Christopher Hibbert

With passion and wit, Christopher Hibbert details the crucial years that formed Dickens the writer and Dickens the man. He explains how Dickens transferred the smallest fragments of his experience to his fiction, and how he interpreted his youth for both himself and his readers, throwing a clear light on the creative process and sources of literary imagination. An illuminating look at a complex and baffling person, fans of literary biography will relish Hibbert's acclaimed style as he delivers the fascinating tale of Dickens' development.

Modern history has produced a single myth on a heroic scale to rival those of Alexander and Caesar - that of Napoleon. This biography examines all aspects of his career, life and death, attempting to reveal the man behind the soldier, statesman and legend.

In this coloful, absorbing tale of Nelson's life on and off the high seas, Hibbert illuminates the admiral's personality, his personal and political friendships, his relationship with Sir William Hamilton, and his passionate love affair with Hamilton's wife, the beautiful Lady Emma, daughter of a blacksmith and once a London prostitute. Whether quarreling with royalty, wooing beautiful women around the world, or winning history's most famous sea battles, Hibbert's irascible Nelson is a character for all times.

This book is as captivating as the city itself. Hibbert's gift is weaving political, social and art history into an elegantly readable and marvellously lively whole. The author's book on Florence will also be at once a history and a guide book and will be enhanced by splendid photographs and illustrations and line drawings which will describe all teh buildings and treasures of the city.

Christopher Hibbert draws on every known contemporary source to provide a minutely detailed look of the fascinating writer Samuel Johnson. Using facts and anecdotes, Hibbert delivers intimate glimpses into Johnson's time as a schoolboy, his eccentricities as an undergraduate at Oxford, his struggle as a poor writer in London, and his slow rise to the legendary figure with a court of admirers and a steady stream of visitors. Hibbert combines personal stories with an examination Johnson's writing, offering a compelling and readable account.

With his signature insight and compelling style, Christopher Hibbert explains the extraordinary complexities and contradictions that characterized Benito Mussolini. Mussolini was born on a Sunday afternoon in 1883 in a village in central Italy. On a Saturday afternoon in 1945 he was shot by Communist partisans on the shores of Lake Como. In the sixty-two years in between those two fateful afternoons Mussolini lived one of the most dramatic lives in modern history. Hibbert traces Mussolini's unstoppable rise to power and details the nuances of his facist ideology. This book examines Mussolini's legacy and reveals why he continues to be both revered and reviled by the Italian people.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was praised for his military genius, his courage, and his charisma. Known as the "Hero of Two Worlds," Garibaldi's military prowess extended to the Americas, where he played a major role in the Brazilian struggle for independence. During his fight for Italian unification Garibaldi personally led an army of local untrained rebels to victory in Palermo, Naples, and Sicily. His forces suffered from lack of equipment, food, and money, and yet Garabaldi commanded their fierce loyalty. Christopher Hibbert reveals how this iconic figure earned the adulation of not only his fellow Italians, but people across the globe.

‘There is no one-volume book in print that carries so much valuable information on London and its history.’ Illustrated London News The London Encyclopaedia is the most comprehensive book on London ever published. In its first new edition in over ten years, completely revised and updated, it comprises some 6,000 entries, organised alphabetically, cross-referenced and supported by two large indexes – one for the 10,000 people mentioned in the text and one general – and is illustrated with over 500 drawings, prints and photographs. Everything that is important in the history and culture of the capital is documented, whether vanished or extant, from its first settlement to the present day. ‘Written in very accessible prose with a range of memorable quotations and affectionate jokes…a monumental achievement written with real love.’ Financial Times ‘If I had my way this book would be in every cab in London.’ London Cabbie News

Disraeli is one of the most fascinating men of the 19th century. This masterly biography, written by an outstanding popular historian, concentrates on his intriguing private life.

