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Published by the History of Parliament Trust to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the modern Commonwealth, this illustrated history traces its evolution, from the earliest English colonies in America and the Caribbean, through the demise of Empire and milestones such as the London Declaration of 1949, to the present diverse, informal and resilient organization. In telling that history, the book’s emphasis is on the influence of English, then British, representative democracy on political institutions throughout the Commonwealth.

From the blockade and siege of Toulon in 1793, in which Bonaparte first made his name, to his escape from Elba in 1815, naval operations in the Mediterranean were a critical aspect of the Napoleonic Wars. Drawing on an array of primary sources, this study describes the ebbs and flows of the 20-year conflict that included the set-piece battles of the Nile and Lissa and brought to prominence Horatio Nelson.

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Lady Anne Barnard lived at the heart of Georgian society – the Prince of Wales was a friend, and Walter Scott admired her verses – but her defiance of convention made her an outsider. Drawing on her unpublished papers, including six volumes of memoirs, this biography brings the poet, musician, artist and hostess vividly to life, and tells how she travelled to France to observe the Revolution, married an army officer twelve years her junior, and raised an illegitimate child.

Georgian houses are admired for their elegance, but less attention has been given to what it was like to live in them. In a ‘nosy, gossipy, and utterly engaging’ study of English homes, Vickery examines a wide range of accommodation and types of household, using sources ranging from personal diaries to court records. She investigates not only how homes were furnished and decorated but also how social and cultural changes revolutionized the use of domestic space. Slightly off-mint.

As their nation stood on the brink of Civil War, Americans were captivated by a new postal service that, for just 18 months, carried mail almost 2,000 miles across the continent using a relay of daring young horseback riders. In this book the coauthor of American Sniper explores the origins and development of the Pony Express, debunks myths that quickly grew up around it and considers its lasting relevance as a symbol of American enterprise. Slightly off-mint with felt tip mark on upper trimmed edge. American-cut pages.

Challenging the conventional narratives of cotton mills and inspired innovators, Priya Satia argues that the constant state of war and Britain’s thriving gun trade were driving forces in the Industrial Revolution. Discussing the economic impact of war on political and industrial progress, she scrutinizes the claims by Samuel Galton Jnr, the leading gun manufacturer, that his industry was no worse than any other as everyone was participating in war manufacturing, and that guns were instruments of civilization, essential for preserving property. Slightly off-mint.

From the 1830s onwards, a succession of British aristocrats headed for the American West, taking with them their valets, their dogs – and their prejudices. This sparkling account describes the newcomers' experiences as they crossed the country to meet Native Americans, hunt buffalo and build cattle empires. Packed with lively incident and colourful personalities, it also charts their reception by Americans often less than pleased at the return of their former colonial overlords.

This new, more extensively illustrated edition of the authoritative 1990 work shows how, in the years after the Battle of Waterloo, British warships developed from sail and wood to steam and iron, culminating in the world’s first iron-hulled, seagoing battleship, HMS Warrior. Written by a naval architect, it progresses from the structural innovations of Robert Seppings (1767–1840) to subsequent refinements of steam and the paddle-fighting ship, metal hulls and screw propulsion, and the evolving role of the Royal Navy.

Born in Moscow in 1971, Evgeny Kissin made his concert debut at the age of ten and is now internationally renowned for his interpretation of the classical and Romantic piano repertoire. In this collection of reminiscences he answers some of the questions that he is most often asked – about his childhood, his early teachers and his encounters with the world’s great musicians – and muses on topics including fame, inspiration and his favourite composers. Slightly off-mint.

Beginning in 1896, when the first edition of the Daily Mail launched a new style of journalism designed to provide entertainment, appeal to women, and create news as well as report it, this study examines continuities and changes in the content of popular newspapers. In chapters on war, politics, monarchy and celebrity, gender and sexuality, class and race, the authors look at how the tabloid press has shaped British society.

