Diana Preston

While Galileo was suffering under house arrest at the hands of Pope Urban VIII, the Thirty Years War was ruining Europe, and the Pilgrims were struggling to survive in the New World, work began on what would become one of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Taj Mahal. Built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan as a memorial to his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, its flawless symmetry and gleaming presence have for centuries dazzled all who have seen it.

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"While some of the last battles of WWII were being fought, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin-the so-called "Big Three"-met from February 4-11, 1945, in the Crimean resort town of Yalta. Over eight days of bargaining, bombast, and intermittent bonhomie, while Soviet soldiers and NKVD men patrolled the grounds of the three palaces occupied by their delegations, they decided,...

"Celebrated historian Diana Preston presents betrayals, escapes, and survival at sea in her account of the mutiny of the Bounty and the flight of convicts from the Australian penal colony. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty and William Bligh and his men's survival on the open ocean for 48 days and 3,618 miles has become the stuff of legend. But few realize that Bligh's escape across the seas was not the only open-boat journey in that era of British...

"In six weeks during April and May 1915, as World War I escalated, Germany forever altered the way war would be fought with poison gas, torpedoes killing civilians, and aerial bombardment. Each of these actions violated rules of war carefully agreed at the Hague Conventions of 1898 and 1907. The era of weapons of mass destruction had dawned. While each of these momentous events has been chronicled in histories of the war, historian Diana Preston links...

On December 26, 1898, Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium and observed that "radioactivity seems to be an atomic property." A mere 47 years later, "Little Boy" exploded over Hiroshima. Before the Fallout is the epic story of the intervening half century, during which an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world revealed how to destroy it, and an open, international, scientific adventure transmuted overnight into a wartime...

The story of the world's best-remembered celebrity couple, set against the political backdrop of their time. In 30 BCE, the 39-year-old queen of Egypt, Cleopatra, took her own life rather than be paraded in chains through Rome by her conqueror, the future first emperor Augustus. A few days earlier, her lover of eleven years, Mark Antony, had himself committed suicide. Historian Diana Preston explores the lives and times of a couple whose names--two...