African History

Shakepeare's "lass unparallel", the mistress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, Cleopatra was born in 69 BC and died before she reached the age of forty, when Alexandria fell to...

'A Victorian drama of three intertwined lives set against a backcloth of the greatest empire the world has ever seen. By degrees heroic, poignant, whimsical and tragic, Brian Thompson's wonderful...

Kavalali Mehmed Ali Pasha (c. 1770-1849), often dubbed "the founder of modern Egypt", was one of the most important figures in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Born in what...

The author has known Mandela since the 1950s, and has been given complete access to all his personal papers, to Mandela himself, and to his friends and political associates, to...

Nelson Mandela is one of the world's most revered public figures, a man synonymous with the long, bitter struggle to rid South Africa of an apartheid regime and replace it...

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING FINALIST SHORTLISTED FOR THE WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS 'One of the best memoirs I've read in years' SATHNAM SANGHERA 'Beautifully...

Mandela traces the life and work of South Africa's first democratically elected president. Beginning with his early years in a tiny village in the Transkei, the title follows him to...

The Chief and the Empire uncovers the extraordinary true tale of Te Tai Tokerau rangatira Te Pahi - the first influential Maori leader to cross the Tasman - whose curiosity...

The Second Emancipation , a work of Odyssean dimension, recasts the liberation of post-World War II colonial Africa and the American civil rights struggle through the lens of Ghana's revolutionary...

There can't be many people who have never heard of Nelson Mandela. His has become a household name, a name respected by everyone everywhere, from grandmothers to schoolchildren. Not so...

`I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.' These notorious words, spoken by Churchill in 1942, encapsulate his image...

Widely considered to be the most important biography of Nelson Mandela, Antony Sampson's remarkable book has been updated with an afterword by acclaimed South African journalist, John Battersby. Long after...

*Shortlisted for the 2024 Wolfson History Prize* 'Gripping and profoundly moving' DAMON GALGUT 'Deft and operatic' OBSERVER From one of South Africa's foremost nonfiction writers, a deeply researched, shattering new...

Cleopatra is wreathed by so many outsized myths that it is sometimes difficult to tell the woman from the legend. For centuries, historians have scarcely deviated from the occidental, Horatian...

*Shortlisted for the 2024 Wolfson History Prize* 'Gripping and profoundly moving' DAMON GALGUT 'Deft and operatic' OBSERVER From one of South Africa's foremost nonfiction writers, a deeply researched, shattering new...

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS A TABLET BOOK OF THE YEAR 'One of the best memoirs I've read in years' SATHNAM SANGHERA 'Beautifully...

A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS A TABLET BOOK OF THE YEAR 'One of the best memoirs I've read in years' SATHNAM SANGHERA 'Beautifully...