Illuminating a less familiar aspect of Napoleon’s empire, Michael Broers’s study focuses not on military clashes with foreign enemies but on the animosity of rural populations – peasantry, marginalized nobility and deposed clergy – and their resistance towards the new regimes of urban revolution and Napoleon. Demonized as ‘bandits’ rather than ideological opponents, these were the enemy in Napoleon’s ‘other war’.

In 1780, the anti-Papist Gordon riots left 1,000 dead and London in flames; half a century later, Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act. This narrative history charts the struggles that brought about that conclusion. It profiles the key players, including George III, a staunch opponent of emancipation; the political rivals Wellington and Peel; and the Irish campaigner Daniel O’Connell; and examines the conflict between the right to practise one’s religion and allegiance to the state.

A powerful statesman and inscrutable diplomat, Saionji led a delegation committed to achieving racial equality and international influence. Their lack of success and the Conference’s compromise – the granting of colonial territory – sowed the seeds of further conflict. Slightly off-mint.

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From the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800 to the Liberal Party’s landslide victory in 1906, Cannadine breaks new ground in the history of the 19th century, exploring the ‘many contradictions of progress’ during the United Kingdom’s era of national greatness and imperial aggrandisement. He emphasizes how stable, parliamentary democracy was crucial to Britain’s success, but also explores the darker side of British life and the challenges facing a global power. Part of The Penguin History of Britain series.

During the Great Siege of Gibraltar (1779–83), the longest ever endured by the British, the powerful forces of Spain and France blockaded and assaulted the isle from land and sea. Thousands of civilians and soldiers experienced starvation, disease and deadly bombardment. Including maps and illustrations, this book explores the story of the siege and its impact on life back home, while examining the argument that it ultimately cost the British the American War of Independence.

In 1794 during the war against Revolutionary France, the first Earl Grey led a Caribbean campaign to capture Martinique and Guadalope. Supported by maps and illustrations, this book demonstrates that although the campaign ultimately failed, the unorthodox tactics that were deployed showed a flexibility that would influence several notable subalterns who went on to success in Wellington's Peninsular army and Royal Artillery and, in the case of Richard Fletcher, the Royal Engineers.

Accused of having an affair with a boy, William Beckford (1760–1844) retired to his estate at Fonthill, Wiltshire, where he constructed a faux-medieval abbey to house his art and antiquities. This book draws on contemporary records to detail his grandiose building plans, and to tell how, having spent his inherited wealth, he was forced to auction both his collection and the building itself, whose huge Gothic tower came crashing down soon after the sale.

The inspiration for the film The Duchess and an ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales, Georgiana was famous for her charisma, love affairs, political connections, unusual marital arrangements and gambling debts. In her lifetime she became a fashion icon whose outfits and ostentatious accessories were widely imitated. This biography, which includes portraits of the main characters, draws on letters and contemporary accounts to paint a detailed picture of her scandalous life.

One of the most inglorious events of Nelson’s career concerned the fate of the short-lived republic established in Naples by revolutionary France. Drawing on accounts by Nelson himself, Lady Hamilton and others, this book tells how, after being offered safe passage, the republicans were handed over to the besieging Royalists, from whom they received no mercy. It also investigates whether Nelson was personally guilty of this betrayal, or whether the orders came from London.

‘Oh, if the queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians ... such a beating!’ wrote Victoria; while in Russia, Alexander III described the queen as a ‘pampered, sentimental, selfish old woman’. In this study of the hostility between the British and Russian royal courts, Coryne Hall begins with the disastrous marriage of Princess Juliane of Saxe-Coburg-Saarfeld, Victoria’s ‘Aunt Julie’, to Grand Duke Constantine in 1795, then traces 60 years of the queen’s fear and distrust of the Romanov dynasty.

The Charge of the Light Brigade, Gordon’s Last Stand, Scott of the Antarctic: many of the best-known episodes in British history are tales of fortitude and calm in the face of disaster. This study of the ‘heroic failure’ tradition offers a reassessment of Victorian and Edwardian attitudes to soldiers and explorers, arguing that Britons’ enthusiastic celebration of such failures resulted from their desire to see the Empire as just, benevolent and moral.

