The Duchess

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life.

A story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life - one who has outlived six monarchs and twenty-one prime ministers. It captures how life was lived in the Edwardian era and how it was altered irrevocably by the slaughter of millions of young men in the Great War, and by the subsequent coming of the modern age.

Sex, intrigue and adultery in the world of high politics and huge wealth in late eighteenth-century England.

Written from the perspective of an ordinary 'Tommy', this book is a testament to the human spirit, for out of the mud that threatened to suck out a man's soul rises a compelling story of humanity and friendship.

Collects some of the most romantic letters in history. This book presents various shades of love, from the exquisite eloquence of Oscar Wilde and the simple devotion of Robert Browning, to the wonderfully modern misery of the Roman Pliny the Younger, losing himself in work to forget how much he misses his beloved wife, Calpurnia.

The extraordinary diaries of Thomas Cairns Livingstone represent twenty years of gorgeously idiosyncratic daily records of a middle-class Glasgow household, over a period spanning shortly before the Great War to the early 1930s.

Tells the story of a man whose life has spanned six monarchs and twenty prime ministers.

The first instalment of the highly anticipated biography of Henry VIII, written by one of the UK's most popular, established and exciting historians. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Henry's accession to the throne, 'Henry: Virtuous Prince' is a radical re-evaluation of the monarchy's most enduring icon.

With her colleagues, Helen Barr, plays the violin and she seeks refuge from the everyday in the selfish magic of English literature and poetry. But this is Paris under the occupation and her family is Jewish. In March 1944, Helene and her family are arrested, taken to Drancy Transit Camp and soon sent to Auschwitz. This is her journal.

Katherine Synford was the wife, of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. This book highlights her key dynastic position within the English monarchy. She was the mother of the Beaufort, then the ancestress of the Yorkist kings, the Tudors, the Stuarts and every other sovereign since - a prodigious legacy that has shaped the history of Britain.