As seen on Netflix's The Crown.Anne Glenconner has been at the center of the royal circle from childhood, when she met and befriended the future Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, the Princess Margaret. Though the firstborn child of the 5th Earl of Leicester, who controlled one of the largest estates in England, as a daughter she was deemed "the greatest disappointment" and unable to inherit. Since then she has needed all her resilience to survive the vipers of court life with her sense of humor intact. A unique witness to landmark moments in royal history, Maid of Honor at Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and a lady in waiting to Princess Margaret until her death in 2002, Anne's life has encompassed extraordinary drama and tragedy. In Lady in Waiting, she will share many intimate royal stories from her time as Princess Margaret's closest confidante as well as her own battle for survival: her broken-off first engagement on the basis of her "mad blood"; her 54-year marriage to the volatile, unfaithful Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, who left his fortune to a former servant; the death in adulthood of two of her sons; a third son she nursed back from a six-month coma following a horrific motorcycle accident. Through it all, Anne has carried on, traveling the world with the royal family, including visiting the White House, and developing the Caribbean island of Mustique as a safe harbor for the rich and famous-hosting Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Raquel Welch, and many other politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities.

    Thomas Cromwell was the Henry's VIII's chief minister and principal reformer of the church in one of the most eventful eras in English history. Contemporary sources reveal a brilliant mind and expansive heart, a lover and patron of the arts and humanities, while short case studies shed new light on his relations with, and his reputation among, the Tudor populace. The final part narrates the drama of his downfall, and the king’s posthumous exoneration of the "most faithful servant he ever had."

    Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally--and willing to fight to the end.In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it's also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill's prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports--some released only recently--Larson provides a new lens on London's darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents' wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela's illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill's "Secret Circle," to whom he turns in the hardest moments.

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    Read a succinct account of the life and reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in just one hour.Elizabeth II is the longest lived and, after Queen Victoria, second longest reigning monarch of the United Kingdom. From her coronation in 1953 to her Diamond Jubilee in 2012, Queen Elizabeth II has stood on the world stage as the figurehead for Britain.THE QUEEN: HISTORY IN AN HOUR tells the story of the Queen Elizabeth II’s life and long reign, her royal duties, service during the Second World War, public perception and the transformation of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations under her rule. Essential reading for Royalists and Republicans alike.Love your history? Find out about the world with History in an Hour…

       As a pre-war royal whose world was hugely circumscribed by the strictures of another age, Princess Margaret was admired as well as vilified for most of her adult life. She helped usher the monarchy into the modern world—which sometimes led to conflict and misunderstanding in both her private and public life. Christopher Warwick’s superbly researched biography redresses the balance. It gives the full, insider story of the Princess’s many love affairs, but also looks at her tireless work for charity and willingness to break taboos—it was she, not Diana, who first championed HIV and AIDS awareness. Princess Margaret reminds us that its subject was one of the most remarkable, if complex and contradictory, modern royal personalities.     Reissue.

    He’s had a pretty bad press: supposed usurper of Richard II’s crown and the focus of hatred in the Peasants’ Revolt (they torched his home, the Savoy Palace). Helen Carr will paint a complex portrait of a man who held the levers of power on the English and European stage, passionately upheld chivalric values, pressed for the Bible to be translated into English, patronised the arts … and, if you follow Shakespeare, gave the most beautiful oration on England (‘this sceptred isle… this blessed plot’). An engrossing drama of political machinations, violence, romance and tragedy played out at the cusp of a new era.

    From the spectacular era that bears her name comes the mesmerizing story of Elizabeth I: her tragic childhood; her ruthless confrontations with Mary, Queen of Scots; and her brilliant reign as Europe's most celebrated queen. And into this beautiful tapestry Susan Kay weaves the vibrant and compelling image of Elizabeth the woman. Proud, passionate, captivating in her intensity, she inspired men to love her from the depths of their souls—and to curse the pain of that devotion. Teasing out an intriguing answer to the central mystery of the Virgin Queen—satisfying to readers new to Elizabeth's life as well as die-hard fans of the Tudors— here is a premier exploration of the woman who changed the course of history, and three men whose destinies belonged to her alone.

