Simon Webb: 32 books

Judicial hanging is regarded by many as being the quintessential British execution. However, many other methods of capital punishment have been used in this country; ranging from burning, beheading, and shooting to crushing and boiling to death. Execution explores these types of executions in detail....

Born in London to highly cultured Italian parents, the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a passionate translator of the poetry of Dante Alighieri and his contemporaries. The Langley Press selection includes love sonnets not included in Dante's Vita Nuova, and others by poets including Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Orlandi and Cecco Angliolieri.

What was it like being a teenager in a world without computers, smartphones, DVD players, games consoles, or the Internet? Imagine a time when sharing music meant taking a gramophone record to your friend's house; when making a quick phone call could involve lining up outside a telephone booth!...

Do you remember playing in streets free of traffic? Dancing to the Beatles? Watching a man land on the moon on TV? Waking up to ice on the inside of the windows? If the answer is yes, then the chances are that you were a child in the 1960s. This delightful compendium of memories will appeal to all...

'Richard . . . was . . . little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard-favoured of visage . . . malicious, wrathful, envious . . .' The History of King Richard III by Thomas More, the celebrated 'man for all seasons', gives us King...

Taking you through the year day by day, The Colchester Book of Days contains quirky, eccentric, amusing, and important events and facts from different periods in the history of Britain’s oldest recorded town. Ideal for dipping into, this addictive little book will keep you entertained and informed....

Most people are unaware that London was a terrorist target as long ago as 1867. Numerous parallels can be drawn with current news stories. The worst terrorist bombing before 7/7 was in Clerkenwell in 1867 (12 people were killed). In the years since the 7/7 attacks on the London transport system, many...

For many of us, the very expression ‘Concentration Camp’ is inextricably linked to Nazi Germany and the horrors of the Holocaust. The idea of British concentration camps is a strange and unsettling one. It was however the British, rather than the Germans, who were the chief driving force behind...

Before the Industrial Revolution, everyone lived within short walking distance of their workplace. However, all of this has now changed and many people commute large distances to work, often taking around one hour in each direction. We are now used to being stuck in traffic, crammed onto a train,...

“Fascinating and enlightening . . . Historical true crime books can often fall victim to being very dry . . . [This book], however, is quite the opposite” (Crime Traveler).   Despite the Victorian period’s reputation for stability and social order, there was plenty of civil disorder during...

The little-known true story of rioting and rebellion among British veterans and workers after the end of World War I.   On the August Bank Holiday of 1919, the government in London dispatched warships to the northern city of Liverpool in an overwhelming show of force. Thousands of troops, backed...

The Reverend Jonas Faulkner, pastor of the First Claremont Presbyterian Church in Texas, is a man with a secret: in his younger days he was a notorious gunman, involved in a horrific massacre causing the deaths of many children. So, when a party of young girls travelling to an orphanage in Claremont,...

When Anthony Armstrong returns to his hometown of Parson’s End after completing his studies at Harvard, he expects to spend a few quiet weeks lending a hand at his family’s farm. When his father is shot, however, he is drawn into a vicious range war. Armstrong longs to return to his studies, but...

Jed Harker wishes for nothing more than to mind his own business while travelling north to Kansas. In the summer of 1861 though, men and women were taking sides all across the United States and Harker finds himself compelled to declare where he stands on slavery. The result is that he finds himself...