Maud West ran her detective agency in London for more than thirty years, having starting sleuthing on behalf of society’s finest in 1905. Her exploits grabbed headlines throughout the world but, beneath the public persona, she was forced to hide vital aspects of her own identity in order to thrive in a class-obsessed and male-dominated world. And – as Susannah Stapleton reveals – she was a most unreliable witness to her own life.

Who was Maud? And what was the reality of being a female private detective in the Golden Age of Crime?

Interweaving tales from Maud West’s own ‘casebook’ with social history and extensive original research, Stapleton investigates the stories Maud West told about herself in a quest to uncover the truth.

With walk-on parts by Dr Crippen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Parisian gangsters and Continental blackmailers, The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective is a portrait of a woman ahead of her time and a deliciously salacious glimpse into the underbelly of ‘good society’ during the first half of the twentieth century.

Returning to the UK in some ways has been disconcerting – or maybe discombobulating would be a better word. It is, after all, my home; it is where I grew up, a country I love and am proud of. But either it’s changed, or I have. Maybe both.

It just feels like a strange land.

At the beginning of 2022, after eight years of political reporting in the US, Jon Sopel returned home to the UK – and having spent almost a third of his career abroad, he found a very different place to the one he left. In Strangeland, his first book since launching the global hit podcast The News Agents, he asks: What is the Britain he’s come home to?

In the US, Jon was the outsider looking in, firm in the belief that the common language of English masked our fundamental differences; in terms of values and beliefs, it seemed the British had much more in common with our European neighbours.

Strangeland is Jon’s account of how much that has changed. The US was a country he thought he knew well but didn’t really; returning home has been in some ways even more disconcerting – either Britain, the country he grew up in, has changed dramatically, or he has. Perhaps it’s both.

A trenchant analysis of politics, people, and everything in between, Strangeland is an unforgettable portrait of a country gone through the looking glass.

The age of Elizabeth I exercises a fascination unmatched by other periods of English history. Yet while the leading figures may seem familiar, many Elizabethan personalities, including the queen herself, remain enigmatic; their attitudes to life, politics and religion often difficult to comprehend. Patrick Collinson redraws the main features of the political and religious struggle of the reign. In engaging with the virgin queen herself he tackles the old conundrum: was she a religious woman? He also investigates the no less inscrutable religious position adopted by the by the notorious turncoat, Andrew Perne, the reliability as a historian of the martyrologist John Foxe (whose religion is in no doubt) and the religious environment which shaped William Shakespeare.

'Ackroyd makes history accessible to the layman' - Ian Thomson, Independent The penultimate volume of Peter Ackroyd's masterful History of England series, Dominion begins in 1815 as national glory following the Battle of Waterloo gives way to post-war depression, spanning the last years of the Regency to the death of Queen Victoria in January 1901. In it, Ackroyd takes us from the accession of the profligate George IV whose government was steered by Lord Liverpool, who was firmly set against reform, to the reign of his brother, William IV, the 'Sailor King', whose reign saw the modernization of the political system and the abolition of slavery. But it was the accession of Queen Victoria, aged only eighteen, that sparked an era of enormous innovation. Technological progress - from steam railways to the first telegram - swept the nation and the finest inventions were showcased at the first Great Exhibition in 1851. The emergence of the middle classes changed the shape of society and scientific advances changed the old pieties of the Church of England, and spread secular ideas across the nation. But though intense industrialization brought boom times for the factory owners, the working classes were still subjected to poor housing, long working hours and dire poverty. It was a time that saw a flowering of great literature, too. As the Georgian era gave way to that of Victoria, readers could delight not only in the work of Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth but also the great nineteenth-century novelists: the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray, and, of course, Dickens, whose work has become synonymous with Victorian England. Nor was Victorian expansionism confined to Britain alone. By the end of Victoria's reign, the Queen was also an Empress and the British Empire dominated much of the globe. And, as Ackroyd shows in this richly populated, vividly told account, Britannia really did seem to rule the waves.

Medieval London Widows, 1300-1500 shows that it is possible to expand the repertoire of examples of medieval women with personalities and individuality beyond the well-known triad of Margaret Paston, Margery Kempe and the Wife of Bath. The rich documentation of London records allows these women to speak for themselves. They do so largely through their wills, which themselves exemplify the ability of widows to make choices and to order their lives.

1066 is still one of the most memorable dates in British history. In this accessible text, Brian Golding explores the background to the Norman invasion, the process of colonisation, and the impact of the Normans on English society.
Thoroughly revised and updated in light of the latest scholarship, the Second Edition of this established text features entirely new sections on:
- the colonisation of towns
- women and the Conquest
- the impact of the Conquest on the peasantry.
Ideal for students, scholars and general readers alike, "Conquest and Colonisation" is an essential introduction to this pivotal period in British history.