The beauty, grace and charm of Prince Christian's daughter had prevailed over the Queen's intense dislike of the Danish royal house, and had even persuaded the embarrassingly difficult Bertie to agree to the match. Thus began the fairy-tale saga of a family that handed on its good looks, unaffectedness, and democratic manners to almost every royal house of modern Europe. For, in the year that Alexandra became Princess of Wales, her brother Willie was elected King of the Hellenes ; her father at last succeeded to the Danish throne; her sister Dagmar was soon to become wife of the future Tsar Alexander III of Russia; and her youngest sister Thyra later married the de jure King of Hanover. A Family of Kings is the story of the crowned children and grandchildren of Christian IX and Queen Louise of Denmark, focusing on the half-century before the First World War. It is an intimate, domestic study of a close-knit family, the individual personalities, and the courts to which they came. Without doubt, the chic and beautiful Alexandra epitomized the spectacular flowering of the Danish dynasty; and just as she brought an unprecedented popularity to the sobriety of the English court, so her brothers and sisters helped enliven the staid European scene. The outstanding success of Theo Aronson's previous book, Grandmama of Europe, confirms his reputation as a chronicler of the fortunes of Europe's ruling houses. A Family of Kings bears the hallmark of the author's remarkable talent, and provides a fascinating evocation of the splendour and extravagance, and not infrequent tragedy, of nineteenth and twentieth century royalty.

    Now it covers the globe and includes almost a billion people. On the 500th anniversary of Luther’s theses, a global history of the revolutionary faith that shaped the modern worldFive hundred years ago an obscure monk challenged the authority of the pope with a radical vision of what Christianity could be. The revolution he set in motion inspired one of the most creative and destructive movements in human history. It has toppled governments, upended social norms, and transformed millions of people’s understanding of their relationship with God. In this dazzling global history that charts five centuries of innovation and change, Alec Ryrie makes the case that Protestants made the modern world.Protestants introduces us to the men and women who defined and redefined this quarrelsome faith. Some turned to their newly accessible bibles to justify bold acts of political opposition, others to support a new understanding of who they were and what they could and should do. Above all, they were willing to fight for their beliefs. If you look at any of the great confrontations of the last five centuries, you will find Protestants defining the debate on both sides: for and against colonialism, slavery, fascism, communism, women’s rights, and more. Protestants have also fought among themselves. What unites them all is a passion for God and a vital belief in the principle of self-determination. Protestants are people who love God and take on the world.Protestants have set out for all four corners of the globe, embarking on courageous journeys into the unknown to set up new communities and experiment with new systems of government—like the Puritans, Quakers, and Methodists who made their way to our shores. They are resourceful innovators and are making new converts every day in China, Africa, and Latin America. Protestants created America and defined its special brand of entrepreneurial diligence. Whether you are yourself a Protestant, or even a Christian, you live in a world, and are guided by principles and ideas, shaped by Protestants.

     These images of victory and celebration are so strong in our minds that the period of anarchy and civil war that followed has been forgotten.  Across Europe, landscapes had been ravaged, entire cities razed and more than thirty million people had been killed in the war. The institutions that we now take for granted - such as the police, the media, transport, local and national government - were either entirely absent or hopelessly compromised. Crime rates were soaring, economies collapsing, and the European population was hovering on the brink of starvation.  In Savage Continent, Keith Lowe describes a continent still racked by violence, where large sections of the population had yet to accept that the war was over.  Individuals, communities and sometimes whole nations sought vengeance for the wrongs that had been done to them during the war. Germans and collaborators everywhere were rounded up, tormented and summarily executed.  Concentration camps were reopened and filled with new victims who were tortured and starved.  Violent anti-Semitism was reborn, sparking murders and new pogroms across Europe.  Massacres were an integral part of the chaos and in some places – particularly Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland, as well as parts of Italy and France – they led to brutal civil wars. In some of the greatest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen, tens of millions were expelled from their ancestral homelands, often with the implicit blessing of the Allied authorities.Savage Continent is the story of post WWII Europe, in all its ugly detail, from the end of the war right up until the establishment of an uneasy stability across Europe towards the end of the 1940s.  Based principally on primary sources from a dozen countries, Savage Continent is a frightening and thrilling chronicle of a world gone mad, the standard history of post WWII Europe for years to come.

    This revised and expanded edition of Hilberg's classic work extends the scope of his study and includes 80,000 words of new material, particularly from recently opened archives in eastern Europe, added over a lifetime of research.

