In Georgian England, few men were more fashionable or more eligible than George, Prince of Wales, heir to one of the most powerful thrones in the world. Wild, glamorous, and with a penchant for beautiful women, the 57 year marriage of George III and Queen Caroline was by far the most fruitful of any of the kings of Georgian Britain. From the birth of George IV in 1762 to that of princess Amelia in 1783, Queen Charlotte was either carrying a child or recovering from a birth for more than 20 years. Maria Fitzherbert was a twice-widowed Roman Catholic with a natural aversion to trouble. When she married the prince in a secret ceremony conducted in her Mayfair sitting room, she opened the door on three decades of heartbreak. Cast aside by her husband one minute, pursued tirelessly by him the next, Maria's clandestine marriage was anything but blissful. It was also the worst kept secret in England. Caroline of Brunswick was George's official bride. Little did she know that her husband was marrying for money and when she reached her new home in England, she found him so drunk that he couldn't even walk to the altar. Caroline might not have her husband's love, but the public adored her. In a world where radicalism was stirring, it was a recipe for disaster. Maria and Caroline never met but navigated the choppy waters of marriage to a capricious, womanising king-in-waiting. With a queen on trial for adultery and the succession itself in the balance, Britain had never seen scandal like it. The King's two marriages provided acres of newsprint and oceans of gossip. 32 illus. 201 pages.

England's most controversial King was Richard III. Forever associated with the murder of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, he divides the nation. As spectacular as his death at Bosworth in August 1485, the last King of England to die in battle, the astonishing discovery of his bones under a Leicester car park five centuries later renewed interest in him and re-opened old debates. Is he the world's most wicked uncle or is he in the words of the man who most smeared him 'a prince more sinned again than sinning'? Richard was not born in the north and neither did he die there, but this detailed look at his life retraces his steps over the 33 years that he lived, and focusses on the area that he loved and made his own. He had castles at Middleham and Sheriff Hutton, Penrith and Sandal; he fought the Scots along the northern border and on their own territory; his son was born at Middleham and was invested as Prince of Wales at York Minster where Richard planned to set up a college of 100 priests. His white boar device can be found in obscure corners of churches and castles; his laws, framed in the single parliament of his short reign, gave rights to the people who served him and loved him north of the Trent. And when he felt threatened or outnumbered by his enemies during those turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses, it was to the men of the North that Richard turned for support and advice. They became his Knights of the Body; members of the Council of the North which outlived Richard by 150 years. They died with him at Bosworth. The story is not divorced from the violent politics of the day or from events that happened far to the south, but the North was Richard's home and the place he loved. Best known for his true crime and crime fiction works, M. J. Trow was educated as a military historian at King's College, London. 176pp, gazetteer, battle maps, castle plans and photographs this is a full re-examination of the Tudor bias, culminating in Shakespeare's play which continues to distort the truth until today.

When cathedrals were bright with paint... colonnettes, gables, pinnacles and statues were rich in colour. Red, blue and yellow helped the viewer to identify the holy figures and to decipher the great book of stone. The largest medieval drawing in existence, measuring more than four metres in height, provides exceptional evidence for this. Dating from c.1360-65, it represents the central part of the façade of Strasbourg Cathedral. Even now the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages overwhelm by their imagination, technical daring and sheer scale. How could such structures be built when cities had only a few thousand inhabitants, and only the most primitive machinery was available? Who initiated them? Who designed them? Who paid for them? All around the world but especially in Italy and in Gaul, each Christian community was driven by a spirit of rivalry to have a more glorious church than the others. Gothic and Romanesque building sites are shown in detail in manuscript illumination. As the Medieval town grew, buildings turned from wood to stone and grew ever higher. Patrons sought master masons, intellectuals became administrators, artists and architects established their independence and rights. Discover tracings on stone such as in the sacristy of the Roslin Chapel in Scotland where construction began in 1450, remarkable drawings from workshops, organised guilds, the octagon of Ely Cathedral 1322 and how metal became an essential material. Fully documented and splendidly illustrated throughout in colour, 176pp, paperback.

Beginning with Herodotus's 5th century BC observations of these massive monuments to Napoleon, soldiers, pioneers and adventurers, the scientific era, the cemetery complex, thesis, hypothesis and realities, Corteggiani leads the reader through the history of the Pyramids. He includes recent investigations by Egyptologists Gilles Dormion and Jean-Yeves Verd'hurt into a previously undiscovered room of the Great Pyramid. With remarkable images of early discoveries, a plan of the triangulation of the survey of 1881 of the Pyramids and Temples of Giza, chambers barely more than a metre high bearing graffiti, rare photographs in both colour and black and white and diagrams in this extremely well illustrated series. 128pp, paperback, colour.

