Compiled from The Press Association’s archives, these visual histories of Britain in the mid 20th century evoke the spirit of each decade through reportage photographs of prominent personalities, events and scenes of everyday life, arranged chronologically and accompanied by detailed captions. The titles included in this set are: The 1940s (Read more...) The 1950s (Read more...) The 1960s (Read more...)

Catherine of Aragon has been remembered as a tragic figure, the woman Henry VIII divorced for want of a male heir. Amy Licence takes issue with this portrayal: her study presents neither a victim nor a divorcée, but a highly educated Spanish princess and a great humanist queen who, in the early years of her marriage, was Henry's advisor and his warrior. A magnificent portrait of a 'complex, passionate, unbreakable woman', the biography also upholds Catherine's unwavering conviction that her 'divorce' was invalid.

Bletchley Park and Blenheim Palace, Lindisfarne Priory, the Martyrs’ tree in Tolpuddle, and a water pump in Broadwick Street, Soho, are a few of the historically meaningful places that were nominated by the public and selected by Historic England’s experts for the Irreplaceable project. Arranged by ten themes, from science and discovery to protest, the book offers a richly illustrated, multi-faceted history of the country, explored through the landscapes and built environments around us today.

Widely recognized as the foremost authority on Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Jean Moorcroft Wilson presents a single-volume biography of the poet, building on and adding to her earlier studies. Sassoon himself said that most people thought he died in the First World War; Wilson’s work traces his entire life, before, during and after the war, showing how his writings gained in intensity, and how his literary, artistic and musical friendships illuminate a significant segment of 20th-century cultural life. Slightly off-mint.

In August 1939 a Surrey housewife began a war journal in which she recorded daily life on the home front. She tells of bombers overhead day and night, ration queues and the influx of evacuees. In 1947, she sent the diary to the Imperial War Museum with a letter describing herself as a housewife and a professional journalist; she was a naturally gifted writer whose diary gives a compelling account of wartime Britain.

A muse to poets and descendant of royalty, the golden-haired Penelope Devereux was celebrated in the court of her godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, for being as quick-witted as she was beautiful. This biography charts Devereux’s political ascendancy in the court, her unhappy marriage to nobleman Robert Rich, her involvement in the rebellion to overthrow Elizabeth, led by her brother, the Earl of Essex, and her doomed love affair with Charles Blount, which ultimately led to her downfall.

The hazardous seas that surround Antarctica require ships of the utmost resilience. This book focuses on the design and construction of the actual vessels, from the Chinese fleet that first sighted the southern continent in the 15th century, through Captain Cook’s Resolution, to today’s automated whalers. Technical information, plans, photographs and paintings reveal the features that enabled these ships, whether purpose-built or adapted, to negotiate poorly charted waters and withstand the pressure of ice.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Frank Foley worked as Chief Passport Control Officer for the British Embassy in Berlin, a cover for his role as MI6 Head of Station there. As the Nazi administration increased its stranglehold over the country, Foley used his position to issue visas to countless Jews, allowing them to escape to Britain ‘legally’. This biography also recounts many of the escapes that Foley enabled.

Drawing on hundreds of interviews with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar presents a portrait of Putin, the ‘man who accidentally became king’ and the machinations of his court. Described as ‘a milestone’ by the Financial Times, the book covers the years 1999 to 2015, revealing the inner workings of the Kremlin and the power struggles of oligarchs and officials as it traces Putin’s metamorphosis from ‘Vlad the Lionheart’ to ‘Vlad the Terrible’.

In 1945 Britain was the world's leading builder of jet aircraft and in the decade that followed, produced planes such as the Comet, Vulcan, Hawker Hunter and Lightning; but by the early 1960s aviation companies such as Avro and Vickers were either gone or struggling. This book fuses the author's memories of British aviation's heyday with tales of the legendary aircraft and test pilots and a rueful history of Britain's loss of self-confidence and power. Special illustrated edition.

The sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 by a German U-boat, drowning nearly 1,200 civilian passengers, including 128 Americans, was greeted with jubilation by the German establishment and press. Although it resulted in America’s entry into the First World War, it also marked the beginning of a new kind of brutality in German warfare which, Willi Jasper argues in this erudite study, precipitated the totalitarian violence for which Germany became notorious.

These iconic images from photographic agency Magnum span more than 80 years and reflect diverse aspects of life in London, from red buses and the excited crowd watching the 1937 coronation parade to a tranquil morning swim in Hampstead in 2014. The collection includes work by such celebrated photographers as Robert Capa, Inge Morath, Eve Arnold and Martin Parr.

Grammar does matter, and Joseph Piercy argues cogently that understanding and using grammatical rules is not pedantic, but essential if we want to make ourselves understood. Presented with a very light touch, a scattering of anecdotes, and quotes from literature, his 25 rules and essential tools are lucidly explained with examples and summaries. The book ends with a quiz, a glossary and a selection of 'A Grammarian Walks into a Bar' jokes.

