Catherine Beale: 3 books

At 24, Johnny Arkwright, grandson of the "richest commoner in Europe," inherits Hampton Court, Herefordshire, putting him among the elite of the world's most powerful nation. Yet those of his generation that seemed to inherit the earth were about to see their world disintegrate and disappear,...

At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, London Mayor Boris Johnson memorably said of London 2012 that 'Ping-Pong is coming home'. In fact, he might justifiably have said that 'the modern Olympic movement is coming home'. In 1850, Shropshire doctor William Penny Brookes began Olympian Games for the moral, physical...

At the outbreak of war in 1939 British tank crews were ill-equipped, under trained and badly led. As a consequence the lives of hundreds of crewmen were wasted unnecessarily. This was due not only to the poor design and construction of British tanks, but also to the lack of thought and planning on...