Isobel Charman: 3 books

During the First World War three quarters of a million British people died – a figure so huge that it feels impossible to give it a human context. Consequently we struggle to truly grasp the impact this devastating conflict must have had on people's day-to-day lives. We resort to looking at the...

‘It’s a great sight, all the disused trenches, which were ploughed into nothing in the attacks, and the big stretch of ‘no-man’s land’ in which nothing can live and is full of corpses.’As a boy, Alan Lloyd could never have imagined the harsh realities of the war he would one day...

Set in the heart of swirling, Dickensian London, the wondrous history of a unique institution and the incredible characters—human and animal—that populated it. The founding of a zoo in Georgian London is a story of jaw-dropping audacity in the Age of Empire. It is the story of diplomats,...