History & Biography Bargain Book Box
History & Biography Bargain Book Box (16 Books)
Sixteen books spanning centuries and continents — from jungle warfare in New Guinea to the drawing rooms of Buckingham Palace, from the birth of modern physics to the slow death of an isolated island community. This collection covers the full breadth of human history: battles won and lost, lives shaped by duty and ambition, and the ideas that remade how we understand the world. Whether your interest lies in military campaigns, political biography, social history, or the grand sweep of empire, there's something here that will surprise you.
1. Operation Postern: The Battle to Recapture Lae from the Japanese, 1943 by Ian Howie-Willis One of the lesser-known but strategically decisive engagements of the Pacific War, the 1943 Allied assault on Lae required extraordinary coordination between Australian and American forces across some of the most demanding terrain on earth. Howie-Willis reconstructs the campaign with meticulous care — the logistics, the landings, the jungle conditions — bringing back to life a hard-fought victory that deserves far more attention than it typically receives.
2. Spies, Saboteurs and Secret Missions of World War II by Tony Matthews Behind the front lines of the Second World War ran another war entirely — fought in the shadows by agents operating under false identities, with the constant awareness that capture meant torture or death. Matthews profiles the individuals who took those risks and the operations they carried out, with an eye for both tactical detail and the very human cost of clandestine warfare.
3. Between Five Eyes: 50 Years of Intelligence Sharing by Anthony R. Wells The alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has shaped global security for over half a century — yet it remains largely invisible to the public. Wells, an insider with direct experience of the partnership, traces its evolution from Cold War necessity to the digital present, revealing the institutional trust and occasional friction that keeps the world's most consequential intelligence network functioning.
4. Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters by Andrew Morton The biographer who first exposed the private anguish behind Diana's public smile turns his attention to the Queen and her sister — a relationship defined by love, rivalry, and the immovable weight of royal duty. Drawing on private accounts, Morton reveals how differently two women born into the same extraordinary circumstances could experience the same gilded cage.
5. The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific by Brandon Presser What happened after the Bounty mutiny is, if anything, stranger than the mutiny itself. Presser follows the survivors and their descendants to Pitcairn Island — one of the most remote communities on earth — where isolation and the absence of law produced generations of hidden violence. Part history, part investigation, it reads with the momentum of a thriller.
6. Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I by Matthew Stanley While the nations of Europe tore each other apart, a British Quaker astronomer quietly worked to champion the theory of a German-Jewish physicist — because the science demanded it. Stanley tells the extraordinary story of how Einstein's relativity crossed enemy lines, survived wartime hatred, and changed our understanding of the universe. A book about the persistence of reason in the face of catastrophe.
7. All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia by Simon Garfield The encyclopaedia was one of the most audacious projects in intellectual history — a single work that would contain everything humanity knew. Garfield traces that ambition from Diderot's revolutionary volumes to the chaotic miracle of Wikipedia, populating his history with eccentric editors, bitter rivalries, and the grand delusion that the world's knowledge could ever truly be tamed and alphabetised.
8. Fortune's Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong by Vaudine England Before Hong Kong became a financial powerhouse, it was something rarer: a genuinely cosmopolitan city shaped by Armenian, Jewish, Parsee, Chinese, Portuguese, and British communities who built something together that belonged entirely to none of them. England recovers this forgotten multicultural origins story, making the case that Hong Kong's defining quality was always its hybridity.
9. Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Drawing on dozens of first-hand interviews, Maxtone Graham recreates the world of the mid-twentieth-century office — the typing pools, the dress codes, the assumptions — and the women who navigated it with varying degrees of resignation and quiet determination. Funny, touching, and socially acute, it's a history of a world that vanished more recently than you might think.
10. On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World by Sean Connolly The Irish diaspora is one of the great migration stories of the modern era, stretching from the famine ships of the 1840s to the Irish-American communities that shaped a superpower's politics. Connolly traces the full arc with the authority of a serious historian and the empathy of someone who understands what it means to carry a country with you wherever you go.
