between two worlds.

"An acclaimed historian's definitive biography of the most important African-American figure of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass, who was to his century what Martin Luther King, Jr. was to the 20th century"--

Two months before the outbreak of the Second World War, eighteen-year-old Geoffrey Wellum becomes a fighter pilot with the RAF . . .Desperate to get in the air, he makes it through basic training to become the youngest Spitfire pilot in the prestigious 92 Squadron. Thrust into combat almost immediately, Wellum finds himself flying several sorties a day, caught up in terrifying dogfights with German Me 109s. Over the coming months he and his fellow pilots play a crucial role in the Battle of Britain. But of the friends that take to the air alongside Wellum many never return.

The inimitable Jenni Murray celebrates great women from around the world - rescuing some from obscurity and shining a new light on familiar names

The fascinating history of Christopher Columbus's illegitimate son Hernando, guardian of his father's flame, courtier, bibliophile and catalogue supreme, whose travels took him to the heart of 16th-century Europe' Honor Clerk, Spectator, Books of the Year

A remarkable account of Nazi Germany at war and of one man's struggle against totalitarianism. Friedrich Kellner's diary unflinchingly charts the country's path to dictatorship and genocide and demonstrates just how much ordinary Germans really knew about the actions of the Nazi regime.