Following on from the bestselling Lost London 1870–1945, this book presents some 280 photographs originally commissioned by the London County Council to record streets and neighbourhoods on the threshold of redevelopment. Enlarged and cropped, the photographs reveal the built environment and life within it in great detail. They are, as Dan Cruickshank writes in his foreword, 'photographs which record not just the appearance of the building but also, in some uncanny way, its atmosphere, its grand but crumbling soul'.

In this generously illustrated guide to the Dutch Golden Age of painting, genre works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Steen and many others are fêted for their power to transform the everyday – artisanship, domesticity, intellectual curiosity – into the extraordinary. Covering themes of patronage, trade, meaning and motif, the book shows how a rich array of subject matter, including still life, landscape and domestic interiors, reflects the blossoming of Dutch society in a time of economic prosperity and artistic freedom.

Following the Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Welsh border region of the Marcher lords became a classic frontier society, its difference from the rest of England marked by language and ethnicity and by the often violent military nature of its local rulers. This study traces the history of the main lordships, from pre-1066 Norman involvement in the region to the role of the Mortimers of Ludlow in late medieval politics and the beginnings of the Tudor dynasty.

The wallpaper and fabric designs of William Morris (1834–1896), created in the 19th century, have remained popular into the 21st. This lavishly illustrated volume reveals the breadth of his achievement beyond designing pattern – as poet, painter, typographer, manufacturer and socialist. The authors first trace Morris’s life, then survey the development of his work, from the botanical designs of the 1860s to The Adoration of the Magi (1890), the tapestry made in collaboration with Edward Burne-Jones and John Henry Dearle.

‘Sir, It has all been a terrible mistake. We thought we were voting to leave Eurovision.’ In a year dominated by the EU Referendum, the Telegraph’s letter-writers were in full spate – and not just on the momentous vote. Here, in sections such a ‘The Use and Abuse of Language’, ‘Box Gogglers’ and ‘Royal Blushes’ are readers’ opinions – frankly stated – on everything from family life to ‘Benito Trump’.

Derek Trotter moved into Nelson Mandela House in Peckham with his family in 1960 and the BBC began broadcasting his adventures with his brother Rodney in 1981, attracting record audiences over the next two decades. This celebration of the sitcom contains stills and behind-the-scenes photographs from the series, profiles of the many supporting characters, spoof correspondence and ephemera and excerpts from John Sullivan's original scripts. Off-mint.

From historical milestones, such as the Barton Aqueduct of 1761, to modern engineering marvels, such as the Falkirk Wheel, the canal network has much of interest to enhance the pleasures of boating through picturesque countryside. This exploration of Britain's waterways includes maps, facts and figures, historical notes on the navigations, hundreds of contemporary photographs and detailed information on places of interest along each route.

The history and culture of Europe have been shaped by monasticism, which has left a rich legacy of religious art and architecture. This magnificent volume charts the history of monasticism from late antiquity through its peak in the Middle Ages to the present day. Lavishly illustrated with colour photographs, paintings and illuminated manuscripts, the book describes the traditions, regulations and daily life of the different orders, profiles famous abbots and abbesses, and celebrates the continuing appeal of the contemplative life.

Throughout the First World War, in the village of Vignacourt near the Somme battlefields, a French couple dedicated themselves to photographing soldiers on leave from the front. But their collection languished forgotten in boxes in an attic until it was recently discovered by researchers, Coulthart among them. This handsome volume presents the most interesting of the 4,000 high-quality glass negatives and identifies the British and Commonwealth troops depicted, many of whom were gathering for the Battle of the Somme.

Covering winners, losers, has-beens and hopefuls in a great range of races and championships, from Grand Prix to stock car racing, this is the definitive reference to the lives and achievements of some 2,500 international racing drivers. Arranged alphabetically, from Rauno Aaltonen (a rare cross-over from rallying to racing) to the 2005 Formula Atlantic winner, Charles Zwolsman Jr, the Encyclopaedia lists each driver’s principal race wins and gives a concise account of his or her life and career. Slipcased.

From Amy Adams to Catherine Zeta-Jones, this book profiles over 330 of the most famous names in cinema. Including idols of the silent era as well as today's biggest box-office draws, each biography provides an appraisal of the actor's career, including television and directorial credits, with film stills and a colour-coded timeline charting key performances and awards. The alphabetical listings are interspersed with feature articles on significant themes and picture spreads celebrating some of the best-known stars.

A bestseller and former BBC Countryfile Book of the Year, this is the ultimate guide to what the land, the sun, moon and stars, plants and animals, sky and clouds can reveal – when you know what to look for. Drawing on two decades of outdoor experience, Tristan Gooley explains how to focus our powers of deduction and prediction on the natural world and provides over 850 clues and signs to get us started.

From the remains of primitive boats of uncertain date to 18th-century trading ships and vessels of the Second World War, there are hundreds of wrecks around England's coast bearing testament to the importance of shipping in the nation's history. This illustrated study assesses the factors that have led to maritime disasters over the centuries and provides an insight into naval archaeology and the role of English Heritage in the protection of historic wreck sites.

Two decades before he abdicated the throne of England for the love of Mrs Simpson, Prince Edward was, in the words of Andrew Rose, 'embroiled – along with a "Princess" and an Egyptian multi-millionaire – in a scandal which has been superbly airbrushed from history'. In this book Rose tells the full, previously hidden story of Edward's liaison with Marguerite Alibert in Paris during the First World War, and her subsequent trial for the murder of her Egyptian husband in the Savoy Hotel in London.

Since the Renaissance, the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte – Harlequin, Columbine, Scaramouche and company – have inspired plays, paintings, engravings and porcelain. Drawing on some of the world's finest collections, especially that of the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art in Toronto, this magnificently illustrated survey presents 150 figures by leading British and European manufacturers, including the celebrated Meissen factories. It also explains the hidden meanings of these mysterious characters and how a bawdy street theatre became an elegant courtly entertainment.

Graham Greene called him ‘the greatest novelist of my generation’; Hilaire Belloc thought he was possessed by the devil. Written with the family’s support and drawing on unpublished letters, diaries and memoirs, this new biography reassesses the life and career of the author of Brideshead Revisited: his troubled relationship with his father, his early homosexual affairs, his conversion to Catholicism, wartime service, happy second marriage, drug-induced madness, and his sharp tongue and devastating wit.

Brilliant classical scholar Alfred Dillwyn Knox was recruited by the Admiralty as a codebreaker in 1915 and by the outbreak of the Second World War was a leading cryptographer for the Government Code and Cypher School, breaking the Abwehr Enigma at Bletchley Park in 1941. This biography of the eccentric genius is written by one of 'Dilly's girls' - his codebreaking assistants at Bletchley - and describes his life and work, including detailed explanations of his decryption methods.

Alfred Edmeades Bestall (1892–1986) is best known as the illustrator of Rupert Bear's adventures from 1935 to 1965. This biography, written by his god-daughter, who inherited his early work, diaries and journals, reveals the true breadth of Bestall's work and reproduces artworks for Tatler and other magazines, book illustrations and watercolours as well as Rupert pictures. The second half of the book comprises Bestall's sketchbooks and journals from Wales, Egypt, the Middle East and Europe. Foreword by Sir Paul McCartney. Off-mint.

Growing up in the Kremlin, Svetlana Stalin knew nothing of her father’s tyranny, but could not escape tragedy: her mother’s suicide, the loss of two brothers, and the exile of her lover to Siberia. With access to FBI, CIA and Russian state archives, this biography charts her growing awareness of Stalin’s crimes, her defection to the West, her struggle to escape his terrible legacy – and her horrified realization, with the rise of Putin, that ‘they haven’t changed a bit’. American cut pages with a felt-tip mark on the lower trimmed edge.

When it comes to punctuation, many experts leave it to the writer’s judgement – but what use is that if you’ve never been taught the difference between a colon and a semicolon, or where those pesky apostrophes go? This accessible, light-hearted guide clarifies the rules, shows how punctuation can help you get your meaning across clearly, and explains what you can get away with and what simply won’t do.

The British offensive at Passchendaele, also known as the Third Battle of Ypres, was launched at 3.30am on 31 July 1917; led by Sir Douglas Haig, this ‘big push’ was to achieve a breakthrough, but it became a four-month-long stalemate of constant shelling, torrential rain, mud and filth. Parker chronicles the operation, describes the conditions on the battlefield and the increasingly industrialized warfare of tanks, gas and mines that added to the carnage; and he questions the necessity of the sacrifice.

The Paris of the Impressionists was the fashion capital of the world. Featuring paintings by Degas, Manet, Monet and Morisot, this book follows in the footsteps of stylish Parisians – at home, in cafés, in the park and on holiday; and it uses vintage photographs and prints to explore the worlds of dressmaking, millinery and the department store, while providing fresh insight into some of the most popular paintings of the 19th century.

In one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of recent times, the grave of King Richard III was located in a Leicester car park in 2012. This book contains a diary of the dig and its aftermath by the screenwriter Philippa Langley, whose intuition and perseverance brought the project to fruition despite numerous setbacks. Her account of that remarkable quest is interspersed with historical chapters on the life, reign, death and posthumous reputation of the last Plantagenet monarch.