‘By the seventeenth century the detection, conviction, and punishment of illegitimate lethal violence were firmly and irrevocably tied to the central government.’ Matthew Lockwood’s study shows how definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence were negotiated in coroners’ courts from the late 15th century and gradually gave government the power to enforce a monopoly of violence – a basic prerequisite of a modern state.

Focusing on one critical year, this study identifies the developments that paved the way for the prosperity of Victorian Britain. It demonstrates how, amid widespread poverty and disease, industry flourished and railways spread across the land, bringing millions from the countryside to the cities, while Robert Peel’s abolition of the Corn Laws split the Tory party and ushered in an era of free trade.

Captured after Waterloo, Napoleon was held aboard HMS Bellerophon off the Devon coast. This book records the forgotten episode in which he became a magnet for celebrity seekers who would row out to catch a glimpse of the captive emperor as he paced the deck.

A long-time foreign correspondent in France, Jonathan Fenby explores the tensions between the country’s republican ideal of unity and its internal divisions, and examines how French society and culture have been shaped by the events of the last 200 years. This history offers a portrait of a nation that is proud of its heritage but struggling to find its role in the 21st century. Slightly off-mint.

In 1799 an uneasy Anglo-Russian alliance, formed as part of the Second Coalition against France, landed troops in Holland to overthrow the Batavian Republic, a French satellite, and reinstate Willem V of Orange. Van Uythoven gives a comprehensive account of this ‘Secret Expedition’ and its background, from the creation of the Batavian Republic, through the invasion and the battles of Zijpe, Bergen, Alkmaar and Castricum, to the Armistice and the state of the armies at the end of the campaign.

Fresh from victory over Sweden, Peter the Great took on the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, only to be defeated. This book examines the causes of the conflict, and the size, composition and tactics of the armies. Their uniforms are illustrated in specially commissioned artwork.

When Britain found itself at war with revolutionary France in 1793, its army was chronically underfunded, undermanned and poorly disciplined. This study analyses the recruitment, training and organization instituted by Sir Ralph Abercromby, which turned it into an effective fighting force, and offers a detailed account of its victorious campaign against the French Army of the Orient in Egypt in 1801.

Foreign correspondents risk their own safety to report from the most dangerous places in the world, and are often witnesses to pivotal moments in history. In this celebration of the profession, John Simpson recalls his experiences in Kosovo, Kabul and Baghdad and tells the stories of past and present journalists including Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, Don McCullin and Marie Colvin, offering an insight into the origin, development and practice of this most challenging occupation.

The son of a provincial merchant, Prince Arfa rose to the heights of Iranian politics. His memoir, written shortly before his death in 1936, records the decline of the Persian Empire, and his time as Minister Plenipotentiary at the Russian court of Nicholas II.

In 1741, with Britain at war with Spain, HMS Wager was wrecked on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile. Drawing on survivors’ accounts, this book tells the story of the men who mutinied and sailed 2,500 miles in an open boat to safety in Brazil.

One of Scotland’s foremost citizens of the early 18th century, John Erskine (1675–1732), Earl of Mar was active in politics and in architecture, landscape and infrastructure planning. He made important contributions to building in Scotland, particularly in his native Alloa and, in exile in France after his support for the 1715 Rising, he continued designing and planning. This aspect of Mar’s life, rather than his controversial politics, is the focus of Margaret Stewart’s richly illustrated study.

Elizabeth Lamb – ‘Lady M’ to her friend Lord Byron – was one of the brightest and most influential political hostesses of late Georgian London. Drawing on diaries, archives and letters, including her extensive correspondence with Byron, this biography reveals how she used her looks, charisma and wealth to climb socially, forging friendships with significant figures including Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the Whig leader Charles James Fox, the playwright Sheridan and the future George IV, who became her lover. Slightly off-mint.

Among the first ‘cave hunters’ to work within a scientific framework and recognize the long evolutionary context for humans and animals, William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929) was a renowned, yet controversial geologist, palaeontologist and archaeologist. Mark White sets out to rekindle interest in Dawkins, tracing his life and career from ‘boyhood to burial’, with accounts of his work at Wookey Hole, the Manchester museum, the 1874 Channel tunnel project and ‘one of Victorian archaeology’s darkest hours’, the Creswell Crags excavations of 1875–79.

