The Fateful Year by Mark Bostridge is the story of England in 1914. War with Germany, so often imagined and predicted, finally broke out when people were least prepared for it. Here, among a crowded cast of unforgettable characters, are suffragettes, armed with axes, destroying works of art, schoolchildren going on strike in support of their teachers, and celebrity aviators thrilling spectators by looping the loop. A theatrical diva prepares to shock her audience, while an English poet in the making sets out on a midsummer railway journey that will result in the creation of a poem that remains loved and widely known to this day. With the coming of war, England is beset by rumour and foreboding. There is hysteria about German spies, fears of invasion, while patriotic women hand out white feathers to men who have failed to rush to their country's defence. In the book's final pages, a bomb falls from the air onto British soil for the first time, and people live in expectation of air raids. As 1914 fades out, England is preparing itself for the prospect of a war of long duration. Mark Bostridge won the Gladstone Memorial Prize at Oxford University. His first book Vera Brittain: A Life was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the NCR NonFiction Award, and the Fawcett Prize. His books also include the bestselling Letters from a Lost Generation; Lives for Sale, a collection of biographers' tales; Because You Died, a selection of Vera Brittain's First World War poetry and prose; and Florence Nightingale: The Woman and her Legend, which was named as a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2008 and awarded the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography. The Fateful Year was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2015.

THE catastrophe which overwhelmed Europe in July, 1914, the effects of which made themselves felt more or less over the whole world, cannot yet be made the subject of scientific historical investigation. So immense a task is beyond the powers of those who witnessed and still more of those who were directly concerned in it. It must be left to the rising generation, in the hope that their remoteness from these events will ensure for their labours the necessary freedom from prejudice and that they will have access to historical material more complete than that already available, important as that is. Those who read these short recollections must not expect to I find in them a consecutive and full exposition of the course of the historic events of which I was a witness, or in which I participated, but only my personal estimate of them in the light of the information which I possessed. They will find these occurrences set out objectively in the official compilations of diplomatic documents published, both at the beginning of the European War and later by the Governments of the belligerent Powers, and also in the endless literature published in every language during recent years, and referring, not only to the actual war period, but also to the period that preceded it.

On 30 January 1933, Alfred Hugenberg's conservative German National People's Party (DNVP) formed a coalition government with the Nazi Party, thus enabling Hitler to accede to the chancellorship. This book analyzes in detail the complicated relationship between Conservatives and Nazis and offers a re-interpretation of the Nazi seizure of power - the decisive months between 30 January and 14 July 1933. The Machtergreifung is characterized here as a period of all-pervasive violence and lawlessness with incessant conflicts between Nazis and German Nationals and Nazi attacks on the conservative Bürgertum, a far cry from the traditional depiction of the takeover as a relatively bloodless, virtually sterile assumption of power by one vast impersonal apparatus wresting control from another. The author scrutinizes the revolutionary character of the Nazi seizure of power, the Nazis' attacks on the conservative Bürgertum and its values, and National Socialism's co-optation of conservative symbols of state power to serve radically new goals, while addressing the issue of why the DNVP was complicit in this and paradoxically participated in eroding the foundations of its very own principles and bases of support.

This text provides an introductory account of the Labour Party from its foundation. It not only covers the period up to and including the election of Neil Kinnock as the leader of the Labour Party but also concentrates on the problems of the parliamentary leadership.

Looks at nationalism as an unstable production, examining how, under what circumstances, and with what effects, the comcept of nation was produced and deployed in the Philippines.