11. A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues by Peter Hughes Statues are political acts — and pulling them down is too. Hughes takes twenty-one monuments from across history and uses them to trace the shifting tides of who gets celebrated, who gets forgotten, and who gets toppled. In an era of heated debate over public memory, this is a thoughtful, timely examination of how societies honour — and dishonour — their own past.
12. Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon by Eric H. Cline Megiddo — the site of Armageddon itself — attracted some of the most ambitious archaeologists of the early twentieth century, funded by Rockefeller money and driven by a desire to prove the Bible true. Cline reconstructs the excavations with forensic care, revealing as much about the personalities and politics of early archaeology as about the ancient city they were unearthing.
13. Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth-Century Minds by Simon Ings What happens to a writer who chooses — or is forced — to serve an ideology? Ings examines four figures who operated within Soviet and Nazi systems, asking how they reconciled their art with the demands of totalitarian power. It's an unsettling study of complicity, compromise, and the question of what literature is actually for.
14. Great Society: A New History by Amity Shlaes Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was one of the most ambitious attempts at social reform in American history — and one of the most contested. Shlaes examines the programs, the people, and the unintended consequences with the scepticism of an economic historian, producing a reassessment of the 1960s that challenges much of the received wisdom on both sides of the debate.
15. Unleashed by Boris Johnson A first-hand account of one of the most turbulent political careers in recent British history, covering Brexit, the pandemic, and a resignation that felt both inevitable and shocking. Characteristically ebullient and characteristically partial, Johnson's memoir offers a direct window into the decisions and the reasoning behind some of the most consequential moments of the 2020s — whatever conclusion you draw from them.
16. Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess by Adam Zamoyski Izabela Czartoryska lived through the partitions that erased Poland from the map — and refused to let her country be erased from memory. Zamoyski, one of Poland's finest historians, tells the story of a woman who turned her grief and defiance into action, creating collections and institutions that kept Polish identity alive through decades of foreign occupation.
History & Biography Bargain Book Box (16 Books)
Sixteen books spanning centuries and continents — from jungle warfare in New Guinea to the drawing rooms of Buckingham Palace, from the birth of modern physics to the slow death of an isolated island community. This collection covers the full breadth of human history: battles won and lost, lives shaped by duty and ambition, and the ideas that remade how we understand the world. Whether your interest lies in military campaigns, political biography, social history, or the grand sweep of empire, there's something here that will surprise you.
1. Operation Postern: The Battle to Recapture Lae from the Japanese, 1943 by Ian Howie-Willis One of the lesser-known but strategically decisive engagements of the Pacific War, the 1943 Allied assault on Lae required extraordinary coordination between Australian and American forces across some of the most demanding terrain on earth. Howie-Willis reconstructs the campaign with meticulous care — the logistics, the landings, the jungle conditions — bringing back to life a hard-fought victory that deserves far more attention than it typically receives.
2. Spies, Saboteurs and Secret Missions of World War II by Tony Matthews Behind the front lines of the Second World War ran another war entirely — fought in the shadows by agents operating under false identities, with the constant awareness that capture meant torture or death. Matthews profiles the individuals who took those risks and the operations they carried out, with an eye for both tactical detail and the very human cost of clandestine warfare.
3. Between Five Eyes: 50 Years of Intelligence Sharing by Anthony R. Wells The alliance between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand has shaped global security for over half a century — yet it remains largely invisible to the public. Wells, an insider with direct experience of the partnership, traces its evolution from Cold War necessity to the digital present, revealing the institutional trust and occasional friction that keeps the world's most consequential intelligence network functioning.
4. Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters by Andrew Morton The biographer who first exposed the private anguish behind Diana's public smile turns his attention to the Queen and her sister — a relationship defined by love, rivalry, and the immovable weight of royal duty. Drawing on private accounts, Morton reveals how differently two women born into the same extraordinary circumstances could experience the same gilded cage.
5. The Far Land: 200 Years of Murder, Mania, and Mutiny in the South Pacific by Brandon Presser What happened after the Bounty mutiny is, if anything, stranger than the mutiny itself. Presser follows the survivors and their descendants to Pitcairn Island — one of the most remote communities on earth — where isolation and the absence of law produced generations of hidden violence. Part history, part investigation, it reads with the momentum of a thriller.
