History

Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like...

Rome is an empire with a bad reputation. From its brutal games to its depraved emperors, its violent mobs to its ruthless wars, its name resounds down the centuries like...

Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists - a brilliant academic, with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience both though her TV presenting and her...

More than three thousand years ago a sculptor working in the royal city of Amarna carved a limestone bust of an Egyptian queen. The queen was Nefertiti, consort of the...

More than three thousand years ago a sculptor working in the royal city of Amarna carved a limestone bust of an Egyptian queen. The queen was Nefertiti, consort of the...

Famous for his successful leadership of non-violent Nationalist resistance to British Imperial rule in India, Mohandas K. Gandhi is one of the most iconic figures of the 20th century. All...

Legend has it that, in a few busy weeks in July 1789, a despotic king, his freeloading wife, and a horde of over-privileged aristocrats, were displaced and then humanely dispatched.In...

To many, medieval castles are the essence of Britain and Ireland's fascinating past. Immersed in history and centuries old, each one tells a story of Kings, Queens and feuding lords;...

21 February 1989. Three men fly into Moscow, representing software giants from Britain, America, and Japan. Each of them is determined to undercut the others in order to secure a...

Cities, scripts, literature, the rule of law - all were born in Iraq. That so many see this ancient land as nothing more than a violent backwater steeped in chaos...

Russia and Britain were never natural bedfellows. But the marriage, in 1894, of Queen Victoria's favourite granddaughter, Alicky, to the Tsarevich Nicholas marked the beginning of an uneasy Anglo-Russian entente...

Trading Territories tells the compelling story of maps and geographical knowledge in the early modern world from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century. Examining how European geographers mapped the...

The Euromaidan uprising in Kiev, followed by radical regime change, the annexation of the Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, have shattered European security. The Western response to Russian...

Mirages have long astonished travellers and beguiled thirsty desert voyagers. Chinese and Japanese poetry and images depicted mirages as the exhalations of clam-monsters. Indian sources related them to the `thirst...

In this riveting book Gretchen E. Henderson explores perceptions of ugliness through history, from ancient Roman feasts to medieval grotesque gargoyles, from Mary Shelley's monster cobbled from corpses to the...

Lesser Dragons is a timely introduction to the fascinating and complex world of China's `national minorities'. Based on detailed research, including the author's first-hand fieldwork in several minority areas, it...

In this robust new account of the Vikings, Tom Shippey explores their mindset, and in particular their fascination with scenes of heroic death. Laughing Shall I Die considers Viking psychology...

In 1600 the Catholic Inquisition condemned the philosopher Giordano Bruno for his heretical beliefs. He was then burned alive in a public place in Rome. Historians, scientists and teachers usually...

Mapping the Middle East explores the many perspectives from which people have visualized the vast area lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Oxus and Indus river valleys over the...

Tea has a rich and well-documented past. The beverage originated in Asia long before making its way to seventeenth-century London, where it became an exotic, highly sought after commodity. Over...

The dramatic life of the revolutionary hero Bolivar, who liberated South America - a sweeping narrative worthy of a Hollywood epic.Simon Bolivar's life makes for one of history's most dramatic...

'A wonderful idea, gloriously put into practice. Greg Jenner is as witty as he is knowledgeable' - Tom Holland'You will love Greg Jenner's jolly account of how we have more...

For two decades before a railway system linked southern Africa's principal cities in the mid-1890s, the world's richest supplies of diamonds and gold were transported by coach and horses to...

A powerful account, by Israeli peace activist Miko Peled, of his transformation from a young man who'd grown up in the heart of Israel's elite and served proudly in its...

Napoleon is one of history's most fascinating figures. But his complex relationship with Rome-both with antiquity and his contemporary conflicts with the Pope and Holy See-have undergone little examination. In...

European history is deeply embedded in the global civilization that has emerged in the 21st century. More than two thirds of today's nations were once European colonies or protectorates. Europe's...

Mikhail Sholokhov is arguable one of the most contentious recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a young man, Sholokhov's epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success....

The war that broke out in the former Yugoslavia at the end of the twentieth century saw unspeakable acts of violence committed against defenceless civilians, including a macabre night of...

Elite-level Soviet politics, privileged access to state secrets, knowledge about machinations inside the Kremlin-such is the environment in which Andrei A. Kovalev lived and worked. In this memoir of his...

The late 1990s and early aughts were a time of hope-for democracy and free press. The Soviet Union had failed, leaving behind a number of independent countries where the Scorpions'...

During the Cold War, spy stories became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imaginations of readers and film goers alike as secret police outfits quietly engaged...

Late in life, former President Lyndon Johnson told a reporter that he didn't believe the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John Kennedy. Johnson...

This disturbing expose describes a secret alliance forged at the close of World War II by the CIA, the Sicilian and US mafias, and the Vatican to thwart the possibility...

This day-by-day account of Abraham Lincoln's last six weeks of life covers a period of extraordinary events, not only for the president himself but for the fate of the nation.From...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Do we need still another Watergate book? The answer turns out to be yes-this one." -The Washington Post * "Dazzling." -The New York Times Book...

'Fascinating, panoramic . . . Levi Roach brings an expert eye and page-turning energy' Helen Castor, bestselling author of She Wolves'A fresh retelling . . . written with enthusiasm and...

An engaging, alternative history of the world for children, which helps to make sense of today.The present can loom very large in a child's mind: all the crises and challenges...

So shattering were the after-effects of Kishinev, the rampage that broke out in Russia in April 1903, that one historian remarked that it was "nothing less than a prototype for...

Resonating as profoundly today as when it was first published to widespread critical acclaim a decade ago, God's Crucible is a bold portrait of Islamic Spain and the birth of...

Black Flags, Blue Waters reveals the dramatic history of American piracy's "Golden Age"-spanning the late 1600s through to the early 1700s-when lawless pirates plied the coastal waters of North America...

On 9/11 the CIA changed. Once a organisation focused on information gathering, it became a militarised force. As Philip Mudd explains, at that time, came a different breed of prisoner,...

A lavishly illustrated history of coca wine and the revolutionary advertising methods that made it a world-wide success One of the oldest and most potent natural stimulants, the leaves of...