    Their images have been with us on film and in print for more than a century, like priceless artifacts that call to mind a grander era. Seen at a distance, they appear unknowable. But each is an individual, a real woman, with an extraordinary story to tell. Now, Catherine Whitney reveals what happens behind the palace doors, giving us an intimate glimpse into the private lives of these public figures.Elizabeth, the Queen: Born to duty, adored by her parents, Elizabeth swore as a teenager to serve her country above all else . . . and she has lived up to her promise, even when her crown has been a burden. This once-lively young woman has sacrificed self-interest and personal joy for her subjects for over sixty years. In public, the queen never puts a step wrong. In private, she herself knows she has made many mistakes. She has sacrificed motherhood for majesty, and seen her four children each make errors with devastating consequences. Yet, no matter what happens, the queen perseveres.Elizabeth, the Queen Mother: Hitler was afraid of her, the English people adored her. Her kind, sparkling blue eyes and cheerful manner belied a backbone of steel, and few dared to cross her. She raised her eldest daughter to serve and her youngest daughter to sparkle. But while her love of the people, and of her family, has never been in question, the Queen Mother was made of much sterner stuff than anyone has ever known -- until now.Princess Margaret: Beautiful, talented, vivacious, and complex . . . Margaret was the Diana of her day. But the promise of her youth was destroyed when she was betrayed by her sister, now the queen, who needlessly forced her to give up the man she loved. Troubled and adrift, with only a slight role to fill, Margaret became the object of public ridicule, yet she was something her sister was not: a wonderful mother.Princess Anne: Her father's favorite, arguably the most intelligent of the queen's four children. Yet Anne is forever forced to take second place to her older brother, Charles. Hardworking, hard-headed, and hot-tempered, Anne has been dismissed as an acerbic frump more at home with horses than people, especially in comparison with her ill-fated sister-in-law, Diana. Yet there is a passionate side to this complex woman, one hidden from view.These four women have shaped the world, each in her own way. Now at last their stories can be told.

    First published in 1968, Jack Scarisbrick's Henry VIII is a book which focuses on the personality of this flamboyant and forceful monarch, exploring an impulsive interventionist king whose impact on the government, society and religion of England is felt more than four centuries on.

    As seen in her two previous, highly acclaimed books-Restoration London and Dr. Johnson's London-she has immersed herself in contemporary sources of every kind. She begins with the River Thames, the lifeblood of Elizabethan London. The city, on the north bank of the river, was still largely confined within old Roman walls. Upriver at Westminster were the royal palaces, and between them and the crowded city the mansions of the great and the good commanded the river frontage. She shows us the interior décor of the rich and the not-so-rich, and what they were likely to be growing in their gardens. Then the Londoners of the time take the stage, in all their amazing finery. Plague, small-pox, and other diseases afflicted them. But food and drink, sex and marriage and family life provided comfort, a good education was always useful, and cares could be forgotten in a playhouse or the bear-baiting rings, or watching a good cockfight. Liza Picard's wonderfully skillful and vivid evocation of the London of four hundred years ago enables us to share the delights, as well as the horrors, of the everyday lives of sixteenth century Britain.

    Reared in a dangerous and unpredictable world Margaret of York, sister of Richard III, would become the standard bearer of the House of York and 'The menace of the Tudors'. This alluring and resourceful woman was Henry VII's 'diabolical duchess'. Safe across the Channel in modern-day Belgium and supported by the Emperor she sent Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck with thousands of troops to England to avenge the destruction of her brother and of the House of York. Both rebellions shook the new Tudor dynasty to the core. As the duchess and wife of the wealthiest ruler in Western Europe, Margaret was at the centre of a glittering court and became the patron of William Caxton. It was at her command that he printed the first book in English. Her marriage to Charles, the dour, war-mad Duke of Burgundy, had been the talk of Europe. John Paston, who was among the awe struck guests, reported in the famous Paston Letters that there had been nothing like it since King Arthur' court. Yet within a decade Charles was dead, his corpse frozen on the battlefield and within another decade her own family had been destroyed in England. Childless and in a foreign land Margaret showed the same energetic and cautious spirit as her great-grand-niece Elizabeth I, surviving riots, rebellions and plots. In spite of all her efforts, the Tudors were still on the throne but Margaret, unlike the Yorkist kings, was a great survivor.

    Now, William Shawcross—given unrestricted access to the Queen Mother’s personal papers, letters, and diaries—gives us a portrait of unprecedented vividness and detail. Here is the girl who helped convalescing soldiers during the First World War . . . the young Duchess of York helping her reluctant husband assume the throne when his brother abdicated . . . the Queen refusing to take refuge from the bombing of London, risking her own life to instill courage and hope in others who were living through the Blitz . . . the dowager Queen—the last Edwardian, the charming survivor of a long-lost era—representing her nation at home and abroad . . . the matriarch of the Royal Family and “the nation’s best-loved grandmother.”A revelatory royal biography that is, as well, a singular history of Britain in the twentieth century.

     Publicly declared a bastard at the age of three, daughter of a disgraced and executed mother, last in the line of succession to the throne of England, Elizabeth I inherited an England ravaged by bloody religious conflict, at war with Spain and France, and badly in debt. When she died in 1603, after a forty-five year reign, her empire spanned two continents and was united under one church, victorious in war, and blessed with an overflowing treasury. What's more, her favorites--William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Walter Raleigh--had made the Elizabethan era a cultural Golden Age still remembered today. But for Elizabeth the woman, tragedy went hand in hand with triumph. Politics and scandal forced the passionate queen to reject her true love, Robert Dudley, and to execute his stepson, her much-adored Lord Essex. Now in this spellbinding novel, Rosalind Miles brings to life the woman behind the myth. By turns imperious, brilliant, calculating, vain, and witty, this is the Elizabeth the world never knew. From the days of her brutal father, Henry VIII, to her final dying moments, Elizabeth tells her story in her own words.