6. Einstein's War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I by Matthew Stanley While the nations of Europe tore each other apart, a British Quaker astronomer quietly worked to champion the theory of a German-Jewish physicist — because the science demanded it. Stanley tells the extraordinary story of how Einstein's relativity crossed enemy lines, survived wartime hatred, and changed our understanding of the universe. A book about the persistence of reason in the face of catastrophe.
7. All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia by Simon Garfield The encyclopaedia was one of the most audacious projects in intellectual history — a single work that would contain everything humanity knew. Garfield traces that ambition from Diderot's revolutionary volumes to the chaotic miracle of Wikipedia, populating his history with eccentric editors, bitter rivalries, and the grand delusion that the world's knowledge could ever truly be tamed and alphabetised.
8. Fortune's Bazaar: The Making of Hong Kong by Vaudine England Before Hong Kong became a financial powerhouse, it was something rarer: a genuinely cosmopolitan city shaped by Armenian, Jewish, Parsee, Chinese, Portuguese, and British communities who built something together that belonged entirely to none of them. England recovers this forgotten multicultural origins story, making the case that Hong Kong's defining quality was always its hybridity.
9. Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age by Ysenda Maxtone Graham Drawing on dozens of first-hand interviews, Maxtone Graham recreates the world of the mid-twentieth-century office — the typing pools, the dress codes, the assumptions — and the women who navigated it with varying degrees of resignation and quiet determination. Funny, touching, and socially acute, it's a history of a world that vanished more recently than you might think.
10. On Every Tide: The Making and Remaking of the Irish World by Sean Connolly The Irish diaspora is one of the great migration stories of the modern era, stretching from the famine ships of the 1840s to the Irish-American communities that shaped a superpower's politics. Connolly traces the full arc with the authority of a serious historian and the empathy of someone who understands what it means to carry a country with you wherever you go.
11. A History of Love and Hate in 21 Statues by Peter Hughes Statues are political acts — and pulling them down is too. Hughes takes twenty-one monuments from across history and uses them to trace the shifting tides of who gets celebrated, who gets forgotten, and who gets toppled. In an era of heated debate over public memory, this is a thoughtful, timely examination of how societies honour — and dishonour — their own past.
12. Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon by Eric H. Cline Megiddo — the site of Armageddon itself — attracted some of the most ambitious archaeologists of the early twentieth century, funded by Rockefeller money and driven by a desire to prove the Bible true. Cline reconstructs the excavations with forensic care, revealing as much about the personalities and politics of early archaeology as about the ancient city they were unearthing.
13. Engineers of Human Souls: Four Writers Who Changed Twentieth-Century Minds by Simon Ings What happens to a writer who chooses — or is forced — to serve an ideology? Ings examines four figures who operated within Soviet and Nazi systems, asking how they reconciled their art with the demands of totalitarian power. It's an unsettling study of complicity, compromise, and the question of what literature is actually for.
14. Great Society: A New History by Amity Shlaes Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was one of the most ambitious attempts at social reform in American history — and one of the most contested. Shlaes examines the programs, the people, and the unintended consequences with the scepticism of an economic historian, producing a reassessment of the 1960s that challenges much of the received wisdom on both sides of the debate.
15. Unleashed by Boris Johnson A first-hand account of one of the most turbulent political careers in recent British history, covering Brexit, the pandemic, and a resignation that felt both inevitable and shocking. Characteristically ebullient and characteristically partial, Johnson's memoir offers a direct window into the decisions and the reasoning behind some of the most consequential moments of the 2020s — whatever conclusion you draw from them.
16. Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess by Adam Zamoyski Izabela Czartoryska lived through the partitions that erased Poland from the map — and refused to let her country be erased from memory. Zamoyski, one of Poland's finest historians, tells the story of a woman who turned her grief and defiance into action, creating collections and institutions that kept Polish identity alive through decades of foreign occupation.