Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, a figure of substance. But for nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded, with unparalleled openness and sensitivity to the turbulent world around him, exactly what it was like to be a young man in Restoration London.

Challenging many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers this analysis of how the Revolution redefined the family and its internal dynamics, by introducing civil divorce, equal inheritance rights for sons and daughters, and granting civil rights to illegitimate children.

How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire.

From the author's study of the Austen family papers, this title paints a picture of the Austen clan and their neighbours, and concludes that the facts of Jane Austen's life were even more extravagant and romantic than her fiction.

This is the true story of a brilliantly forged Emily Dickinson poem sold at Sotheby's in 1997. In this text, Simon Worrall reveals the psychology of a master forger and a ruthless killer, a man whose love for books developed into an uncontrollable compulsion.