    "To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine." -Claude Terrail, owner, Restaurant La Tour d'ArgentIn 1940, France fell to the Nazis and almost immediately the German army began a campaign of pillaging one of the assets the French hold most dear: their wine. Like others in the French Resistance, winemakers mobilized to oppose their occupiers, but the tale of their extraordinary efforts has remained largely unknown-until now. This is the thrilling and harrowing story of the French wine producers who undertook ingenious, daring measures to save their cherished crops and bottles as the Germans closed in on them. Wine and War illuminates a compelling, little-known chapter of history, and stands as a tribute to extraordinary individuals who waged a battle that, in a very real way, saved the spirit of France.

    This Very Short Introduction integrates the political, social and cultural history of the Spanish Civil War. It sets out thedomestic and international context of the war for a general readership. In addition to tracing the course of war, the book locates the war's origins in the cumulative social and cultural anxieties provoked by a process of rapid, uneven and accelerating modernism taking place all over Europe. Thisshared context is key to the continued sense of the war's importance. The book also examines the myriad of political polemics to which the war has given rise, as well as all of the latest historical debates. It assesses the impact of the war on Spain's transition to democracy and on the country'scontemporary political culture.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundredsof key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

    His court at the Palace of Versailles became the most dazzling on the Continent, and through his intelligence and cunning, he made France the leading power of Europe. Now, in this masterful biography, historian Olivier Bernier brilliantly recreates Louis XIV's world to reveal the secrets of this monarch's unequaled sovereignty and to explore the singular mystique that surrounds him today. Not only was Louis heir to his father's throne, he felt he was divinely chosen to rule France. From the year he became king at the age of thirteen, he oversaw every aspect of government, from waging war and making political appointments to supervising the building of his many palaces. Along with political treachery that marked Louis XIV's long reign, Bernier also brings to light the personal scandals. We witness the poignant resignation of Louis XIV's queen to her husband's parade of mistresses and illegitimate children, the infamous intrigue when the king's brother was accused of poisoning his wife in a jealous rage, and the momentous building of Versailles, not an act of monstrous self-indulgence that bankrupted the nation but the visible expression of Louis XIV's new monarchy - his ingenious methods of centering all activity around court life, thus preventing his courtiers from fomenting rebellion. Under the Sun King, architecture, painting, music, and theater flourished, making France not only a great political force but a paradigm of fashion and culture as well. Louis XIV takes us from the grandeur of Versailles to the battlefields of the countryside, from the bedrooms of the king's mistresses to the chambers of his ministers, and presents an engrossing portrait of royal life and a commanding leader.

    The Allies intended to bypass Paris and cross the Rhine into Germany, ending the war before winter set in. But as they advanced, local forces in Paris began their own liberation, defying the occupying German troops. Charles de Gaulle, the leading figure of the Free French government, urged General Dwight Eisenhower to divert forces to liberate Paris. Eisenhower’s advisers recommended otherwise, but Ike wanted to help position de Gaulle to lead France after the war. And both men were concerned about partisan conflict in Paris that could leave the communists in control of the city and the national government. Neither man knew that the German commandant, Dietrich von Choltitz, convinced that the war was lost, schemed to surrender the city to the Allies intact, defying Hitler’s orders to leave it a burning ruin. In The Liberation of Paris, Jean Edward Smith puts “one of the most moving moments in the history of the Second World War” (Michael Korda) in context, showing how the decision to free the city came at a heavy price: it slowed the Allied momentum and allowed the Germans to regroup. After the war German generals argued that Eisenhower’s decision to enter Paris prolonged the war for another six months. Was Paris worth this price? Smith answers this question in a “brisk new recounting” that is “terse, authoritative, [and] unsentimental” (The Washington Post).

    'On the outside, [the foreigners] seem intractable, but inside they are cowardly...Although there have been a few ups-and-downs, the situation as a whole is under control.' In October 1839, a few months after the Chinese Imperial Commissioner, Lin Zexu, dispatched these confident words to his emperor, a Cabinet meeting in Windsor voted to fight Britain's first Opium War (1839-42) with China. The conflict turned out to be rich in tragicomedy: in bureaucratic fumblings, military missteps, political opportunism and collaboration. Yet over the past hundred and seventy years, this strange tale of misunderstanding, incompetence and compromise has become the founding myth of modern Chinese nationalism: the start of China's heroic struggle against a Western conspiracy to destroy the country with opium and gunboat diplomacy. "The Opium War" is both the story of modern China - starting from this first conflict with the West - and an analysis of the country's contemporary self-image. It explores how China's national myths mould its interactions with the outside world, how public memory is spun to serve the present; and how delusion and prejudice have bedevilled its relationship with the modern West.

