The year 1066: a battlefield in England, a mighty king lies prone on the ground, his lifeblood ebbing out of him. As he draws his last breath, the world of which he is the greatest figurehead also moves towards its end, its existence about to pass from history into legend and later into myth. This is not Hastings; it is Stamford Bridge, and the dying king is Harald Hardrada, one of the greatest figures of the Viking age. It was a bolt from the blue when Viking raiders descended on the defenceless monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 and left it a heap of burning rubble. In succeeding years, other monasteries fell too: Jarrow, Monkwearmouth, Iona. Britain and Ireland suffered extensively as did France, Spain, Italy and even the mighty Byzantine Empire. But this was not just a period of conquest and violence - it was also an age of exploration. Viking ships crossed the Atlantic, through Shetland and Orkney to the Faroes and from there to Iceland, Greenland and North America. They sailed east and their traders moved across the steppes and rivers of Russia down to Constantinople, then the greatest city in Christendom. This is the story of the Vikings, those men and women who raided and traded their way into history whilst at the same time helping to build new nations in Scandinavia and beyond. Their history begins a long time before the Lindisfarne raid. It is also the tale of evocatively named great men: Sweyn Forkbeard, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Lodbrok, Erik the Red, Ivarr the Boneless, Cnut the Great.

Although the answer appears obvious, there is far more to the sinking of the Titanic than is popularly understood. On 10 April 1912 Titanic - the largest and most luxurious ocean liner in the world - left Southampton on her maiden voyage. The only headlines she expected to make were on her triumphant arrival in New York. But just five days later, she was a wreck at the bottom of the North Atlantic, taking over 1500 lives with her. Why? The answer to this question is a set of circumstances and a chain of events that came together to seal her fate and that of so many of her passengers and crew. Nature of course played her part in the form of that gigantic iceberg as well as in other less obvious ways. Most of all though there was human error, complacency and an inability to think the unthinkable when designing or sailing the ship. Just one different action at any stage in the chain could have saved the life of Titanic or at least most, if not all, of those aboard her. The world still has much to learn from the loss of the Titanic. This book explains why the largest ship in the world was lost and just how the voyage of a lifetime turned into a nightmare.

In 878, Alfred, king of Wessex was on the verge of oblivion. Trapped on a small island in the Somerset Levels, it seemed as if he and his kingdom were about to be destroyed. Yet within months he had defeated the Viking invaders and started to reverse the tide of conquest. While Alfred was driven by the prospect of a land called England that did not yet exist, he was not the one who finally created it. Two of his children, Edward – king of Wessex after him – and his remarkable daughter Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians, expanded his kingdom into Mercia in the Midlands. His grandson Æthelstan confirmed the conquest of the north at one of the great battles of the so-called Dark Ages at Brunanburh. The triumph of Alfred’s dynasty was cemented by the short but magnificent reign of Edgar ‘the Peaceable’, a man who could claim to be not just king of England but emperor of the whole of Britain. The ultimate collapse of Anglo-Saxon England, first of all in the face of Cnut of Denmark’s campaigns in 1015/16 and later in the Norman Conquest of 1066, has unjustly obscured their achievements. This book tells the story of the Anglo-Saxons and reasserts their right to be regarded as one of the greatest royal dynasties that Britain has ever seen.

The year 1066: a battlefield in England, a mighty king lies prone on the ground, his lifeblood ebbing out of him. As he draws his last breath, the world of which he is the greatest figurehead also moves towards its end, its existence about to pass from history into legend and later into myth. This is not Hastings; it is Stamford Bridge, and the dying king is Harald Hardrada, one of the greatest figures of the Viking age. It was a bolt from the blue when Viking raiders descended on the defenceless monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 and left it a heap of burning rubble. In succeeding years, other monasteries fell too; Jarrow, Monkwearmouth, Iona. Britain and Ireland suffered extensively as did France, Spain, Italy and even the mighty Byzantine Empire. But this was not just a period of conquest and violence. It was also an age of exploration, Viking ships crossed the Atlantic, through Shetland and Orkney to the Faroes and from there to Iceland, Greenland and North America. They sailed east and their traders moved across the steppes and rivers of Russia down to Constantinople, then the greatest city in Christendom. This is the story of the Vikings, those men and women who raided and traded their way into history whilst at the same time helping to build new nations in Scandinavia and beyond. Their history begins a long time before the Lindisfarne raid. It is also the tale of evocatively named great men: Sweyn Forkbeard, Harald Bluetooth, Ragnar Lodbrok, Erik the Red, Ivarr the Boneless, Cnut the Great.

