It is impossible to separate the Great Trek from events which took place as far back as the Portuguese explorers because those events shaped the backdrop to the causes of the Great Trek. Most writers have specialized in the trek itself whereas Binckes has adopted a broader approach that studies the impact of the earlier white incursions and migrations on southern Africa, to create a better understanding of the trek and its causes.

The story of the battle for independence from the British Empire in South Africa by “a vivid chronicler of military forces, generals, and wars” (Kirkus Reviews). The Great Boer War (1899-1902), more properly known as the Great Anglo-Boer War, was one of the last romantic wars, pitting a sturdy, stubborn pioneer people fighting to establish the independence of their tiny nation against the British Empire at its peak of power and self-confidence. It was fought in the barren vastness of the South African veldt, and it produced in almost equal measure extraordinary feats of personal heroism, unbelievable examples of folly and stupidity, and many incidents of humor and tragedy. Byron Farwell traces the war’s origins; the slow mounting of the British efforts to overthrow the Afrikaners; the bungling and bickering of the British command; the remarkable series of bloody battles that almost consistently ended in victory for the Boers over the much more numerous British forces; political developments in London and Pretoria; the sieges of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley; the concentration camps into which Boer families were herded; and the exhausting guerrilla warfare of the last few years when the Boer armies were finally driven from the field. The Great Boer War is a definitive history of a dramatic conflict by the author of Queen Victoria’s Little Wars, “a leading popular military historian” (Publishers Weekly).

This book offers an account of this understudied conflict dating from the early stage of European colonialism in Africa, and unpacks the complex regional relationships between different communities in the first half of 19th century.

After six battles, the war of 1838 between the Zulu people and the invading Boers and their Port Natal allies reached a stalemate. The Boers occupied half the Zulu kingdom and Dingane, the Zulu monarch, was discredited.

Australians came to the ABC's The Killing Season in their droves, their fascination with the Rudd–Gillard struggle as unfinished as the saga itself. Rudd and Gillard dominate the drama as they strain to claim the narrative of Labor's years in power. The journey to screen for each of their interviews is telling in itself. Kevin Rudd gives his painful account of the period and recalled in vivid detail the events of losing the prime ministership. Julia Gillard is frank and unsparing of her colleagues. More than a hundred people were interviewed for The Killing Season—ministers, backbenchers, staffers, party officials, pollsters and public servants—recording their vivid accounts of the public and private events that made the Rudd and Gillard governments and then brought them undone. It is a damning portrait of a party at war with itself: the personal rivalries and the bitter defeats that have come to define the Rudd–Gillard era. "The making of The Killing Season matched the drama on screen and that’s a story we wanted to tell. And now we have a place for the episodes of rich material we could have put into a 5-part series." — Sarah Ferguson

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.