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¿Sabía que Cataluña fue una de las regiones más taurinas y donde se recogen los testimonios más antiguos de las corridas de toros en España? ¿O que una de las hijas de El Cid se casó con un conde de Barcelona? ¿Y que soldados catalanes lucharon para el Imperio español desde la Patagonia hasta Alaska? Las historias de los pueblos están llenas de tópicos, falsas leyendas… y olvidos. El Principado de Cataluña no podía ser menos.

Undoubtedly, Napoleon, the French revolutionist and emperor, has left his mark on European history. His vast empire stretched all over the continent, and his unique image and posture have been emulated by many. In this comprehensive guide, we will take a look at some of the greatest achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte, as well as his virtues and vices, personal background, politics, exile, and death. You will gain a greater comprehension of his motives, the problems he faced, and how he solved said problems in his own way.

In a riveting account of the dark days leading up to France's defeat and occupation, Martin reveals a great and civilized nation committing a kind of suicide in 1938. When the relative calm in the first quarter ends with Germany's invasion of Austria, France is faced with hard questions about its diplomatic and military posture, and the leftist political alliance called the Popular Front makes its last stand.

In this fascinating BBC Radio series, Katie Hickman examines the lives of 'diplomatic women' through their letters and diaries. From the first exploratory expeditions into foreign lands, through the heyday of the British Empire and still today, the foreign service has been shaped and run behind the scenes by the wives of ambassadors and minor civil servants.

Soldier Keith Nightingale has conducted terrain walks in Normandy for over forty years with veterans, active-duty military, and local French civilians. Over the decades Nightingale conducted dozens of formal interviews and informal conversations with many of the principals of the day, including Generals Bradley, Collins, Gavin, Ridgway, and Hill. Added to this rare new primary material from the top brass are numerous conversations with lower-ranking vets who did the heavy lifting.

When did globalisation begin? Most observers have settled on 1492, the year Columbus discovered America. But as celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen shows, it was the year 1000, when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe, so an object could in theory circumnavigate the world. This was the 'big bang' of globalisation, which ushered in a new era of exploration and trade, and which paved the way for Europeans to dominate after Columbus reached America.

Published in the 200th anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo, a witty look at how the French still think they won, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde. Two centuries after the Battle of Waterloo, the French are still in denial. If Napoleon lost on 18 June 1815 (and that's a big 'if') then whoever rules the universe got it wrong. As soon as the cannons stopped firing, French historians began rewriting history.

In The Red Hotel, former Daily Telegraph Foreign Editor and Russian expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war and forcing them to reproduce Kremlin propaganda. War correspondents were both bullied and pampered in a gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. Through the use of British archives and Russian sources, the story of the role of the women of the Metropol Hotel and the foreign reporters they worked with is told for the first time.

There are many reasons to be fascinated by Germany: forests, architecture and fairy tales, not to mention its history and inhabitants’ penchant for very peculiar food. Our distant and often maligned cousin, this is a place in which innumerable strange characters have held power, in which a chaotic jigsaw of borders have moved about seemingly at random, and which at the dark heart of the 20th century fell into the hands of truly terrible forces. And now Simon Winder is here to tell us everything else there is to know about this mesmerizing, tortured and endlessly fascinating country.

1302 is een historisch jaar. Vlaanderen dankt er zelfs zijn feestdag aan: 11 juli, de dag waarop in Kortrijk de Guldensporenslag werd uitgevochten. Lange tijd was 1302 ook het onderwerp van talloze polemieken en mythes. Wat maakt 1302 zo iconisch? Het verhaal van 1302 begint met het economisch welvarende Vlaanderen dat ten prooi valt van een sluwe Franse koning. Maar wanneer al lang gistende spanningen in de Vlaamse steden tot explosie komen, stort het Franse bouwwerk in.

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendour of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, French cooks began to claim central roles in defining and enforcing taste, as well as educating their diners to changing standards. Tracing the transformation of culinary trades in France during the Revolutionary era, Jennifer J. Davis argues that the work of cultivating sensibility in food was not simply an elite matter; it was essential to the livelihood of thousands of men and women. Davis interrogates the development of cooking aesthetics and practices by examining the policing of the culinary marketplace in the name of safety and good taste.

The story of the love affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, and his abdication in order to marry the divorcée, has provoked fascination and discussion for decades. However, the full story of the couple's links with the German aristocracy and Hitler has until now remained untold. Meticulously researched, 17 Carnations chronicles this entanglement, starting with Hitler's early attempts to matchmake between Edward and a German noblewoman.

Drie koningen uit het Huis Oranje-Nassau regeerden tussen 1813 en 1890 over Nederland: Willem I (1813-1840), Willem II (1840-1849) en Willem III (1849-1890). Hun historische reputaties lopen uiteen. Willem I, als enige van de drie opgenomen in de Historische Canon van Nederland, geldt als een van de grondleggers van onze staat. De Koning-Koopman zou zijn onderdanen hebben opgestoten in de vaart der volkeren; het is wat veel eer. Willem II wordt herinnerd als de Held van Waterloo. In 1848 zou hij zijn conservatieve denkbeelden abrupt hebben ingeruild voor liberale overtuigingen.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate.

For a whole year on his train to work, TLS editor Stig Abell read books from across genres and time periods. Then he wrote about them and their impact on our culture and his own life. The result is a work of many things: a brisk guide to the canon of Western literature; an intimate engagement with writers from Shakespeare to JK Rowling, Marcel Proust to Zora Neale Hurston; a wise and funny celebration of the power of words; and a meditation on mental unrest and how to tackle it.

Prefaced by lauded French historian Pierre Nora and translated from the French by award-winning Matt Reeck, these two texts return us to Kundera’s much-missed living presence. Subtle, alive, and full of wit and irony, 89 Words followed by Prague: A Poem that Disappears is an homage to a literary legend and a reminder of just how prescient his words and insights are today.

Through the discovery of a precious friendship album which belonged to 12-year-old Alie, a Jewish schoolgirl in Amsterdam, Claudia Carli has traced and preserved the lives of an entire class of girls, most of whom did not survive the war. Alie and her friends are brought touchingly and vividly to life, along with their writings, in this extraordinary book. Their everyday hopes, pleasures and longings are offset by the constant fear of a knock on the door, a missing friend from class, a family member taken away.

Between 1941 and 1944, sixteen thousand plucky homing pigeons were dropped in an arc from Bordeaux to Copenhagen as part of 'Columba' – a secret British operation to bring back intelligence from those living under Nazi occupation.

Bert Trautmann is famed as the goalkeeper who broke his neck in an FA Cup final and played on. But his early life is no less extraordinary: he grew up in Nazi Germany and fought for the Germans in World War Two. In 1945 he was captured and sent to a British POW camp where, for the first time, he saw a better way of life. He embraced England as his new home and before long became an England football hero. This is his extraordinary story.