Bloomsbury Reader imprint: 830 books

What has happened in Poland? Poland has erupted four times in the last twenty five years, but only the events of 1980 have had comprehensive media coverage. As a result, many questions have been raised in the minds of Western observers. How were such changes possible? What forces lay behind them?...

Why did the Suez War ever come to pass? Why did Eden, against public opinion and without sufficient military capability, decide to invade Egypt? When Gamal Abdel Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal, Britain and France reacted dramatically, beginning a chain of events that ultimately led to...

A Jew who left Germany when Hitler came to power, Sir Ernst Chain was a winner, with Sir Alexander Fleming and Lord Florey, of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1945. Later he was a significant figure in the use of the semi-synthetic penicillins which, from the mid-1950s onwards, revolutionized...

J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964) was one of the most brilliant of British scientists - and one of the most controversial. A trail-blazing geneticist and physiologist, who used himself as his own guinea-pig, he was also a highly successful populariser of science, a dedicated Marxist, and a devotee of Hindu...

'An absolute gem of a book' Alastair Humphreys Know how to tramp and you know how to live. Know how to meet your fellow-wanderer, how to be passive to the beauty of nature and how to be active to its wildness and its rigour. The tramp is a friend of society; a seeker, they pay their...

Born in France in 1809, Louis Braille was the fourth child of a village saddler. At the age of three, he stabbed himself in the eye with a pointed tool taken from his father's work bench. Some thirteen years later he again took a sharp tool from the same bench and used it to create a code of raised...

First published in London in 1962, this collection of Sitwell's later poetry contains "several pieces which show that the lyrical impulse of her early days was still alive to make new discoveries of great freshness and tenderness" - Dictionary of National Biography "Her mastery...

Shirley Pitts, the eldest of six children was born upside down on 24 november 1934. Her "career" began by thieving bread off doorsteps and coal from coalcarts. Her father's bungled attempts at blackmarketering and her dipsomaniac mother's inadequacies made Shirley resolve not only to be...

Twenty years ago, they were the best of friends. When Connie invites her university gang on the holiday of a lifetime - a safari in the Kalahari - they have little in common anymore. Is getting them back together a terrible mistake? Despite the undercurrent of tension, they are drawn into the...

The Northern Garrisons visits the soldiers of WWII in some of the most barren and inhospitable of outposts. Eric Linklater, in his mission to document the lives, trials and achievements of these men, travelled to Shetland, Orkney, the Faeroes and Iceland. In Iceland Linklater notes how quickly the...

Here are portraits of three very different Victorian women, all of whom married men of exceptional talent, energy and genius. To be the wife of such frenetic, explosive characters as David Livingstone, Karl Marx or Charles Darwin, especially at this period in history, demanded rare qualities. Yet...

The awesome figure of Otto von Bismarck, the 'Iron Chancellor', dominated Europe in the late 19th century. His legendary political genius and ruthless will engineered Prussia's stunning defeat of the Austrian Empire and, in 1871, led to his most dazzling achievement - the defeat of France and the...

In 1536, the murder of the princes in the Tower is still within living memory . . . Brother Thomas of Croyland Abbey has an urgent mission - to find a new king and perhaps save the great abbeys of England from the destruction threatened by Henry VIII. The vital question he has to answer-who...

This is not an historical novel in the ordinary sense. It is something new: the life of an actual royal family, whose story is so rich and varied that it falls naturally into the form of a modern novel. The heroine is Princess Henrietta of England, known to family as Minette. She is the Duchess of...