検索キーワード： ヨーロッパ

James Boswell forever changed the genre of biography when he painstakingly transformed a scholarly profusion of detail into a perceptive, lifelike portrait of Dr. Samuel Johnson. James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature.

In this classic account of the French war in Indochina, Bernard B. Fall vividly captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the savage eight-year conflict in the jungles and mountains of Southeast Asia from 1946 to 1954. The French fought well to the last, but even with the lethal advantages of airpower, they could not stave off the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists, who countered with a hit-and-run campaign of ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids. Defeat came at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, setting the stage for American involvement and opening another tragic chapter in Vietnam's history.

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences.

Anne Lister was extraordinary. Fearless, charismatic, and determined to explore her lesbian sexuality, she forged her own path in a society that had no language to define her. She was a landowner, an industrialist, and a prolific diarist whose output has secured her legacy as one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century. Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister follows Anne from her crumbling ancestral home in Yorkshire to the glittering courts of Denmark as she resolves to put past heartbreak behind her and find herself a wife.

The Enlightenment is one of the formative periods of Western history, yet more than 300 years after it began, it remains controversial. It is often seen as the fountainhead of modern values such as human rights, religious toleration, freedom of thought, scientific thought as an exemplary form of reasoning and rationality and evidence-based argument. Others accuse the Enlightenment of putting forward a scientific rationality which ignores the complexity and variety of human beings, propagates shallow atheism and aims to subjugate nature to so-called technical progress.

Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is rather like meeting a very famous person. We may all pretend that a well-known celebrity is no different from anyone else, and yet there is an undeniable thrill in actually meeting and talking to a person of world stature. The idea for this book, which is entirely new, is to invite the listener into an intimate conversation with a selection of the most famous manuscripts in existence and to let each of those manuscripts illuminate the Middle Ages and sometimes the modern world too.

In 2020, the world faced its biggest crisis in a generation: a global pandemic. In the UK, it exposed deep divisions within society and laid bare a toxic culture war that had been raging beneath the surface. From the outset, Piers Morgan urged the nation to come to its senses, once and for all, and held the government to often ferocious account over its handling of the crisis. COVID-19 shed shocking light on the problems that plague our country. Stockpilers and lockdown-cheats revealed our grotesque levels of self-interest.

On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next 12 months, the Nazis would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons and destroying two million homes. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson gives a new and brilliantly cinematic account of how Britain’s most iconic leader set about unifying the nation at its most vulnerable moment, and teaching ‘the art of being fearless’.

The British Empire comprised a bewildering collection of colonies, dominions, protectorates, and mandated possessions that spanned the planet. This was the largest empire in world history, at its peak ruling over more than 400 million people and covering almost one-quarter of the total land mass of the Earth.

The Spanish Empire was the first truly global empire and the first to be described as one on which “the sun never sets.” It rapidly grew to become one of the largest and most powerful empires in the history of the world and brought us goods such as potatoes, chocolate, and chewing gum.

If you had to name the most destructive conflicts in human history, you likely wouldn’t put the Thirty Years’ War near the top of that list, but in fact, this conflict resulted in more than eight million fatalities throughout Europe. It resulted in widespread destruction, and it bankrupted the majority of the powers involved. For such a destructive war, the Thirty Years’ War is not well-known, and yet it changed the geopolitical face of Europe as well as the role of religion and nation-states in society. This audiobook tells the compelling story of the Thirty Years’ War.

Henry VII was not destined to be the well-known (or perhaps better described as infamous) king that his son was after him, but his place in history remains important. With his victory over Richard III in 1485, Henry brought England out of the Middle Ages and ushered it into the modern era. His reign ended decades of bloody civil wars and provided the wealth and stability necessary for commerce and art to thrive in England. When Henry’s son, Henry VIII, ascended the throne in 1509, it marked England’s first uncontested transfer of power in almost 90 years.

The Age of Extremes is eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm's personal vision of the 20th century. Remarkable in its scope, and breathtaking in its depth of knowledge, this immensely rewarding book reviews the uniquely destructive and creative nature of the troubled 20th century and makes challenging predicitions for the future.

Left unfinished after Dickens died in 1870, The Mystery of Edwin Drood centers on Edwin Drood's uncle, John Jasper, and his love for Rosa Bud, Edwin's fiancee. Set in the dark, fictional cathedral city of Cloisterham, the novel is awash with guilt, disguise and mystery. It contains some fine writing, and just before his death, Dickens left an indication of where the plot was going, which is included.

A ground-breaking and essential work of history – the first of its kind to closely examine the British Royal Family's connection with the transatlantic slave trade The Crown's Silence is the untold story of the British royal family's relationship to slavery from the reign of Elizabeth I to the present. It will be the first history of the British monarchy told through the lens of its intimate, centuries-long relationship with African slave trading, slavery, and racial injustice.

Queen Elizabeth II’s seventy-year reign witnessed the highs and lows of the close and crucial alliance between the U.S. and the U.K., from the Suez crisis to Brexit. Following the advice of her mentor, Winston Churchill, to “stay close to the Americans,” Queen Elizabeth played an unexpected role behind the scenes. In The Queen and Her Presidents, veteran political reporter Susan Page goes beyond the image of a staid monarch in colorful hats to reveal a skilled strategist, who, like many powerful women, was routinely underestimated and discounted.

Ireland is Britain's closest neighbour - the sea crossing from Scotland measures only 12 miles. It was also its first captive in what became Britain's empire. The two nation's stories have been intertwined since Anglo-Norman invaders crossed the Irish Sea during the 12th century. These Troubled Isles tells the extraordinary history of the past century in this tumultuous relationship, from the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1922 to the present day.

More than seven centuries later, bestselling historian Alice Loxton set herself an epic challenge: following in history's footsteps by walking the entire 200-mile funeral route on the corresponding dates. As Alice journeys in search of England's forgotten queen, over ancient paths and modern motorways, history comes alive in surprising ways. In 1290, England mourned the death of a queen, Eleanor of Castile, beloved wife of King Edward I. Her body was carried on a 200-mile journey from Lincoln to London, a solemn procession that would become immortalized in stone.

The Fall of the Reich: The Final 100 Days tells the harrowing and historically rich story of how the Third Reich unravelled during its final, desperate months between January and May 1945. What was once a seemingly invincible Nazi war machine had by 1945 become a hollow shell—crumbling under the weight of defeat, dissent, and destruction. From the failed final offensive in the Ardennes to the thunder of Soviet artillery at the gates of Berlin, this book tracks the intense and often chaotic events that sealed Hitler’s fate and reshaped the modern world.

Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise.