The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both...

Joseph Bruchac focuses on key events from Crazy Horse's childhood in this drastic tale of the legendary Lakota warrior. When Curly (his boyhood name) witnesses a fierce battle between white settlers and the Lakota Indians, he flees to the hills on a vision quest. An author's note following the story completes this fascination summary of the life an...

This is the story of Dido Belle, whose adoption by an aristocratic family challenged the conventions of 18th century England Dido Belle was the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a Royal Navy captain and a slave woman, adopted by the Earl of Mansfield. As Lord Chief Justice of England he would preside over the drowning of 142 slaves by a shipping...

This classic memoir of the First World War is now a major motion picture starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington. In 1914 Vera Brittain was 20, and as war was declared she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the lives of her whole generation - had changed in a way that would have been unimaginable in the tranquil p...

Though he couldn't have known it, the various scholars and scientists that Napoleon Bonaparte brought to Egypt during his military campaigning there kicked off modern Egyptology, and a general fascination across the West. Until about 200 years ago, the writing of the ancient Egyptians was an enigma to the world, but that changed when an ancient Egy...

The Peaky Blinders as we know them, thanks to the hit TV series, are infused with drama and dread. Fashionably dressed, the charismatic but deeply flawed Shelby family have become cult anti-heroes.Well-known social historian, broadcaster and author, Carl Chinn, revealed the true story of the notorious gang in his bestselling Peaky Blinders: Th...

A unique account of the millions of colonial troops who fought in the First World War. Every major battle fought on the Western Front, from the First Battle of Ypres to the Second Battle of the Marne, was fought by Allied armies that were multi-racial and multi-ethnic. Yet from the moment the guns fell silent the role of non-white soldiers was forg...

Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. Whether it was the scandalous Lord Byron, whose poetry sent female fans into an erotic frenzy; or the cheetah-owning, coffin-sleeping, one-legged French actres...

The Plantagenet queens of England played a role in some of the most dramatic events in our history. Crusading queens, queens in rebellion against their king, queen seductresses, learned queens, queens in battle, queens who enlivened England with the romantic culture of southern Europe – these determined women often broke through medieval cons...

It should have been a beautiful moment between a man and his dog. Philip Womack made a quip about Cerberus, the three-headed hell-hound, but for Una, the beloved lurcher, it was all Greek. Then she ran off after a squirrel. And Womack was left to wonder what else she didn't know about the great civilisations of the past. The Greeks and the Romans l...

In a brilliantly entertaining, living history of the modern United Kingdom, Andrew Marr traces how radically we have transformed through the course of Queen Elizabeth II's reign. When the Queen stepped into her crown in 1953 at the age of twenty-five, a British expedition was summiting Mount Everest for the first time. Ian Fleming was publishing th...

This is the astonishing story of persistence, comradeship and fighting spirit showed by everyday people in bringing the Nazis down. Patricia and Jean Owtram are possibly the only living sisters to have signed the wartime Official Secrets Act. Raised in a Lancashire country house in the 1920s, the family takes in two Austrian Jewish refugees, and th...

Spitfire Stories, published in association with Imperial War Museums, is a fascinating anthology of first-hand stories from Spitfire heroes and heroines of the Second World War.The Spitfire is the world's most iconic aeroplane. Coming into its own during the Battle of Britain, it became famous during the Second World War as the only plane that coul...

Gifted storyteller Winston Groom, the bestselling author of Forrest Gump, has written the fascinating story of three extraordinary heroes who defined aviation during the great age of flight: Charles Lindbergh, Eddie Rickenbacker, and Jimmy Doolittle. These cleverly interwoven tales of their heart-stopping adventures take us from the feats of W...

This National Book Award winner by Pulitzer Prize winner David McCullough shows how sickly "Teedie" becomes the robust, energetic Teddy Roosevelt. Born in 1858, Teddy finds his priviledged Manhattan family isn't immune to pain and sorrow. Potts disease disables his older sister, and epilepsy haunts his brother. Crippled by deadly asthma, Teddy soon...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Leadership written and read by Doris Kearns Goodwin, with additional narration from Beau Bridges, David Morse, Jay O. Sanders and Richard Thomas. Are leaders born or made? Where does ambition come from? How does adversity affect the growth of leadership? Does the leader make the times or do the times make t...

A wonderful, epic story that tells the history of the greatest city in the world, from Roman times to the present day. From the author of Paris, Sarum and New York. London has perhaps the most remarkable history of any city in the world. Now its story has a unique voice. In this epic novel, Edward Rutherfurd takes the listener on a magnificent jour...

The fascinating story of England's history and of the public and private life of her Royal Family is highlighted by extracts from the diaries and speeches of English Monarchs and observations by their contemporaries.

At midnight on 15 August 1947, India left the British Empire. This defining moment of world history had been brought about by a handful of people: Jawaharlal Nehru, the fiery Indian prime minister, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the new nation of Pakistan, Mohandas Gandhi, the mystical figure who enthralled a nation, and Louis and Edwina Mountbatte...

The Apollo moon programme has been called the last optimistic act of the twentieth century. Over a strange three-year period between 1969 and 1972, twelve men made the longest and most eccentric of all journeys and all were indelibly marked by it. In this audiobook, Andrew Smith sets out to find and interview the remaining moonwalkers in order to l...

BILL BRYSON presents a fascinating exploration of THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. This highly entertaining BBC Radio 4 series is written and presented by Bill Bryson and based on his bestselling book, Mother Tongue. In it he romps through the history of Britain to reveal how English became such an infuriatingly complex - but ultimately world-b...