Историческая литература
Различные книги в жанре Историческая литератураMidnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day
If British India had not been partitioned in 1947, its population would today be comfortably the world’s largest. At c1.5 billion, Midnight’s Descendants (the offspring of those affected by ‘the midnight hour’ Partition) already outnumber Europeans and Chinese; and they are growing faster than either. By 2020 they will constitute a quarter of the world’s entire population. As well as comprising the peoples of what is now called ‘South Asia’ (the preferred term for the partitioned subcontinent of modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, plus Nepal and Sri Lanka) they are widely established across the globe.Midnight’s Descendants is the first general history ever published to treat the region as a whole. Correlating and contrasting the fortunes of all the constituent nations over the last six decades affords unique insights into the tensions and conflicts that divide what is being hailed as one of the world’s most dynamic regions.Written by a widely respected expert on the region, the book will be the first account to incorporate the rich story of South Asia’s transnational, or ‘diasporic’, peoples. It will examine attitudes towards their homeland of the 22 million overseas South Asians, and will assess their contributions to the self-image of the parent states, to economic survival in the case of Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and to India’s globalised achievement.Like Midnight’s Children, Midnight’s Descendants will be expansive and tumultuous in the great tradition of India’s narrative epics.
Midnight Blue: A gripping historical novel about the birth of Delft pottery, set in the Dutch Golden Age
Amsterdam 1654: a dangerous secret threatens to destroy a young widow’s new life.Following the sudden death of her husband, twenty-five year old Catrin leaves her small village and takes a job as housekeeper to the successful Van Nulandt merchant family. Amsterdam is a city at the peak of its powers: science and art are flourishing in the Golden Age and Dutch ships bring back exotic riches from the Far East.When a figure from her past threatens her new life, Catrin flees to Delft. There, her painting talent earns her a chance as a pottery painter. Slowly, the workshop begins to develop a new type of pottery to rival the coveted Chinese porcelain – and Delft Blue is born. But when tragedy strikes, Catrin has a hard choice to make.Rich and engrossing, Midnight Blue is perfect for fans of Tulip Fever and Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero
The Battle of Trafalgar can claim to be one of the most known of the great human events. In Men of Honour, Adam Nicolson takes one of the greatest identifiable heroes in British history, Horatio Nelson, and examines the broader themes of heroism, violence and virtue.Trafalgar gripped the nineteenth century imagination like no other battle: it was a moment of both transcendent fulfilment and unmatched despair. It was a drama of such violence and sacrifice that the concept of total war may be argued to start from there. It finished the global ambitions of a European tyrant but culminated in the death of Admiral Horatio Nelson, the greatest hero of the era.This book fuses the immediate intensity of the battle with the deeper currents that were running at the time. It has a three-part framework: the long, slow six hour morning before the battle; the afternoon itself of terror, death and destruction; and the shocked, exultant and sobered aftermath, which finds its climax at Nelson's funeral in a snowy London the following January.Adam Nicolson examines the concept of heroes and heroism, both then and now, using Nelson as one of the greatest examples. A man of complexity and contradiction, he was a supreme administrator of ships and men; overflowing with humanity, charm and love but also capable of astonishing ruthlessness and ferocity. Nelson's own courage, vanity, ruthlessness and sweetness made him one of the great identifiable heroes of English history.In Men of Honour, Adam Nicolson also traces the stories of many unknown people of the day. He tackles the grand theme of heroism; the move from the age of reason to the age of romanticism; and examines a battle that was not only a uniquely well-documented crisis in human affairs but also a lens on its own time. Adam Nicolson does not approach Trafalgar as a military historian. His book gives a wonderfully immediate recreation of both the battle itself and its aftermath in a rich, concrete and intellectually engaging style.
Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire.
From the author of ‘Edge of Empire’ comes a fascinating, thought-provoking and alternative history of the American Revolution – that of those Americans who remained loyal to the British Empire.George Washington's triumphant entrance into New York City in 1783 marked the end of the American Revolution; the British were gone, the patriots were back and a key moment inscribed itself in the annals of the emerging United States. Territorial independence had effectively begun.Although widely perceived as a struggle between nations, the reality of the American Revolution is a strikingly different one. This was a war in which Britons fought Britons and Americans fought Americans. It was also one in which hundreds of thousands of American Loyalists, from Georgia to Maine, took Britain's side. And, when George Washington arrived in New York on that November day, they were forced to face up to a very tough situation; would they be free? Would they be safe? Would they retain their property and their jobs? Would they have to leave?As many as 200,000 American Loyalists left the United States. They lost their homes and their possessions and had little choice but to build new lives elsewhere in the British Empire. In ‘The Imperial Exile’, Maya Jasanoff examines the story of the Loyalist refugees, focusing on the life of one woman – Elizabeth Johnston – and her family, who reconstructed their lives in four different imperial settings: St Augustine, Edinburgh, Jamaica and Nova Scotia. Their movements speak eloquently of a larger history of exile, mobility and the shaping of the British Empire in the wake of the American War.A rich, compelling and untold history.
