What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAlix and Nicky: The Passion of the Last Tsar and Tsarina
Virginia Rounding · 384 pages
A study of the marriage of the last Russian tsar and tsarina offers psychological insights into their relationship and covers the Empress's ill health, their relationship with confidante Ania Vyrubova, and their reliance on the infamous Rasputin.
Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion
Anne Somerset · 621 pages
An assessment of the short twelve-year reign of Britain's last Stuart monarch recounts how she united England and Scotland as a sovereign state, offering additional insight into the military victories that laid the foundations for Britain's future naval and colonial supremacy.
Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart
John Guy · 581 pages
A new historian of Mary Queen of Scots draws on new sources to shatter various myths surrounding this odd monarch and uncover some of the scandals and political machinations underpinning, and undermining, her throne.
Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England
Alison Weir · 499 pages
The Lonely Empress: Elizabeth of Austria
Joan Haslip · 462 pages
Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration
Antonia Fraser · 524 pages
Elizabeth: Apprenticeship
David Starkey · 356 pages
Henry VIII: Man and Monarch
Susan Doran · 288 pages
Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources
Asser, Alfred the Great · 368 pages
Asser's Life of King Alfred, written in 893, is a revealing account of one of the greatest of medieval kings. Composed by a monk of St David's in Wales who became Bishop of Sherborne in Alfred's service and worked with him in his efforts to revive religion and learning in his kingdom, this life is among the earliest surviving royal biographies. It is an admiring account of King Alfred's life, writ
The Romanovs: 1613-1918
Simon Sebag Montefiore · 744 pages
From the Introduction... In some ways, this book is a study of character and the distorting effect of absolute power on personality. It is partly a family story of love, marriage, adultery and children, but it is not like other such stories—royal families are always extraordinary because power both sweetens and contaminates the traditional familial chemistry: the allure and corruption of power
Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings
Amy Kelly · 442 pages
The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
Ian Mortimer · 448 pages
Elizabeth the Great
Elizabeth Jenkins · 336 pages
Countless books have been written about Elizabeth I of England, but rarely has Elizabeth the woman been presented with the vividness, authority, and perception which inform this fascinating and important work. Miss Jenkins brings the great queen, her court, and the whole exciting age to which she gave her name brilliantly to life. There was something almost bewitched in Elizabeth, as though she
Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar
Edvard Radzinsky, Edvard Radzinskii · 471 pages
Dragon Lady: The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China
Sterling Seagrave · 601 pages
The author of *The Soong Dynasty* gives us our most vivid and reliable biography yet of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi, remembered through the exaggeration and falsehood of legend as the ruthless Manchu concubine who seduced and murdered her way to the Chinese throne in 1861.
Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman
Robert K. Massie · 791 pages
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure young German princess who traveled to Russia at fourteen and rose to become one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history. Born into a minor noble family, Catherine transformed herself
Catherine de Medici
Leonie Frieda · 464 pages
"Orphaned in infancy, imprisoned in childhood, heiress to an ancient name and vast fortune, Catherine was brought up in the Florentine court and married off, by her uncle the Pope, to Henry, Duke of Orleans, son of King Francis I of France. Aged only fourteen, she suffered cruelly as Henry loved only his beautiful mistress, Diane de Poitiers." "In 1559, when Henry, by then King of France, died hor
The Twelve Caesars
Suetonius · 352 pages
De vita Caesarum, known as The Twelve Caesars, is a set of twelve biographies, each about one of the Roman emperors, including one on Julius Caesar. It was written by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, commonly referred to as Suetonius, in 121. Considered highly significant in antiquity, The Twelve Caesars has remained a major source of Roman history.
Winter King
Thomas Penn · 458 pages
It was 1501. England had been ravaged for decades by conspiracy, violence, murders, coups and counter-coups. Henry VII had clambered to the top of the heap - a fugitive with a flimsy claim to England's crown who through luck, guile and ruthlessness had managed to win the throne and stay on it for sixteen years. Although he built palaces, hosted jousts, gave out lavish presents and sent ambassadors
The Shah
Abbas Milani · 488 pages
An Iranian scholar chronicles the life and legacy of the last Shah of Iran, including his role in the creation of the modern Islamic republic.
George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I
Miranda Carter · 498 pages
In the years before World War I, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell their tragicomic stories.
Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch
Sally Bedell Smith · 718 pages
Elizabeth & Leicester: Power, Passion, Politics
Sarah Gristwood · 528 pages
“Even their contemporaries felt that the relationship of Elizabeth and Robert transcended the details on practicality. There had to be some explanation for their lifelong fidelity, and those contemporaries put it down to 'synaptia', a hidden conspiracy of the stars, whose power to rule human lives no-one doubted: 'a sympathy of spirits between them, occasioned perhaps by some secret constellation'