JAMES HAWES

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES THROUGH 80 EXTRAORDINARY CREATIONS, FROM BEOWULF AND THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY TO BANKSY, STORMZY, AND BEYONDA companion book to the landmark BBC series, Brilliant Isles tells the story of these islands through art, music, buildings and literature the creations of visionaries, mavericks and rule-breakers who responded to their times and shaped the future. Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into, this is a vibrant, surprising and witty guide to a unique culture, by one of our sharpest writers'Hawes's view of English history is sharp and vivid and extremely persuasive'PHILIP PULLMAN'At last a chance to get to grips with the entire history of England, and all in a few hours!'MAIL ON SUNDAY'An engaging, informative sprint through the story of our little island'INDEPENDENT'thorough and absorbing... [Hawes] brings the story right up to date, able to step back from the current madness with admirable clarity NEW EUROPEAN'A fantastic read. I would recommend it to anyone.'PAT KENNY, Newstalk Ireland'Such a thought-provoking read...

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Harry MacDonald had seen plenty of skulls - arsing about with some poor sod or others skull is what pays Harrys rent - but until the day of his official thirty-ninth birthday (actually, Harry was knocking on forty), which was also the day he met Shnade again, he had never noticed the shape of his own skull-to-be; and until the night of that same day, he had never seen a living skull being crunched deliberately, wetly inwards. Perhaps it all happened because Harry had got lost in his work for too long. Or perhaps because Shnade had got lost doing nothing for too long. Or perhaps because all of us, Harry and Shnade included, are lost full stop. Shes not really Shnade, of course. Shnade was what we heard, and is what we called her, and is what she will be, to me any rate, for as long as I have. When Shnade swung round, I saw her dress flick along with the movement of her hips and brush Harrys thigh. It was a light, small, flimsy dress of reddish cotton; she wore it over some kind of black, shiny, strappy, swimsuitish thing. You could see this big tattoo of a lizard that ran right from her shoulder to her wrist. And you could tell that when her dress swished across the thigh of Harrys jeans, it felt to him like it was made of chain-mail. And I think, looking back, we all knew, right then, that Harry was fucked.

Take four neer-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who cant bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like shes breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winners private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.

A completely fresh look at the culture clash between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe. Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts. But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohltwhile playing Das Lawn Tennisas the dupe of a global conspiracy? Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victorias cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germanys ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.

EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES THROUGH 80 EXTRAORDINARY CREATIONS, FROM BEOWULF AND THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY TO BANKSY, STORMZY, AND BEYONDA companion book to the landmark BBC series, Brilliant Isles tells the story of these islands through art, music, buildings and literature the creations of visionaries, mavericks and rule-breakers who responded to their times and shaped the future. Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into, this is a vibrant, surprising and witty guide to a unique culture, by one of our sharpest writersHawess view of English history is sharp and vivid and extremely persuasivePHILIP PULLMANAt last a chance to get to grips with the entire history of England, and all in a few hours!MAIL ON SUNDAYAn engaging, informative sprint through the story of our little islandINDEPENDENTthorough and absorbing... [Hawes] brings the story right up to date, able to step back from the current madness with admirable clarity NEW EUROPEANA fantastic read. I would recommend it to anyone.PAT KENNY, Newstalk IrelandSuch a thought-provoking read...

READ IN A DAY. REMEMBER FOR A LIFETIME. In his bestselling, internationally-acclaimed The Shortest History of Germany, James Hawes told the story of a nation in 240 invigorating pages, tracing the roots of todays challenges back to the first encounters with Rome. In The Shortest History of England, he takes the same approach to his homeland. As he journeys from Caesar to Brexit via Conquest, Empire and World War, he discovers an England very different to the standard vision. Our stable island fortress, stubbornly independent, the begetter of parliaments and globe-spanning empires, is riven by an ancient fault-line that predates even the Romans; its fate has ever been bound up with that of its neighbours, whether we like it or not; and -- for the past 1,000 years -- it has harboured a class system like nowhere else on Earth. There has never been a better time to understand why England is the way it is -- and there is no better guide.

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John Goode is a leftie lecturer who just wants to give his beloved wife and kids a normal life. You know: north London, good schools, nice neighbours, sash windows... yes, you know. But who can afford that kind of normal these days? Goode can only daydream of becoming a television academic, or else of a bloody great economic crash that would make his job worth something again. So when he stumbles on a long-buried assault rifle whilst planting plum-trees for his children, he soon begins to wonder if this might be just the tool to seriously renegociate his familys future...

After his masterpieces on Germany and England, James Hawes has done it again... a wonder to behold PROFESSOR CIARAN MARTIN From the Ice Age to the present, here is the real story of Ireland. In The Shortest History of Ireland, James Hawes turns his attention to Ireland, reaching beyond the cliches to tell a dramatic new story, backed up by the latest scholarship. Irish history is often seen as a mere catalogue of colonial repression. Yet Hawes shows that Ireland, its unique culture rooted in millennia of continuity, has always been able to assimilate would-be invaders. He reveals how the Irish, ever since the roaming saints and scholars of the early Middle Ages, helped shape Europe, then America. And he argues that, with its natural wealth, its extraordinary magnetism and its exiled children across the globe, the island only needs to sidestep the last, toxic wreckage of the British Empire for its turbulent past to flow into a bright future. With 100s of maps and images, this is popular history at its best -- a timeless drama of freedom and persecution, riot and revolution, empire and independence.