The story of this war has usually been told in terms of a conflict between blundering British generals and their rigidly disciplined red-coated troops on the one side and heroic American patriots in their homespun shirts and coonskin caps on the other. In this fresh, compelling narrative, Christopher Hibbert portrays the realities of a war that raged the length of an entire continent--a war that thousands of George Washington's fellow countrymen condemned and that he came close to losing. Based on a wide variety of sources and alive with astute character sketches and eyewitness accounts, Redcoats and Rebels presents a vivid and convincing picture of the "cruel, accursed" war that changed the world forever. 16 pages of illustrations. "Hibbert combines impeccable scholarship with a liveliness of style that lures the reader from page to page."--Sunday Telegraph

In this surprising new life of Victoria, Christopher Hibbert, master of the telling anecdote and peerless biographer of England's great leaders, paints a fresh and intimate portrait of the woman who shaped a century. His Victoria is not only the formidable, demanding, capricious queen of popular imagination,she is also often shy, diffident, and vulnerable, prone to giggling fits and crying jags. Often censorious when confronted with her mother's moral lapses, she herself could be passionately sensual, emotional, and deeply sentimental. Ascending to the throne at age eighteen, Victoria ruled for sixty-four years,an astounding length for any world leader. During her reign, she dealt with conflicts ranging from royal quarrels to war in Crimea and rebellion in India. She saw monarchs fall, empires crumble, new continents explored, and England grow into a dominant global and industrial power. This personal history is a compelling look at the complex woman whom, until now, we only thought we knew.

For more than 60 years Queen Victoria presided over 20 governments, and a country undergoing profound economic, social and political change. This biography brings Victoria and her ministers vividly to life, as well as all those whom the Queen came to know, to love, dislike, revere or denigrate.

In George III: A Personal History, British historian Christopher Hibbert reassesses the royal monarch George III (1738-1820). Rather than reaffirm George III's reputation as Mad King George," Hibbert portrays him as not only a competent ruler during most of his reign, but also as a patron of the arts and sciences, as a man of wit and intelligence, indeed, as a man who greatly enhanced the reputation of the British monarchy" until he was finally stricken by a rare hereditary disease.Teeming with court machinations, sexual intrigues, and familial conflicts, George III opens a window on the tumultuous, rambunctious, revolutionary eighteenth century. It is sure to alter our understanding of this fascinating, complex, and very human king who so strongly shaped England's ,and America's,destiny.

An intimate portrait of history's most fascinating monarch.

Traces the history of Rome from the time of the Etruscans to Mussolini, looks at the artists, intellectuals, and religious and political leaders who have shaped its destiny, and examines Roman society

If you want to discover the captivating history of the French Revolution, this is the book for you . . .Concise, convincing and exciting, this is Christopher Hibbert's brilliant account of the events that shook eighteenth-century Europe to its foundation. With a mixture of lucid storytelling and fascinating detail, he charts the French Revolution from its beginnings at an impromptu meeting on an indoor tennis court at Versailles in 1789, right through to the 'coup d'etat' that brought Napoleon to power ten years later.In the process he explains the drama and complexities of this epoch-making era in the compelling and accessible manner he has made his trademark.'A spectacular replay of epic action' Richard Holmes, The Times'Unquestionably the best popular history of the French Revolution' The Good Book Guide

'By far the best single-volume description of the mutiny yet written' - Economist A beautifully written and meticulously researched narrative history of the great Indian uprising of 1857 by one of our most acclaimed living historians. First published in 1978 and re-issued with a handsome new cover for the 2002 paperback edition.

At its height Renaissance Florence was a centre of enormous wealth, power and influence. A republican city-state funded by trade and banking, its often bloody political scene was dominated by rich mercantile families, the most famous of which were the Medici. This enthralling book charts the family’s huge influence on the political, economic and cultural history of Florence. Beginning in the early 1430s with the rise of the dynasty under the near-legendary Cosimo de Medici, it moves through their golden era as patrons of some of the most remarkable artists and architects of the Renaissance, to the era of the Medici Popes and Grand Dukes, Florence’s slide into decay and bankruptcy, and the end, in 1737, of the Medici line.

Hibbert tries to show by reference to history of punishments, to the reactions of those who suffered them or have been threatened by them, and to the endeavors of those who have concerned themselves with the criminal and the prevention of crime, that cruelty punishment has an inevitable tendency to produce cruelty in people.