Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

First published in 2005, this story tells how in the years before the French Revolution, London is an unsettled, dangerous place: the scene of an exquisite, thrilling tale of revelation and revenge. One freezing May morning, two veiled women step off the boat from Holland. A French lady, calling...

Classic Crime from the Golden Age. Margery Allingham is J.K. Rowling's favourite Golden Age author. Eric Crowther collected secrets and used them as weapons. Delighting in nothing more than torturing those around him with what he knew, there is no shortage of suspects when he is found dead...

Relive the 20th century through the eyes and words of Lord Mountbatten – a member of the Royal family and one of Britain's most highly decorated naval officers. This extraordinary volume spans 70 years of triumph, conflict and glory in the life of this remarkable man who rose to worldwide recognition as both statesman and military hero, yet was tragically assassinated in 1979.

Tolstoy was not always an old man-not always a bearded patriarch fixing the world with the eye of an angry ancient mariner. He started War and Peacewhen he was thirty five, and AnnaKareninawas finished before he was fifty. By then he had fulfilled his genius and deployed all those elements of his...

Roger Scruton is one of the most widely respected philosophers of our time, whose often provocative views never fail to simulate debate. In Modern Philosophy he turns his attention to the whole of the field, from the philosophy of logic to aesthetics, and in so doing provides us with an essential and comprehensive guide to modern thinking.

When Caterina Gomez returns to her beloved home of Oporto, Portugal, her troubles have only just begun. The country is at war with France and, even though Oporto is no longer in French hands, it is a shadow of its former self. The scandalous cloud that Caterina left under is still not forgotten, and...

This biography looks beneath the usual assessment of Adolf Hitler the monster, digging deeper into his life and examining his successes alongside his many failings. Through his meticulous research and illuminating writing, Stone reveals a man who was surprisingly human: not the clear-sighted decisive...

The eloquent and intimate biography of one of the most significant figures of the last century. Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist and won the Nobel Prize for literature. Born into the high world of the Whig...

First published in 1981, this is about the life of Bertrand Russell, born when Queen Victoria had nearly three decades still to reign, was one of the most influential of the twentieth century, as well as one of the most controversial. He resolved to write two series of books 'in the philosophy of...

I looked again at the folded map of Europe in my hand. Then I crossed the road to the Continental booking office and bought a ticket for Salzburg in Austria. "Return?" asked the clerk. "Definitely not," I told him. In December 1966, the New Year looked exciting for fifty-five-year-old...

'It is because we learn from the writers who have either got into difficulties or who have a certain vanity in creating them, that I have chosen Meredith as my subject', says Mr. Pritchett at the beginning of these Clark Lectures for 1969. The Meredith who, as Henry James remarked, 'did the best things...

Arthur Koestler's publications manifest a wide range of political, scientific and literary interests. The Trail of the Dinosaur gathers some of his best-known essays and speeches. The Trail of the Dinosaur , first published in 1955, contains a great deal of Koestler's thinking for the first...

The unrivalled scenery of the Alps attracts increasing numbers of visitors every year, while for those who seek the more active and dangerous pursuits of climbing and skiing, the region offers unique opportunities. Ronald Clark, a distinguished historian of mountaineering, who knows the Alps...

The Soviet Union would abandon its communist principles, Khrushchev once boasted, only 'when shrimps learnt to whistle'. Now that Gorbachev has taught his shrimps to whistle, can Western politicians cope with the challenges of a wholly unchartered new world? All the major institutions of the post-war...