The Story of the Taj Mahal

A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time

Full of passion and tragedy, the story of the Taj Mahal- one of the greatest love stories of all time

The Prestons' delightful and definitive book tells the monument's full, extraordinary story, not only of the vast undertaking of the building itself, but also the operatic sweep of the dynastic and romantic convulsions behind the project . . . Combines tremendous scholarship with a host of cracking stories well told.

The Prestons' richly patterned chintz of a book also delivers a romantic account of the Mughal empire as a whole.

A hugely entertaining book packed with information, often irrelevant but still fascinating, about the Mughal emperors of India and in particular Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal.

An enthralling history of extraordinary kings and their peerlessly cultured and opulent lives . . . truly unforgettable.

A highly readable potted history of the Moghul empire that produced this extraordinary building...thorougly enjoyable.

The Prestons tell the story engagingly and well, providing a lucid narrative sweep

Considerable research leavened by colourful story-telling...every page offers a vivid image or telling detail that captures the deeply weird and violent world of the Moghuls.

Diana Preston's most recent books are Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania (now also a major BBC1 drama documentary), A Pirate of Exquisite Mind and Before the Fall-Out (selected for the Samuel Johnson Prize longlist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Science and Technology Prize). Her new book, Cleopatra and Anthony, will shortly be published by Doubleday. Her co-author is her husband Michael Preston, an historian and traveller.

In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love: although almost constantly pregnant - she bore him fourteen children - Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign.But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. The Taj Mahal took twenty years to build and depleted the Moghul treasuries.But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth century's most powerful empire into irreversible decline.

Cleopatra and Antony

The truth behind one of the greatest love stories of history.

The most up-to-date account of Antony and Cleopatra, one of the most famous love stories of all time . . . tirelessly documented through original source documents that are used to explode some common myths.

Her research is careful and deep; her prose is lively and graceful; her sympathy for her central character is strong but wholly without sentimentality; her depiction of the worlds in which Cleopatra lived is detailed, textured and evocative. If there is a better book about Cleopatra for today's reader, I don't know what it is.

Diana Preston is an Oxford-trained historian, writer, and broadcaster who lives in London. Her most recent books are Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania (now a major BBC1 film), A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, Before the Fall-Out (chosen for the Samuel Johnson Prize longlist) and A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time. She writes with her husband Michael Preston, an historian and traveller.

In 44 bc, Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March. His mistress, Cleopatra of Egypt, fled back to Alexandria with their little son. Mark Antony, Caesar's friend and henchman, who, according to some accounts, was already besotted by the beautiful Cleopatra, took up her son's case before the Senate. But they refused to recognize him as one of Caesar's heirs. 
Civil war broke out, and after the defeat of Caesar's murderers, Antony took control over the East. Summoned to his headquarters in present-day Turkey, Cleopatra made her entry at dusk on a scented, candlelit barge: and so began one of the greatest love stories of all time - an eleven-year love affair that created the ancient world's most famous celebrity couple. The affair became all-consuming and fired the lovers with the ambition to create a new order. Had they succeeded, our world today might have been very different. 
Filled with murder, intrigue, civil war and great battles, the tragedy of Cleopatra and Antony has fascinated the world for two millennia, and has been depicted by everyone from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the iconic 1960s film. 
Now Diana Preston has gone back to the original sources and delved into the real history behind the propaganda and the myth, to breathe new life into this epic love story.

From Marie Curie To Hiroshima

Before the Fall-Out

A history of the human chain reaction that led to Atomic Bomb.

Studded with...moments of drama ... Preston's handling of her research is impeccable. But this is far from being a merely scientific history ... The effect is to demonstrate the terrible convergence of events, Hiroshima and physics drifting into the last, super-heated embrace. Furthermore, Preston is on top of the politics ... She lays it out before the reader with absolute clarity ... For Preston, it is the individual act that counts: the apparent impersonal progress of her story is an illusion. Plutonium doesn't exist in nature. We made it. We chose to make it. Read Preston. This is a formidable book.

In this wonderful book Diana Preston sustains the suspense over 400 pages of text. Although we all know who won, Preston tells the story so well that some of the chapters read like extracts from a thriller ... Preston introduces both the physics and the physicists in a logical fashion that grips the reader - however ignorant of science - from the outset ... She also weaves in the parallel military and political stories beautifully ... Diana Preston is not a scientist. She is, in the best sense of the term, a popular historian. But she makes two comments about science that touch on the profound.

The great, enthralling story of the race to build the bomb is often as complicated and full of twists as nuclear physics itself, but Diana Preston has told it clearly and vividly. A valuable book.

Fast-paced and galvanizing narrative . . . avidly researched and gracefully condtructed, Preston's revelatory history is rich in telling moments, powerful personalities, intense controntations, and indelible images of the devastation delivered by nuclear weapons.

What Preston does better than any other writer is to capture the human aspects of the frankly exciting race to create a nuclear weapon . . . This energetic book is a fine place to begin.

Her skill is in weaving ethical struggles, scientific innovations and the grim dance of international relations into a riveting, coherent narrative.

Historian Diana Preston has done a truly stupendous job in marshalling the facts and threading together the myriad storylines about the birth of the atomic age, from Marie Curie's discovery of radium to Nagasaki and beyond ... I particularly admire her ability to synthesise abstruse technical detail...in a way that makes it easy to understand. She has taken all this potentially arid science and given it a human force ... A complex, monumental tale I doubt will ever be better told.

Compelling...Told with great skill by Diana Preston. There are personalities and discoveries, enterprises and adventures, colour and detail, and naturally there are moral dilemmas. But the lasting impression, implied in the subtitle and enhanced by the fluency of the tale, is of inevitability.

A concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen.

Diana Preston is an Oxford-trained historian, writer and broadcaster who lives in London. She is the author of The Road to Culloden Moor: Bonnie Prince Charlie and the '45 Rebellion; A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole; Besieged in Peking: The Story of the 1900 Boxer Rising; Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania and A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier (written with her husband, Michael Preston).

Spanning fifty years, Before the Fall-Out tells the full story of how an exhilarating quest to unravel the secrets of the material world produced the knowledge of how to destroy it.And of how a scientific adventure shared openly between nuclear physicists from many different nations transmuted into a secretive wartime race for the ultimate weapon of mass destruction - the atom bomb. 
 
As much as on the science, Before the Fall-Out focuses on the 'human chain reaction' - the intertwined lives of the many scientists of many nations whose compulsive curiosity led, however unwittingly, ultimately to Hiroshima. In her page-turning account Diana Preston reveals how individuals responded to events - from Allied scientists debating the morality of deploying the bomb, to Japanese civilians who became its first victims, and to a German chemist working on the Nazi bomb project while concealing a Jewish pianist in his Berlin apartment. Diana Preston draws on fresh material including interviews with the last living scientist to have worked with Marie Curie, the only senior scientist to have walked out on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds, and the German scientist who accompanied Werner Heisenberg on his controversial wartime visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. 
 
A Manhattan Project scientist said that the only secret of the bomb was that it could be made: once this was known, any nation could replicate it. Before the Fall-Out helps us make better sense of our own, dangerous world and of the threats and moral dilemmas that face our society today.

The Life Of William  Dampier

A Pirate Of Exquisite Mind

A rip-roaring swashbuckler about a forgotten 17th century English hero who, starting as a poor, piratical buccaneer, became a famed round-the-world explorer.

Lively... extraordinary life - an unlikely combination of plundering and pioneering achievements in natural history and exploration

Gripping and well-researched... An impressive achievement

This long overdue biography wonderfully brings to life one of the most important explorers of the seventeenth century

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea

This eloquently enthusiastic biography, besides charting Dampier's astonishing achievements, offers fascinating information about his times

Diana Preston is an Oxford-trained historian, writer, and broadcaster who lives in London. She is the author of The Road to Culloden Moor; A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole; The Boxer Rebellion and Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania. Michael Preston, Diana Preston's husband, read English at Oxford University and is now an historian and traveller.

William Dampier, (1651-1715), was an English adventurer and pirate who preyed on ships on the Spanish Main. Poor and ill-educated and determined to make his fortune, he nonetheless had a passion for exploration and scientific research. 
 
Dampier was the first to map the winds and currents of the world's oceans; led the first recorded party of Englishmen to set foot on Australia - 80 years before Cook; wrote about Galapagos wildlife 150 years before Darwin, who drew on Dampier's notes in his own work; was the first travel writer: A NEW VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD was instant bestseller when it was published in 1697 - said to have influenced the novels of Swift and Defoe. 
 
A man full of contradictions: he who achieved so much 'blew it' later in life, declining into scandal, failure and even farce. A unique man ahead of his time, he lived a large part of his life among pirates yet managed to preserve what Coleridge called his "exquisite refinement of mind". A classic example of the best narrative history.

Diana Preston

'The most comprehensive and accessible account of the sinking there has been or perhaps will be'

'Sets a standard which other books have not achieved'

'A fitting monument to a multiudinous loss'

'It is not easy, nowadays, to write an original book on the first world war...but Preston has succeeded'

'A book as majestic as its subject.&nbsp; Preston is a consumate popular historian and a stylish and elegant writer'

'A complex story of heroism and great courage'

'Clear and effective...benefits from exhaustive research'

'Very good...Preston has done an extraordinary amount of work, particularly in tracing the memories of survivors'

On May 7th, 1915 a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic sank with the loss of 1200 lives. On board were some world-famous figures, including multimillionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. But this wasn't the Titanic and there was no iceberg. The liner was the Lusitania and it was torpedoed by a German U-boat. 
 
Wilful Murder is the hugely compelling story of the sinking of the Lusitania. The first book to look at the events in their full historical context, it is also the first to place the human dimension at its heart. Using first-hand accounts of the tragedy Diana Preston brings the characters to life, recreating the splendour of the liner as it set sail and the horror of its final moments. Using British, American and German research material she answers many of the unanswered and controversial questions surrounding the Lusitania: why didn't Cunard listen to warnings that the ship would be a target of the Germans? Was the Lusitania sacrificed to bring the Americans into the War? What was really in the Lusitania's hold? Was she armed? Had Cunard's offices been infiltrated by German agents? And did the Kaiser's decision to cease unrestricted U-boat warfare in response to international outrage expressed after the sinking effectively change the outcome of the First World War? 
 
Highly readable, meticulously researched, this special centenary edition casts dramatic new light on one of the world's most famous maritime disasters.

Diana Preston

Praise for Wilful Murder: The Sinking Of The Lusitania

'The most comprehensive and accessible account of the sinking there has been or perhaps will be'

'Sets a standard which other books have not achieved'

'A fitting monument to a multiudinous loss'

'The most comprehensive and accessible account of the sinking there has been or perhaps will be'

'Sets a standard which other books have not achieved'

'A fitting monument to a multiudinous loss'

'The most comprehensive and accessible account of the sinking there has been or perhaps will be'

'Sets a standard which other books have not achieved'

'A fitting monument to a multiudinous loss'

Books by Diana Preston

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