From the Historic England popular series by the historian who has researched incredible photographic archives and who here selects 1,200 of the best images depicting the yards and alleys of Georgian and Victorian London and Britain, the maze of medieval streets, transformation of shopping areas and lost buildings. Once sleepy villages and market towns during this period were engulfed by a tide of development - Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds exploded across the face of England and railways wrought massive changes as their iron tentacles spread across the landscape. By 1900 nearly 80% of England's population lived in urban areas, compared with just one third 100 years earlier. Ranging from 1870, the midpoint of Queen Victoria's reign, England was entering the Great Depression. Education became a statutory right, putting children at school desks rather than setting them to work. Women were being given control of any wages they earned and they began their long fight for equality. European rivalry accelerated and Britain's industrial and commercial pre-eminence was challenged by foreign competition. It was the age of the internal combustion engine, the telephone, radio, and aviation lay just around the corner and photographs were now able to record the moment. Most were taken to provide a permanent record of areas which were vanishing, and the quality of the images are of the highest quality of the time showing early railways, coaching inns, horse-drawn travel, the offices of the White Star Line Liverpool 1898, mock Tudor homes in Port Sunlight model village, Knebworth, fishermen's towns like Newlyn Cornwall 1907 with women and children and a man at work, New Street Station, grand civic buildings and town halls, Fry's chocolate in glamorous shop windows, tea rooms and formal gardens, back-to-backs, puppet shows and village life, markets and railway workers, Windsor Castle and Stonehenge with silk top-hatted gentlemen visiting, a windmill being demolished, watermen selling water with a bonneted child alongside her parents and his cart. The images are grouped by Northwest, Northeast, East Midlands, West Midlands, East England, South and Southeast, London, South and Southwest. A spectacular heavyweight large volume 10" x 11¾", 560 glossy pages.
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The archaeologist author together with Christiane Eluère takes us back beyond the borders of history. Achilles, Odysseus and other heroes of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey fought with shields and swords of bronze. What was the world like in those mythic days when the rival Greek cities of Troy and Mycenae battled for supremacy, and far to the West unknown engineers raised the megaliths of Stonehenge? We read about Achilles, armed for battle raging at the Trojans. 'First he placed along his legs the fair greaves linked with silver fastenings to hold the greaves at the ankles. Afterward he girt about his chest the corselet, and across his shoulders slung the sword with the nails of silver, a bronze sword, and caught up in the great shield, huge and heavy nets, and from it the light glimmered far, as far from the Moon... Next he pulled out from its standing place the spear of his father...' But what do we know of even earlier times when the settled peoples of Europe first replaced their crude stone tools with those made of refined metal, and crafted ornaments of beaten copper and gold? Chapters cover The Metallurgical Centres like the Gold of Varna in Bulgaria with 2,200 ornaments dating from as early as the 5th millennium, The Chalcolithic Period in the Iberian Peninsula which was the result of Eastern influences. Bronze (an alloy of copper and tin) appeared between 3000 and 1500BC in the Eastern Mediterranean and in Northern Europe. Pictured are remains and art in Crete, vessels, arms and armour, cultural centres, mother goddesses and horned figures, chariots, wheels and birds depicted in small Sardinian bronzes; the Mycenaean religion, funeral rites and an appendix on documents, with illustrations including the remarkable remains of Otzi, the ancient man, as preserved today. 160pp, paperback packed with colour illus. and glossy pages in this Thames & Hudson publication.

In 1799 at Rosetta, near Alexandria, an officer of the French Army found a black basalt stele bearing inscriptions in three different scripts. The Rosetta Stone was to provide the key to deciphering Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Excitement mounted among the oriental-language specialists. The Greek text which reproduced a decree of King Ptolemy V appeared to be a translation of the other two. Fully explained are the purely ideographic and phonetic scripts in the opening pages of this gloriously well illustrated history. Buried treasure, looting, intrigue and dedicated scholarship. 'Wonderful things' gleaming in the darkness, the cache of royal mummies and most wonderful of all, the tomb of Tutankhamun. Here is the complete story of the rediscovery of Ancient Egypt, a tale of extraordinary characters like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon who braved the 'Pharoah's Curse', Belzoni, the 'Patagonian Samson', Champollion who unlocked the secrets of the hieroglyphics. It is a tale of spectacular rescue with modern technology used to save Egypt's monuments from floodwaters and the ravages of time. Documented is the first sight of Abu Simbel in 1813 by a Swiss traveller who while in Nubia was disguised as a Syrian merchant, and how the island of Philae became a victim of 20th century engineering works on the Nile; Petrie who returned to Abydos aged 69 in 1922 is pictured in a rare photograph and of course mummies, chests, collars of beads when the inner coffin was opened in 1925. Plus the Library of Alexandria, the first cross section of the Great Pyramid, the Great Temple at Karnak opened to all, the founding of the Cairo Museum and treasures aplenty. Very well illustrated 208 page softback, colour.

