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Author, broadcaster and 'rock star classicist' Natalie Haynes is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greece and Rome. In these four series, she explores some of the most prominent historical and mythological figures from the classical world, telling their stories through a mix of stand-up comedy and conversation.

For 2,500 years, the Celts have continued to fascinate those who have come into contact with them, yet their origins have remained a mystery and even today are the subject of heated debate among historians and archaeologists. Barry Cunliffe's classic study of the ancient Celtic world was first published in 1997. Since then, huge advances have taken place in our knowledge: new finds, new ways of using DNA records to understand Celtic origins, new ideas about the proto-urban nature of early chieftains' strongholds. All these developments are part of this fully updated edition.

The ruins of Pompeii, buried by an explosion of Vesuvius in 79 CE, offer the best evidence we have of everyday life in the Roman empire. This remarkable book rises to the challenge of making sense of those remains, as well as exploding many myths: the very date of the eruption, probably a few months later than usually thought, or the hygiene of the baths that must have been hotbeds of germs, or the legendary number of brothels, most likely only one, or the massive death count, maybe less than 10 per cent of the population.

In 1889, Victorian impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte opened the Savoy, Britain's first luxury hotel. Allowing the rich to live like royalty, it attracted glamour, scandal and a cast of eccentric characters, with the D'Oyly Carte family elevated to a unique vantage point on high society. The Secret Life of the Savoy will tell their story through three generations, exploring their roller-coaster achievements, lifestyles and private lives, through the prism of this iconic hotel and its many distinguished guests - from Oscar Wilde to the Beatles.

Here is the tragic, stormy life of Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. Her story is a chronicle of courage and faith, betrayal and treachery - set amidst the splendor, pageantry, squalor, and intrigue of 16th-century Europe. The history of Mary Tudor is an improbable blend of triumph, humiliation, heartbreak, and devotion - and Ms. Erickson recounts it all against the turbulent background of European politics, war, and religious strife of the mid-1500s.

Take a riveting tour of the Italian peninsula, from the glittering canals of Venice to the lavish papal apartments and ancient ruins of Rome. In these 24 lectures, Professor Bartlett traces the development of the Italian city-states of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, showing how the modern nation of Italy was forged out of the rivalries, allegiances, and traditions of a vibrant and diverse people.

In this classic account of the French war in Indochina, Bernard B. Fall vividly captures the sights, sounds, and smells of the savage eight-year conflict in the jungles and mountains of Southeast Asia from 1946 to 1954. The French fought well to the last, but even with the lethal advantages of airpower, they could not stave off the Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists, who countered with a hit-and-run campaign of ambushes, booby traps, and nighttime raids. Defeat came at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.

Born in Massachusetts, Jared Bibler relocated to Iceland in 2004 only to find himself in the middle of an unprecedented financial crisis a handful of years later. Personally wiped out and seeking to uncover the truth about a collapse that brought the pastoral country to its knees, he became the lead investigator into some of the largest financial crimes in the world. This work helped Iceland to famously become the only country to jail its bank CEOs in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

The Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland bordered on a number of sedentary states to the south and there were, inevitably, numerous interactions between the nomads and their neighbours. The Scythians fought the Persians on a number of occasions, in one battle killing their king and on another occasion driving the invading army of Darius the Great from the steppe.

The papal tiara has been worn by a number of infamous men through the course of its history. Some have been accused of murder, many have had mistresses, while others sold positions in the church to their followers or gave land and wealth to their illegitimate children. E. R. Chamberlin examines the lives of eight of the most controversial popes, from the reign of Pope Stephen VI, who had his predecessor exhumed, put on trial and thrown in the Tiber, in the ninth century, through to Pope Clement VII, whose failed international policy led to the Sack of Rome in 1527.

What was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer answers the key questions that a visitor to late 16th-century England would ask.

In little more than 50 years the regard with which the Royal Family are held has changed out of all recognition. Their private lives are now the stuff of soap opera and it seems any one who comes into contact with them sells their story to the magazines or to the newspapers. The Little Princesses was published in 1950 to a furore we cannot imagine today. Crawfie was demonised by the press, and the Queen Mother, who had been a great friend and who had, Crawfie maintained, given her permission to write the account, never spoke to her again.

Against a backdrop of Islamophobia, Europeans are increasingly airbrushing from history their cultural debt to the Muslim world. But this legacy lives on in some of Europe's most recognizable buildings, from Notre-Dame Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament.

Eighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change, as traditional ways of life were overturned by the "rational" exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands.

In the early 1970s, Britain seemed to be tottering on the brink of the abyss. Under Edward Heath, the optimism of the '60s had become a distant memory. Now the headlines were dominated by strikes and blackouts, unemployment and inflation. As the world looked on in horrified fascination, Britain seemed to be tearing itself apart. And yet, amid the gloom, glittered a creativity and cultural dynamism that would influence our lives long after the nightmarish '70s had been forgotten.

At the beginning of 1940 Germany was at the pinnacle of its power. By May 1945 Hitler was dead and Germany had suffered a disastrous defeat. Hitler had failed to achieve his aim of making Germany a super power and had left its people to cope with the endless shame of the Holocaust. In The Hitler Years - Disaster 1940-1945, Professor Frank McDonough charts the dramatic change of fortune for the Third Reich and challenges long-held accounts of the Holocaust and Germany's ultimate defeat.

After the overwhelming horrors of the first half of the 20th century, described by Ian Kershaw in his previous book as having gone 'to hell and back', the years from 1950 to 2017 brought peace and relative prosperity to most of Europe. Enormous economic improvements transformed the continent. The catastrophic era of the world wars receded into an ever more distant past, though its long shadow continued to shape mentalities. Europe was now a divided continent, living under the nuclear threat in a period intermittently fraught with anxiety.

Who owns England? Behind this simple question lies this country’s oldest and best-kept secret. This is the history of how England’s elite came to own our land, and an inspiring manifesto for how to open up our countryside once more.

In On This Day in History, Dan Snow, Britain's favourite historian, tells the story of an important event that happened on each day of the year. From the signing of the Armistice treaty at 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 to Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat on 1 December 1955, our past is full of all kinds of fascinating turning points.

Their names still echo down the ages: The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Temple of Artemis. The statue of Zeus at Olympia. The mausoleum of Halikarnassos. The Colossus at Rhodes. The Lighthouse of Alexandria. The Seven Wonders of the World were staggeringly audacious impositions on our planet. They were also brilliant adventures of the mind, test cases of the reaches of human imagination. Now only the pyramid remains, yet the scale and majesty of these seven wonders still enthral us today.