'Delighted to learn from this very enjoyable new book that the first ever game of football played in Austria was won by the Vienna Cricket Club.' - Tom Holland, Historian and BroadcasterHave we matched Wembley 1966 and 2022, or lost again on penalties? As a football fan in the Home Nations, there is at least one thing of which you can be sure. Even if sometimes other countries play it better than us, they'll forever have to thank Britain f...

Explores the link between King Arthur's kingdom and the rise of Mercia, uncovering lost battlefields. England today is a rich, complex mix of identities, cultures, and heritages. However, in the decades after Roman Britain collapsed in the fifth century, the cultures of the Angles and of the Saxons, with significant degrees of homogeneity, spread rapidly westwards across much of eastern, southern and central England. Then it stopped. Or was stopped. For the area then still beyond Anglo-Sax...

Pickup an old stamp album and flick through it. You'll find a host of exotic and unfamiliar names: Cyrenaica, Fernando Poo, Fiume, North Ingria, Obock, Stellaland, Tuva, – distant lands, vanished territories, lost countries. Do they still exist? If not, where were they? What happened to them?From My Old Stamp Album goes in search of the truth about these and many other amazing places. Stuart Laycock and Chris West unearth stories of many kinds. Some take y...

Italy Invades, full of restless adventurers, canny generals, and the occasional scoundrel, is a fast-paced and compelling read, the perfect sequel to America Invades.Recreating their success with America Invades, Christopher Kelly and Stuart Laycock take another global tour, this time starting from Italy and exploring that country's military involvements throughout the ancient and modern worlds. From the empire building of the Romans, through the globe-sp...

Did you know?• The first African community to arrive in England was stationed at Aballava on Hadrian's Wall to keep out the Picts.• Admiral Robert FitzRoy, creator of the Met Office, was so upset by criticism of his weather forecasts that he shot himself.• While studying at Cambridge, Charles Darwin formed the 'Glutton Club' for the purpose of eating unusual animals.• Ada Lovelace wrote a computer code in the nineteenth century, before a wor...

Attempts to understand how Roman Britain ends and Anglo-Saxon England begins have been undermined by the division of studies into pre-Roman, Roman and early medieval periods. This groundbreaking new study traces the history of British tribes and British tribal rivalries from the pre-Roman period, through the Roman period and into the post-Roman period. It shows how tribal conflict was central to the arrival of Roman power in Britain and how tribal identities persisted thro...

The centuries after the end of Roman control of Britain in AD 410 are some of the most vital in Britain's history - yet some of the least understood. Warlords brings to life a world of ambition, brutality and violence in a politically fragmented land, and provides a compelling new history of an age that would transform Britain. By comparing the archaeology against the available historical sources for the period, Warlords presents a coherent picture of the...

Out of 193 countries that are currently UN member states, we've invaded or fought conflicts in the territory of 171. That's not far off a massive, jaw-dropping 90 per cent. Not too many Britons know that we invaded Iran in the Second World War with the Soviets. You can be fairly sure a lot more Iranians do. Or what about the time we arrived with elephants to invade Ethiopia? Every summer, hordes of British tourists now occupy Corfu and the other Ionian islands. Find out ho...

The Roman Empire has been a source of fascination to political thinkers, the obsession of some of the greatest historians, and has influenced art down the ages. Now, in a fresh new take on the era, historian Stuart Laycock sums up the subject in 100 haikus. These original poems are sometimes witty, sometimes sad, sometimes playful, sometime serious, but with only a few syllables to play with they are always concise and to the point. Read them in order for a sense of the vast sweep of Roman...

Many Britons like to think they have a basic understanding of Britain’s amazing history. The Roman invasion, Alfred and the Danes, 1066, Magna Carta, Bannockburn, Agincourt, the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII and his wives, the Reformation, etc., etc. The trouble is that concentrating on just a few over-familiar landmarks like these can give a distorted picture of the land we live in. What would our history look like if, instead of looking at all the bits everybody knows, we started telling...

Have you ever wondered why some towns in Texas have French names? Or why there's a statue of a Shawnee chief at the US Naval Academy? Or what coastal wildlife refuges have to do with American fears of invasion? And what the Olive Oil Riot in Montana was really all about? America Invaded has the answers to these intriguing questions, and so many more. Ever since they first set foot on the North American continent, humans have explored, discovered, established boundaries - and subsequently i...

The historian and archeologist presents a vivid and comprehensive account of warfare in early Medieval England.In this compelling new study, Paull Hill reveals what documentary records and the growing body of archaeological evidence can tell us about war and combat in the age of the great Anglo-Saxon kings. The violent centuries before the Norman Conquest come to life in this detailed account of how and why the Anglo-Saxons fought, how their warriors were armed and ...