Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson (Professor of Political and Financial History, University of Oxford)

$25.00 NZD

Category: United Kingdom | Reading Level: very good

The British Empire was the biggest empire in all history. At its peak it governed a quarter of the world

Richard the Third as Duke of Gloucester and King of England Volume I and Volume II by Caroline Halstead

$30.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: good-very good

The Point of Departure by Robin Cook

$12.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: very good

Inside British Intelligence: 100 years of MI5 and MI6 by Thomas Gordon

$14.00 NZD

Category: Espionage | Reading Level: very good

The King's Speech by Mark Logue; Peter Conradi

$10.00 NZD

Category: United Kingdom | Reading Level: very good

THE BESTSELLING BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR AND BAFTA AWARD-WINNING FILM One man saved the British Royal Family in the first decades of the 20th century - amazingly he was an almost unknown, and certainly unqualified, speech therapist called Lionel Logue. Logue wasn't a British aristocrat or even an Englishman - he was a commoner and an Australian to boot. Nevertheless it was the outgoing, amiable Logue who single-handedly turned the famously nervous, tongue-tied, Duke of York into the man who was capable of becoming King. Had Logue not saved Bertie (as the man who was to become King George VI was always known) from his debilitating stammer, and pathological nervousness in front of a crowd or microphone, then it is almost certain that the House of Windsor would have collapsed. The King's Speech is the previously untold story of the extraordinary relationship between Logue and the haunted young man who became King George VI, drawn from Logue's unpublished personal diaries. They throw extraordinary light on the intimacy of the two men - and the vital role the King's wife, the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, played in bringing them together to save her husband's reputation and his career as King. The King's Speech is an intimate portrait of the British monarchy at a time of its greatest crisis, seen through the eyes of an Australian commoner who was proud to serve, and save, his King. ...Show more

Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin by Sherard Cowper-Coles

$12.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: very good

In this entertaining and engaging memoir, former ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles lifts the lid on embassy life throughout the world. In 1977 fresh-faced Oxford graduate Sherard Cowper-Coles entered the hallowed portals of the Foreign Office. Over the next thirty years he was invariably to be found at th e frontline of international diplomacy, either striding the corridors of power at Westminster or jetting from one exotic location to the next. His tasks ranged from the challenging to the bizarre - from speech writing for Margaret Thatcher (who scrawled an emphatic 'NO!' over his first effort), to hiding an embarrassing bobble hat from Robin Cook . With recollections from the last three decades in international politics, taking us right up to Cowper-Coles's posting to Afghanistan, 'Ever the Diplomat' is a revealing and witty account of a unique period in our history. Cowper-Coles reveals what went on behind-the-scenes of Whitehall as we encounter a swindler impersonating Liberian President Charles Taylor, the young, idealistic leader of Syria Bashar al-Assad and Tony Blair in his boxer shorts. ...Show more

The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties by Ronald Blythe

$25.00 NZD

Category: United Kingdom | Reading Level: very good

We British - The Poetry of a People by Andrew Marr

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: very good

More than just an anthology, WE BRITISH is a history of Britain told through its poetry. Written by Britain's most celebrated political commentator for World Poetry Day. This is the story of Britain told from inside. Hundreds of thousands of Britons over many centuries have left traces of what it was li ke to be them - letters, drawings, text messages, emails and social network exhibitionism. But unlike texts, emails or television, poetry allows people from distant times to talk directly to us, with nobody else getting in the way: a mediaeval ploughman, a Tudor drunk or a jilted Georgian woman can look us in the eyes. What follows, then, is not a history of Britain in verse, but an epic story of what it was to be "British" - which means Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Northumbrian, Mercian as well as English. Combining some of the greatest of our poetry, including poems far too little-known, with explanations and brief historical essays, WE BRITISH amounts to a surprising, uplifting journey towards a new way of thinking about who we have been and who we are. ...Show more

Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table by Cita Stelzer

$20.00 NZD

Category: United Kingdom

Over seventy years the dinner table became a stage for Churchill's brilliant conversational talents, an intimate world in which both gossip and diplomatic secrets could be shared, and a confidential arena where he could debate with the great minds of his time the problems of a difficult century and thei r possible solutions. Introduction by Andrew Roberts. ...Show more

Katherine Swynford: The Story of John of Gaunt and His Scandalous Duchess by Alison Weir

$10.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: good

Katherine Synford was first the mistress, and later the wife, of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster. Her charismatic lover was one of the most powerful princes of the fourteenth century and Katherine was renowned for her beauty and regarded as enigmatic, intriguing and even dangerous by some of her co ntemporaries. In her impressive new book, Alison Weir has triumphantly rescued Katherine from the footnotes of history, highlighting her key dynastic position within the English monarchy. She was the mother of the Beaufort, then the ancestress of the Yorkist kings, the Tudors, the Stuarts and every other sovereign since - a prodigious legacy that has shaped the history of Britain. ...Show more

Margaret Thatcher: The Path To Power

$20.00 NZD

Category: Biography | Reading Level: good-very good

Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History by Adam Nicolson

$16.00 NZD

Category: United Kingdom | Reading Level: good-very good

A fascinating account from award-winning author, Adam Nicolson, on the history of Nicolson's own national treasure, his family home: Sissinghurst. Sissinghurst is world famous as a place of calm and beauty, a garden slipped into the ruins of a rose-pink Elizabethan palace. But is it entirely what its c reators intended? Has its success over the last thirty years come at a price? Is Sissinghurst everything it could be? The story of this piece of land, an estate in the Weald of Kent, is told here for the first time from the very beginning. Adam Nicolson, who now lives there, has uncovered remarkable new findings about its history as a medieval manor and great sixteenth-century house, from the days of its decline as an eighteenth-century prison to a flourishing Victorian farm and on to the creation, by his grandparents Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, of a garden in a weed-strewn wreck. Alongside his recovery of the past, Adam Nicolson wanted something else: for the land at Sissinghurst to live again, to become the landscape of orchards, cattle, fruit and sheep he remembered from his boyhood. Could that living frame of a mixed farm be brought back to what had turned into monochrome fields of chemicalised wheat and oilseed rape? Against the odds, he was going to try. Adam Nicolson has always been a passionate writer about landscape and buildings, but this is different. This is the place he wanted to make good again, reconnecting garden, farm and land. More than just a personal biography of a place, this book is the story of taking an inheritance and steering it in a new direction, just as an entrepreneur might take hold of a company, or just as all of us might want to take our dreams and make them real. ...Show more