Written by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's great-great granddaughter Iris, her great grandparents were the 1st Earl of Granville (1773-1846) and Harriet Elizabeth Cavendish. Iris died in 1944, and although her writing is a little flowery, it was her ability to open doors through her family connections which makes this biography so fascinating. Georgiana's story is surely one of the most compelling and dramatic in late Georgian society, the subject of many books and a successful film, The Duchess. Love affairs, tragedy, high society, gambling and a host of illegitimate children are shared between herself, her best friend, her lover and her husband. Married to an elderly reserved duke, she was a young and emotionally demonstrative girl, unprepared for her duties as duchess. She discovered that her husband already had a mistress with whom he had a daughter and all the duke requires of Georgiana is to provide him with an heir which she seems at first unable to do. Starved of affection, she throws herself into the fashionable world and becomes the darling of society where she leads others and sets the fashions, whether for three foot high ostrich feathers or tall towers of hair with elaborate decorations. In 1782, the Duke and Duchess meet the fascinating Lady Elizabeth Foster, recently separated from her husband and living in restricted circumstances. Elizabeth attaches herself to Georgiana and is invited to return home with them. She becomes not only a close friend to Georgiana, but a mistress to the Duke and bears him two illegitimate children. Surprisingly Georgiana supports this strange ménage à trois, but nevertheless continues her bedroom duties to the Duke, eventually bearing him two daughters and finally in 1790, the much sought-after son. The true love of Georgiana's life is the handsome young Whig politician Charles Grey with whom she embarked on an affair in 1791. She faced the worse crisis of her life when she discovered that she was carrying his child. The Duke gave an ultimatum - give up Grey and the child, or never see her three children again. She chooses her children. 224 pages, paperback, very well illustrated with both colour images and black and white archive material plus chronological chart.

'This light-hearted survey of the historiography of Henry VIII was originally penned in 2010 as the introductory section of a never completed biography of the second Tudor king.' Thankfully the wonderful publisher Alan Sutton picked it up, and this 96 page softback with 111 colour illustrations is the result. Henry VIII is remembered in particular as the formidable and arrogant regal figure portrayed by Hans Holbein the Younger, the early Tudor stud who clocked up np fewer than six wives, and the proto-nationalist/imperialist ruler who sent the Pope packing and inaugurated the English Reformation. Nor is it easy to avoid contrasting the handsome, athletic and affable teenage prince who ascended the throne in 1509 with the bloated, physically decrepit and irritable elderly king he had become by the time of his death in 1547. The humanist Erasmus first met Henry VIII in 1499 when as a nine year old child he detected in him 'A certain royal demeaner, a dignity of mind combined with a remarkable courtesy.' Of the 111 magnificent portraits they include Thomas Cromwell, John Fisher, Elizabeth Woodville and illustrations such as George Cavendish's manuscript of the biography of Wolsey and images of famous historians like A. P. Pollard and even television's Blackadder. 96pp, colour, paperback.

By the author of around 100 books including historical and royal biography comes an account of Queen Victoria's personal and political relationships with the empires, kings and queens, emperors, empresses and their families of France, Germany, Austria and Russia. Victoria had close familial ties with the royal houses of Germany long before the King of Prussia became German Emperor in 1871, as well as strong personal bonds with the exiled French Emperor and Empress and their son the Prince Imperial, after the fall of the French Empire in 1870. In addition, the volume explores Victoria's often strained relations with her grandson William II, and her tumultuous interactions with the Russian emperors. We are transported back to a glamorous and powerful time when there were four Imperial Heads of State in Europe, Queen (and Empress) Victoria, the German Emperor William, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria, and Tsar Alexander II of Russia. Beautifully written by John Van der Kiste who weaves together the many strands to provide a fascinating picture of European royalty from the 1830s to the early 1900s. Many contemporary portraits, 176pp, paperback.