NCW Libraries

Powell's "Below Stairs" became a sensation among readers revelling in the subtle class warfare of the hit series "Downton Abbey." Now, Powell tells the true story of Rose, the under-parlourmaid to the Wardham Family at Redlands, who eloped with the family's only son.

Acclaimed historian A. N. Wilson gives a sweeping, definitive biography of one of the most recognizable yet enigmatic monarchs of all time. The longest reigning British monarch and female sovereign in history, Queen Victoria was a figure of profound paradox who has mystified historians for over a century. Now in this magisterial biography, A. N. Wilson rebukes the conventional wisdom about her life-that she was merely a "funny little woman in a bonnet"...

Merlin the Magician has remained an enthralling and curious individual since he was first introduced in the twelfth century though the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth{u2019}s Historia Regum Britanniae. But although the Merlin of literature and Arthurian myth is well known, Merlin the "historical" figure and his relation to medieval magic are less familiar. In this book Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores just who he was and what he has meant to Britain....

Edmund Burke is the greatest and perhaps also the most underrated political thinker of the past 300 years. A brilliant 18th-century political theorist, philosopher, and statesman, Burke was a fierce champion of human rights, and a lifelong campaigner against arbitrary power.

A groundbreaking retelling and reclaiming of Anne Boleyn's life and legacy from a preeminent cultural thinker puts old questions to rest and raises some surprising new ones.

Inspired by a true story, when Queen Victoria is unable to go swimming without her subjects glimpsing her in a swimming suit, her husband, Prince Albert, comes up with an innovative solution so his wife can indulge in the healthy exercise.

Narrative historian Lawrence James has written a genuinely new biography of Winston Churchill, one focusing solely on his contradictory relationship with the British Empire. As a young army officer in the late nineteenth century serving in conflicts in India, South Africa, and the Sudan, his attitude toward the Empire was the Victorian paternalistic approach--at once responsible and superior. Conscious even then of his political career ahead, Churchill...

The war between the fertile Stewarts and the barren Tudors was crucial to the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth century. The legendary struggle, most famously embodied by the relationship between Elizabeth I and her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, was fuelled by three generations of powerful Tudor and Stewart monarchs. It was the marriage of Margaret Tudor, elder sister of Henry VIII, to James IV of Scotland in 1503 that gave the Tudors a...