    The same morning--the first of a new Muslim century--hundreds of gunmen stunned the world by seizing Islam's holiest shrine, the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Armed with rifles that they had smuggled inside coffins, these men came from more than a dozen countries, launching the first operation of global jihad in modern times. Led by a Saudi preacher named Juhayman al Uteybi, they believed that the Saudi royal family had become a craven servant of American infidels, and sought a return to the glory of uncompromising Islam. With nearly 100,000 worshippers trapped inside the holy compound, Mecca's bloody siege lasted two weeks, inflaming Muslim rage against the United States and causing hundreds of deaths. Despite U.S. assistance, the Saudi royal family proved haplessly incapable of dislodging the occupier, whose ranks included American converts to Islam. In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini blamed the Great Satan--the United States --for defiling the shrine, prompting mobs to storm and torch American embassies in Pakistan and Libya. The desperate Saudis finally enlisted the help of French commandos led by tough-as-nails Captain Paul Barril, who prepared the final assault and supplied poison gas that knocked out the insurgents. Though most captured gunmen were quickly beheaded, the Saudi royal family responded to this unprecedented challenge by compromising with the rebels' supporters among the kingdom's most senior clerics, helping them nurture and export Juhayman's violent brand of Islam around the world. This dramatic and immensely consequential story was barely covered in the press in the pre-CNN, pre-Al Jazeera days, as Saudi Arabia imposed an information blackout and kept foreign correspondents away. Yaroslav Trofimov now penetrates this veil of silence, interviewing for the first time scores of direct participants in the siege, including former terrorists, and drawing on hundreds of documents that had been declassified on his request. Written with the pacing, detail, and suspense of a real-life thriller, "The Siege of Mecca" reveals how Saudi reaction to the uprising in Mecca set free the forces that produced the attacks of 9/11, and the harrowing circumstances that surround us today.

    This provocative book shows that Europe in the Middle Ages was as much a product of a process of conquest and colonization as it was later a colonizer.

    

    A peasant girl who hears voices from God. A warrior leading an army to victory, in an age that believes women cannot fight. The Maid of Orleans, and the saviour of France. Burned at the stake as a heretic at the age of just nineteen. Five hundred years later, a saint. Her case was heard in court twice over. One trial, in 1431, condemned her; the other, twenty-five years after her death, cleared her name. In the transcripts, we hear first-hand testimony from Joan, her family and her friends: a rare survival from the medieval world. What could be more revealing?

    First, while acknowledging the seminal contribution of Daniel Mornet’s Les origens intellectuelles de la Révolution française (1935), he synthesizes the half-century of scholarship that has created a sociology of culture for Revolutionary France, from education reform through widely circulated printed literature to popular expectations of government and society. Chartier goes beyond Mornet’s work, not be revising that classic text but by raising questions that would not have occurred to its author.Chartier’s second contribution is to reexamine the conventional wisdom that there is a necessary link between the profound cultural transformation of the eighteenth century (generally characterized as the Enlightenment) and the abrupt Revolutionary rupture of 1789. The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution is a major work by one of the leading scholars in the field and is likely to set the intellectual agenda for future work on the subject.

    Yet in the intervening years —as America and the world’s other leading powers have continued to appease him — Putin has grown not only into a dictator but an international threat. With his vast resources and nuclear arsenal, Putin is at the center of a worldwide assault on political liberty and the modern world order.For Garry Kasparov, none of this is news. He has been a vocal critic of Putin for over a decade, even leading the pro-democracy opposition to him in the farcical 2008 presidential election. Yet years of seeing his Cassandra-like prophecies about Putin’s intentions fulfilled have left Kasparov with a darker truth: Putin’s Russia, like ISIS or Al Qaeda, defines itself in opposition to the free countries of the world.As Putin has grown ever more powerful, the threat he poses has grown from local to regional and finally to global. In this urgent book, Kasparov shows that the collapse of the Soviet Union was not an endpoint — only a change of seasons, as the Cold War melted into a new spring. But now, after years of complacency and poor judgment, winter is once again upon us.Argued with the force of Kasparov’s world-class intelligence, conviction, and hopes for his home country, Winter Is Coming reveals Putin for what he is: an existential danger hiding in plain sight.