Known collectively as the 'Great War', for over a decade the Napoleonic Wars engulfed not only a whole continent but also the overseas possessions of the leading European states. A war of unprecedented scale and intensity, it was in many ways a product of change that acted as a catalyst for upheaval and reform across much of Europe, with aspects of its legacy lingering to this very day. There is a mass of literature on Napoleon and his times, yet there are only a handful of scholarly works that seek to cover the Napoleonic Wars in their entirety, and fewer still that place the conflict in any broader framework. This study redresses the balance. Drawing on recent findings and applying a 'total' history approach, it explores the causes and effects of the conflict, and places it in the context of the evolution of modern warfare. It reappraises the most significant and controversial military ventures, including the war at sea and Napoleon's campaigns of 1805-9. The study gives an insight into the factors that shaped the war, setting the struggle in its wider economic, cultural, political and intellectual dimensions.

Napoleonic Wars, 1803-1815

History

Gates, David

Europe

PIMLICO (RAND)

Two hundred years before Hardy disguised it as Casterbridge, Dorchester was a typical English county town, of middling size and unremarkable achievements. But on 6 August 1613 much of it was destroyed in a great conflagration, which its inhabitants regarded as a 'fire from heaven', the catalyst for the events described in this book. Over the next twenty years, a time of increasing political and religious turmoil all over Europe, Dorchester became the most religiously radical town in the kingdom. The tolerant, paternalist Elizabethan town oligarchy was quickly replaced by a group of men who had a vision of a godly community in which power was to be exercised according to religious commitment rather than wealth or rank. One of this book's most remarkable achievements is the re-creation, with an intimacy unique for an English community so distant from our own, of the lives of those who do not make it into history books. We glimpse the ordinary men and women of the town drinking and swearing, fornicating and repenting, triumphing over their neighbours or languishing in prison, striving to live up to the new ideals of their community or rejecting them with bitter anger and mocking laughter. In it subtle exploration of human motives and aspirations, in its brilliant and detailed reconstruction, this book shows how much of the past we can recover when in the hands of a master historian.

Fire from Heaven : Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century

Hoxton today is one of the most fashionable parts of inner London, yet before the Blitz, it was the capital's most notorious slum area. It was London's busiest market for stolen goods, the centre of the pickpocket trade, home to a razor gang that terrorised racecourses all over southern England. Its main thoroughfare, Hoxton Street, was known also as the roughest street in Britain. But among the people born there in its heyday was Bryan Magee, journalist, academic, philosopher, radio and television broadcaster and Member of Parliament. For him it was home, for his first nine years, until he became an evacuee on the outbreak of war. In this moving and beautifully written book he recalls the vanished world of his childhood and brings it to life again in all its drama and surprise.

Clouds of Glory: A Hoxton Childhood

BRYAN MAGEE

Biographies & Memoirs

Blue Notes Records: The Biography

COOK, RICHARD

Arts & Literature

This classic in popular geology, is a unique exploration of Britain’s geological diversity. Richard Fortey guides us around the British Isles, and as the rocks change, so we learn to read the clues they contain – cultural as well as geological.

Hidden Landscape (Pimlico, 136)

Science & Math

RICHARD FORTEY

Earth Sciences

CASE OF MARY BELL,THE

Politics & Social Sciences

GITTA SERENY

Social Sciences

Caravaggio: A Life

Helen Langdon

In an open cart Elspeth Huxley set off with her parents to travel to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they built a house of grass, ate off a damask cloth spread over packing cases, and discovered-the hard way-the world of the African. With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the small farm at a time when Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that was as harsh as it was beautiful. For a young girl, it was a time of adventure and freedom, and Huxley paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up among the Masai and Kikuyu people, discovering both the beauty and the terrors of the jungle, and enduring the rugged realities of the pioneer life

The Flame Trees Of Thika

HUXLEY, Elspeth

A riveting account of the Wars of the Roses, focusing on the human side of the story. The war between the houses of Lancaster and York for the throne of England was characterized by treachery, deceit and, at St. Albans, Blore Hill and Towton, some of the bloodiest and most dramatic battles on England’s soil. Between 1455 and 1487, the royal coffers were bankrupted and the conflict resulted in the downfall of the House of Lancaster and the House of York, and the emergence of the illustrious Tudor dynasty. Alison Weir’s lucid and gripping account focuses on the human side of history, on the people and personalities involved in the conflict. At the centre of the book stands Henry VI, the pious king whose mental instability led to political chaos; Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York and Henry’s rival; and most important of all, Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s wife who took up arms in her husband’s cause and battled for many years in a violent man’s world.

Lancaster & York

ALISON WEIR

Community & Culture

The Second World War dwarfs in scale the scanty memoirs of great figures of the past. The imagination boggles at the task of finding a just comparison... The events would have made the narrative great even if the writer had not had Churchill's gift of style. But the style matches the occasion. TLS That the acclamation ha

The Second World War: The One-Volume Abridgement

Winston, Churchill

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the PIMLICO (RAND) publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PIMLICO (RAND)