Leviathan: The Rise of Britain as a World Power
How Britain’s ships and men created a superpower.Navigating the 300 years between the Tudor accession and the loss of the American colonies Leviathan charts one of history’s greatest transformations: the rise of Britain as the world’s most formidable maritime power. From the chaos of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII’s split with Rome and Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentary regime, David Scott’s masterly narrative explodes traditional assumptions to present a much darker interpretation of this extraordinary story.Powered by a rapidly growing navy, a rapacious merchant marine, resilient politics, bigotry and religious fanaticism, warmongering and slavery, this candid book is required reading for all those wishing to understand how Britain achieved her global might.
From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War
Renowned industrial expert Geoffrey Owen analyses the complex reasons behind the delayed modernisation of British industry.In 1945, following the economic hardship of the war years, British industry looked forward with confidence to re-establishing links with its traditional trading partners in the Empire, and in the years of reconstruction which followed enjoyed unprecendented growth and prosperity. But the emergence of an economically vigorous and fiercely competitive Europe forced Britain to come to terms with some fundamental industrial weaknesses and to question where her economic destiny lay as the ‘miracle economies’ of France and Germany began to overtake her own.Through case studies of key industries from textiles to pharmaceuticals, steel to electronics, Owen offers a vivid account of Britain’s industrial progress, and argues that since the late 1970s British industry has undergone a painful but necessary transformation which has rapidly modernised the UK economy.At the start of a new millennium, as Britain once again debates its relationship with an ever more unified Europe, Geoffrey Owen provides a timely appraisal of the often troubled path that Britain has taken from Empire to Europe.
Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War
Described as ‘a masterpiece’ by critics, this remarkable book tells the story of war through the lives and deaths of a single family. Absolutely unforgettable new writing.If you loved The English Patient or Rohinton Mistry’s Fine Balance or Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, you will love this book.Three young men gazed at him from silver-framed photographs in his grandmother’s house, ‘beheld but not noticed, as angels are in a frieze full of mortal strugglers’. They had all been in the Second World War, a fact that surprised him. Indians had never figured in his idea of the war, nor the war in his idea of India – and he thought that he had a good idea of both.One of them, Bobby, even looked a bit like him, but Raghu Karnad had not noticed until he was the same age as they were in their photo-frames. Then he learned about the Parsi boy from the sleepy south Indian coast, so eager to follow his brothers-in-law into the colonial forces and onto the front line. Manek, dashing and confident, was a pilot with India’s fledgling air force; gentle Ganny became an army doctor in the arid North-West Frontier. Bobby’s pursuit would carry him as far as the deserts of Iraq and the green hell of the Burma battlefront.The years 1939-45 might be the most revered, deplored and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of a single family – a story of love, rebellion, loyalty and uncertainty – and with it, the greatest revelation that is India’s Second World War.Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma – unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.
Deserter: The Last Untold Story of the Second World War
The extraordinary story of the deserters of the Second World War. Who were they? What made them run? And what happened once they made the decision to flee?During the Second World War, the British lost 100,000 troops to desertion, and the Americans 40,000. Commonwealth forces from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Britain's colonial empire also left the ranks in their thousands. The overwhelming majority of deserters from all armies were front-line infantry troops; without them, the war was harder to win. Many of these men were captured and court martialled, while others were never apprehended. Some remain wanted to this day. Why did these men decide to flee their ranks?In ‘Deserter’, veteran reporter and historian Charles Glass follows a group of British and American deserters into the heat of battle and explores what motivated them to take their fateful decision to run away. The result is a highly emotional and engaging study of an under-explored area of World War II history.
Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival
Set in the aftermath of a harrowing plane crash, this is the true story of one young boy’s fight for survival in nature’s most treacherous conditions.Eleven-year-old Norman Ollestad was a gifted skier. After winning the 1979 Southern California Slalom Skiing Championship, his father chartered a small plane to fly Norman home, so that his son could collect his trophy and train with his team.Moments later the Cessna, engulfed in a blizzard, crashed into the San Gabriel Mountains and was left suspended at 8,000 feet. Norman's father, his coach and his hero, was dead.Climbing out of the wreckage, young Norman begins a gruelling descent, thousands of feet down an icy mountain. Blinded by heavy snow and faced with a raging wind and below-freezing temperatures, he attempts to guide his father's injured girlfriend to safety. Kept alive by sheer will, Norman summons everything his father taught him about determination and courage to save his own life.Powerful, inspiring and utterly compelling, this is a unique and unforgettable memoir.
Annie Groves 2-Book Valentine Collection: My Sweet Valentine, Where the Heart Is
Two wonderfully heart-warming novels, available together for the first time, from the best-selling author of London Belles and As Time Goes By.My Sweet Valentine is an emotional portrayal of the lives of four women in wartime London.Tilly, Dulcie, Agnes and Sally are each making their own contribution to the Home Front. But the London of 1941 is a treacherous place, especially for the tender-hearted. As Valentine’s Day approaches, the perils of war threaten life as they know it and all matters of the heart.Where the Heart is tells the compelling drama of the Campion family, struggling to stay together as World War II rages over Liverpool.Lou Campion has joined the WAAFs, against the wishes of her parents and twin sister Sasha. Katie's plans for the future are dashed, Fran's young husband is close to death and Bella's impossible passion has to remain a secret. Yet even in the darkest hour there is hope – while their city is crumbling, the Campion’s pride is intact.