The History Press: 2510 books

Rachmaninoff’s work was scorned by the musical establishment as hopelessly old-fashioned and emotionally over-indulgent but never failed to find popular acclaim—including being used as the soundtrack to the film Brief Encounter. Who was this taciturn genius? This book investigates Rachmaninoff’s intense and melodramatic life.

From Count Dracula's residence in Piccadilly to Platform 9¾, an exhaustively researched guide to London's fictional landmarksAll of London's fictional clubs, pubs, restaurants, houses, and streets that have been made famous in the works of the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, Bram...

They called him America's first teenageer, James Dean starred in just three films, but his death in 1955 aged 24 - dying as he lived - made him an icon of the rebellious youth culture that he had symbolised in Rebel Without a Cause. This biography explores the myth around him.

A Grim Almanac of Old Berkshire is a day-by-day catalogue of ghastly tales dating from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. Full of torment and torture, heinous homicides, and cataclysms of nature, these pages contain multiple murders, horrendous hauntings, and audacious thefts. Have you heard...

A Bucket of Sunshine, a term used for the use of a nuclear bomb, is a firsthand insight into life in the mid-1960s on a Royal Air Force Canberra nuclear-armed squadron in West Germany on the frontline in the Cold War. Mike Brooke describes not only the technical aspect of the aircraft and its nuclear...

In 1940, against the backdrop of the Battle of Britain, 66 Squadron's commanding officer, Squadron Leader Athol Forbes, asked 10 of his pilots to record their experiences of flying one of the greatest aerial battles ever waged. The Ten Fighter Boys, published in 1942, comprised the first-hand accounts...

In 1982, 8,000 miles from home, in a harsh environment and without the newest and most sophisticated equipment, the numerically inferior British Task Force defeated the Argentinian forces occupying the Falkland Islands and recaptured this far-flung outpost of what was once an empire. It was a much-needed...

This book lets us take a tour round a courtly palace and peep around each door, as we encounter the kitchens, the bakery, the laundry, the bedrooms, the gardens and the privvies! Everything you could wish to know is here, as the book describes the different lifestyles of the court, and the people who served them.

In 1819, a young man outwitted death at the hands of John and Lavinia Fisher and sparked the hunt for Charleston’s most notorious serial killers. Former homicide investigator Bruce Orr follows the story of the Fishers, from the initial police raid on their Six Mile Inn with its reportedly grisly cellar...

This is a fascinating portrait of royal life at Sandringham, from the early life of Albert Edward to the modern day. Drawing on letters, diaries and contemporary reports, it is a rich exploration of the private lives of Britain’s royal family. From family life at the estate to the first visit of...

It takes stubborn dedication and passionate optimism to brave the frosty, wet conditions for the chance to shoot ducks and geese. And yet the tradition continues every year as more than one million waterfowl occupy the waters of the Chesapeake. Whether you are setting decoys or watching the sun rise...

Dark and foggy Victorian streets, the murderous madman, the arsenic-laced evening meal—we all think we know the realities of Victorian crime. Adrian Gray's book thrillingly reflects some of this, ranging over classic murders by knife and poison. But it also covers much more, taking the reader into...

This is the story of the men who built Britain’s canals and railways—not the engineers and the administrators, but the ones who provided the brawn and muscle. There had never been a workforce like the navvies, a great army of men, moving about the country following the work as it became available....

In the autumn of 1644 was fought one of the most sustained and desperate sieges of the First Civil War when Scottish Covenanter forces under the Earl of Leven finally stormed Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the King’s greatest bastion in the north-east and the key to his power there. The city had been resolutely...