The practice of transporting criminals to Australia was abandoned in 1868 and replaced by the convict system: serious offenders were sentenced to ‘penal servitude’ in UK prisons and later released on license. Using information in licensees’ records, this volume presents brief biographies of 100 criminals, arranged in an A–Z, from Samuel Ainge (b.1820) who, after a seemingly blameless life was arrested for embezzlement in 1883, to Mary Wright (b.1853), who drowned her young daughter in 1880.

Focusing on the stories of ordinary men and women who worked as servants in the homes of the middle classes, this book gives a ‘warts and all’ history of domestic service. In each of four periods, Michelle Higgs first surveys the work, conditions and social issues of the day before introducing the servants and their testimony, from Mary Ann Ashford, general servant, housemaid and cook in 1800, to Amy Jones, a 14-year-old general servant and nursemaid in 1945.

The sex trade flourished openly and profitably in Georgian England, particularly in the area around London’s Covent Garden. This illustrated history considers how the ‘oldest profession’ permeated all classes – from the courtesans who plied their trade within the very highest echelons of society right down to the common prostitutes who walked the streets – and examines how the scene was portrayed by the letter writers, journalists, satirists and caricaturists of the time.

One of Sheffield’s most infamous sons, Charlie Peace responded to the steel mill accident that crippled him and the loss of a father that impoverished the family by turning to crime – and proving himself a genius at burglary, murder and disguise. Ben Johnson narrates Peace’s career of crime, from petty theft to murder and, eventually, to Armley Gaol and the hangman’s rope.

From the mid-1700s onwards, as the number of people entering the medical profession in England and Scotland increased, so too did the demand for cadavers to examine as part of their training. This led to a rise in ‘bodysnatching’ – a macabre profession that is investigated here through the examination of contemporary documents and newspaper reports, revealing the stories of some of the trade’s lesser-known figures.

Colonel Jean-Nicolas-Auguste Noël was appointed to the command of Napoleon’s highly mobile trains d’artillerie during the invasion of Russia in 1812. Altogether he served the Emperor for over two decades and his memoirs record both his own service, including the retreat from Moscow and the Battle of Leipzig, and the rise and fall of the First Empire. Edited, translated and introduced by Rosemary Brindle.

After defeat at Buenos Aires in 1807, the 45th (Nottinghamshire) fought with Wellington throughout the war in Spain. This detailed regimental history charts its exploits, including the siege of Badajoz, where a lieutenant’s red jacket was raised over the citadel in place of the French flag.

While overshadowed by the fighting in France and Germany, the British campaign against Napoleon’s forces in Holland was an important precursor of Waterloo. This collection of official reports, letters and soldiers’ diaries offers eyewitness accounts of the main engagements, including the defeat at Bergen op Zoom.

This first volume begins with the political and military decisions and manoeuvres that led to war and follows the opening engagements up to the first great battles at Abensberg on 20 April, Eggmühl two days later and the storming of Regensburg on 23 April.This volume is part of John Gill’s epic three-part history of the Franco-Austrian War of 1809 and that watershed year in the military history of the Napoleonic Wars. Each volume includes a preface or prologue, extensive appendices containing the orders of battle and notes, and an index.

Volume II takes up the story with the march on Vienna and, after the fall of the Habsburg city, goes on to Napoleon’s first repulse at the Battle of Aspern-Essling. It also looks across the Alps to events in Italy, and Eugene de Beauharnais’ counter-offensive.This volume is part of John Gill’s epic three-part history of the Franco-Austrian War of 1809 and that watershed year in the military history of the Napoleonic Wars. Each volume includes a preface or prologue, extensive appendices containing the orders of battle and notes, and an index.

Written to accompany an exhibition at the Royal Maritime Museum, this illustrated biography charts the rise and fall of Emma Hamilton. The author frames her story in the broader context of the roles that women played in the daily life of the British Fleet, and examines how she was portrayed by the artists, caricaturists and satirists of the time.