Bernard Cornwell is renowned for his historical fiction, particularly the Sharpe series set in the Napoleonic Wars. In this book he combines those storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history of the days leading up to Waterloo and the battle itself. Cornwell's aim is to give an impression of what it was like to be on the field on 18 June 1815, and he agrees with Wellington's judgment: Waterloo – no matter how many accounts you read – 'is a cliffhanger'.

Discovered after the death of the distinguished American historian Page Smith (1917–1995), and published posthumously, this volume was intended as the final part of Smith's People's History of America. The narrative traces the Native American story from the first encounter with Europeans to the end of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in 1890, but rather than a comprehensive history, Smith aims to explore the nature of the interchange between white settlers and the indigenous peoples of North America.

In 1893, the aristocratic Alfred Monson was charged with the murder of Cecil Hambrough, a young army officer, on the Ardlamont estate in Scotland. The case captivated popular imagination, but few realized that the two expert witnesses, Joseph Bell and Henry Littlejohn, had been solving crimes together for 20 years. This book charts their adventures – exploits which inspired Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes – and probes the mystery that would challenge even their genius for detection.

Originally an Alpine perennial with medicinal uses, auricula flowers were so colourful and fragrant that people began cultivating the plant purely for pleasure. Easy to propagate and maintain, over the centuries increasing numbers of varieties were produced, 200 of which are listed here with many accompanying photographs. Including advice on exhibiting, dealing with pests and diseases and a fascinating history of the plant, this is a useful reference for casual readers and enthusiasts alike.

Howard Hodgkin's prints represent an extraordinary body of work, a parallel and very different achievement from his paintings. They have been internationally celebrated and passionately collected, yet this is the first comprehensive survey and catalogue raisonné of the prints. The book includes a major essay by Nan Rosenthal of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an interview with Hodgkin, along with 83 colour and 126 duotone reproductions. Plus a chronology and bibliography.

Beginning with Shepton Mallet prison, which had been in use for 400 years when it closed in 2013, Michael Portillo investigates the stories hidden within the walls of twelve buildings that illuminate aspects of Britain’s modern history. Through structures including Brighton’s sewer system, Imber village in Wiltshire, a nuclear bunker in Cambridge and the New Victoria cinema in Bradford, he explores four themes: crime and emergency, life and death, defence, and ‘People’s Pleasure Domes’.

From the 1880s to around 1914, a group of young painters based in Glasgow challenged the traditional art of the Scottish Academy, favouring instead the naturalistic ideas of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and en plein-air painting. The realism and freedom of their portraits, informal scenes and landscapes was to revolutionize Scottish art. This book introduces the Glasgow Boys – among them James Guthrie, John Lavery, Arthur Melville, George Henry and David Gauld – and presents over 85 reproductions of their work.

Klop ('Bedbug') Ustinov (1892–1962) was an MI5 secret agent tasked, not with killing, but with bemusing and beguiling his enemies into revealing their deepest, darkest secrets. Through the Russian revolution, two World Wars and the Cold War, Klop bluffed and tricked his way into the confidence of everyone from Soviet commissars to a Gestapo Gruppenführer. Journalist Peter Day tells the epic tale of an agent whose missions remained obscured by his socializing and womanizing.

Research Professor Dominic Lieven writes from the premise that ‘World War I was the source and origin of most of the catastrophes that subsequently afflicted twentieth-century Russia’. Drawing on unprecedented study of Russian and other foreign archives, this powerful investigation explores the mindset of those who made the decision to go to war, and sheds new light on the origins of a conflict that would determine the course of world history for a century. (Previously published as Towards the Flame.) Slightly off-mint and felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Finding Woozles, meeting the Heffalump, solving the problem of Eeyore’s tail: Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends in the 100 Aker Wood set off on their adventures – some of them as dangerous as looking for the North Pole – in this collection of 17 stories from Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. The book is illustrated with EH Shepard’s original drawings in full colour and ends with ‘The End’ from Now We Are Six. Age 5+

Partly thanks to their potentially bomb-resistant solidity, The Ritz, the Savoy, Claridges and the Dorchester became central to the cultural and political life of the country during the Second World War. This colourful history explores a remarkable period when cabinet ministers, military officials, exiled foreign dignitaries, journalists, spies, artists and chancers all used the hotels as meeting places, makeshift offices, temporary embassies and social centres. Slightly off-mint.

Earth is a desert planet. Nearly half its land area is either cold or hot desert, but these areas are rarely seen by residents of the outside world. Documentary photographer Michael Martin has ridden his motorbike across the Sahara and Atacama deserts, and traversed the ice-fields of Greenland and Spitsbergen by dog sledge. This volume charts his travels through more than 400 photographs, gripping reportage, scientifically exact maps and environmental analysis from contributing experts.