50,000 biographies and 60 million words record the lives of the men and women who shaped all aspects of British history. All walks of life are represented, new fields greatly increased alongside more traditional areas. A new focus gives extended coverage to the regions, Britons abroad and former colonies.

In the dying days of British rule in Hong Kong, an elderly man emerges from the sea demanding to see the Governor. He has, he says, information which threatens not just the territory's future, but that of China's stability itself. Information which, it soon becomes apparent, the CIA and MI6 will stop at nothing to control.

This work takes us from the mid-1770s when the country was intoxicated by a great surge of political energy through to the massive advances of technology and industrialisation during the Victoria era, and the burgeoning of the British Empire.

Hashi Mohamed came to Britain aged nine, a refugee from the Somali civil war. He attended some of Britain's worst schools and was raised exclusively on state benefits. Yet today he is a successful barrister, with an Oxford degree and a CV that includes appearances on the BBC. Hashi explores what his own experience can tell us about social mobility in Britain today. Far from showing that anything is possible, he concludes his story is far from typical:...

This text is for those who have done some work on their family tree but have hit the inevitable problem of 'brick walls'. Unlike most genealogy books this one starts with the 1801 census - others imply that that the census started in 1841.

Think you know the Kings and Queens of England? Think again. In 'Unruly', David Mitchell explores how early England's monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects' destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky sods who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear to us today in their portraits.

David Olusoga's 'Black and British' is a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination and Shakespeare's Othello. Unflinching, confronting taboos and revealing hitherto unknown scandals,...

This standard one-volume history tells the story of Britain and her peoples from the Roman occupation to the 1990s. It encompasses political, social, economic and cultural developments throughout the British Isles.

Midsummer's Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the...

The qualification for inclusion in this book is being the highest natural ground in each county of the UK. Ranging from an 80m field in Huntingdonshire to the 1344m summit of Ben Nevis in Inverness-shire, the 82 walks in this guide are designed to suit all abilities.