Whilst Richard I is one of medieval England's most famous kings he is also the most controversial. He has variously been considered a great warrior but a poor king, a man driven by the quest for fame and glory but also lacking in self-discipline and prone to throwing away the short-term advantages that his military successes brought him. In this reassessment W. B. Bartlett looks at his deeds and achievements in a new light. The result is a compelling new portrait of 'the Lionheart' which shows that the king is every bit as remarkable as his medieval contemporaries found him to be. This includes his Muslim enemies, who spoke of him as their most dangerous and gallant opponent. It shows him to be a man badly let down by some of those around him, especially his brother John and the duplicitous French king Philip. The foibles of his character are also exposed to the full, including his complicated relationships with the key women in his life, especially the imposing contemporary figure of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and his wife, Berengaria, with whom he failed to produce an heir, leading to later suggestions of homosexuality. This is a new Richard, one for the twenty-first century, and a re-evaluation of the life story of one of the greatest personalities of medieval Europe.

The Viking Conquest of England in 1016 - a far tougher and more brutal campaign than the Norman Conquest exactly half a century later - saw two great warriors, the Danish prince Cnut and his equally ruthless English opponent King Edmund Ironside, fight an epic campaign. Cnut sailed in two hundred longboats, landing first in September 1015 on the Wessex coast with 10,000 soldiers. The two forces fought each other to the point of exhaustion for the next fourteen months. It was a war of terrifying violence that scarred much of England, from the Humber to Cornwall. It saw an epic siege of the great walls of London and bruising set-piece battles at Penselwood, Otford, and the conclusive Danish victory at Assandun on 18 October 1016. Edmund's death soon afterwards finally resolved a brutal, bloody conf lict and ended with Cnut becoming the undisputed king of England. This book tells the extraordinary story of Cnut the Great's life. Cnut was far removed from the archetypal pagan Viking, being a staunch protector of the Christian Church and a man who would also become Emperor of the North as king of Denmark and Norway. His wife, Emma of Normandy, was a remarkable woman who would outlive the two kings of England that she married. Their son Harthacnut would be the second and last Danish king of England, but the greatness of his dynasty did not long survive his death. This saga also features the incompetent AEthelred the Unready, the ferocious Sweyn Forkbeard and the treacherous Eadric Streona, recreating one of the great stories of Dark Age England.

While the Anglo-Zulu War is now best remembered for two battles, the stunning British defeat at Isandlwana and the victory against the odds at Rorke's Drift, two others at Hlobane and Khambula eerily mirrored them. At Hlobane the British stared disaster in the face again and just about escaped, while at Khambula they inflicted a crushing defeat on the Zulu army and turned the war on its head. In addition to these two battles, a British force was massacred on the Ntombe River and the region was the last to surrender. It was a war of ambushes and night attacks, of raids and counter-raids, of visceral intensity and bitterness and two massive battles. It also saw the British hanging on after Isandlwana through the determination and grit of two men, Colonels Evelyn Wood and Redvers Buller, both Victoria Cross winners and arguably amongst the greatest heroes of the war. Humbler heroes too play their part in the story of the war in this part of Zululand, such as Sister Janet Wells, inspired by Florence Nightingale to journey out to South Africa as a pioneer nurse when still in her teens. This is the dramatic story of a true epic, one which played a critical part in shaping the ultimate British victory against a determined and wronged enemy.

The Crusades continue to exert a fascination in the West as a story of perceived gallantry and battles against impossible odds. Yet what is less often considered is their effect on the Holy Land, and in particular the response of the Muslim world to the invasions of European Crusaders. In this book, W. B. Bartlett, author of four books on the Crusades, looks at these great events from the Muslim point of view. One of the effects was to unite a previously divided Islamic world against a common enemy. In the process, they gave an unstoppable impetus towards the declaring of jihad against the West, a holy war against Christendom. They also helped to shape the careers of some important figures, most notably Saladin, but also other great men like Sultan Baibars and Nur al-Din. The rise of these great leaders is traced in this book, as are the many great battles that were fought by men just as devoted to their cause as the Crusaders were.

The Third Crusade of Richard the Lionheart is well known but the build-up to it less so. Yet the years that led up to the Battle of Hattin in 1187 is resonant with intrigue, plot and counter-plot, and the abuse of power. This is the story of those events, involving the greatest of the military orders, the Templars and their key ally, the ruthless Reynald of Chatillon, and how they seized a throne, sought to rule a kingdom and eventually, as a result, lost it. In the 1180s the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem was ruled by a weak king, Guy of Lusignan. A puppet, placed on the throne by power-hungry 'hawks' Reynald of Chatillon and Templar Grand Master, Gerard de Ridfort, he was the worst possible ruler at this crucial time. Arrayed against the hawks was a group of 'doves', those who wished to have some form of accommodation with the Muslims. This infighting among the Christian forces, coupled with the rise of a Muslim leader of genius, Salah ed-Din Yusuf, Saladin, led almost inevitably to the fateful field of Hattin. Wayne Bartlett reveals the causes and the aftermath of one of the few battles that can truly be called decisive.