Secondhand History Books

This is the story of the Venerable Palden Gyatso who, in 1992, was released after 33 years of incarceration in Chinese prisons in Tibet, and fled to India, bringing with...

Letters from Burma - an unforgettable collection from the Nobel Peace prize winner Aung San Suu KyiIn these astonishing letters, Aung San Suu Kyi reaches out beyond Burma's borders to...

A vivid account of the fierce, honourable, death-obsessed, profoundly religious Aztecs on the eve of the Spanish conquest. Even in the darkest symbolism of their blood-drenched worship they appear as...

Francis Fukuyama used to regard himself as a 'neocon'. But, attacking the right-wing policymakers he had previously worked with, he argues here that the Bush administration, in the war in...

Everyone has heard of the Atlantic Trade, in which millions of Africans were transported to the Americas by Europeans to work as slaves. However, there is another slave trade, previously...

The first people of South Africa, Stone-Age hunters and gatherers from the mountains and the arid flats of the interior, did not survive the arrival of settlers from Europe. Within...

In the recent past, a working knowledge of the Maya script has been confined to epigraphers, art historians and other specialists. Its very unfamiliarity to the general public, and the...

Homosexuality is still taboo in the Arab countries. While clerics denounce it as a heinous sin, newspapers, reluctant to address it directly, talk cryptically of 'shameful acts' and 'deviant behaviour'....

Civil wars pose some of the most difficult problems in the world today and the United Nations is the organization generally called upon to bring and sustain peace. Lise Morje...

'An absorbingly creepy travelogue through the corridors, tunnels and basements of our most famous cultural repository. With Noah Angell as our guide, the British Museum becomes a haunted prison filled...

Revisit the definitive book on Pearl Harbor in advance of the 78th anniversary (December 7, 2019) of the "date which will live in infamy"At 7:53 a.m., December 7, 1941, America's...

The village pump was once the focal point of rural life, providing the only water supply to communities and offering a place in town squares and village greens for people...

Over 2,000 years of history seen through the eyes of 50 extraordinary women. Was Jane Austen a fan of her own work? What did Harriet Tubman want to tell Abraham...

The most successful British general until the advent of Napoleon, John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, was also a successful, if devious politcian, and a commanding figure both on...

In 1986 the author, an ordinary Nottingham social worker and mother of two, received a letter from a woman asking for help to trace her parents. She claimed that at...

Here is an intellectual entertainment, a sweeping history of the key institutions that have organized knowledge in the West from the classical period onward. With elegance and wit, this exhilarating...

For more than 150 years P&O has been one of the world's greatest shipping lines. Beginning with the mail contract to Gibraltar, P&O quickly became the British way to travel...

This work examines what life was like in the new communities founded by David I in the 12th century, such as Perth, Aberdeen, Elgin, Edinburgh and Glasgow. It looks at...

A powerfully toldmemoir of family, separation, and the things left unsaid, in the wake of theSecond World WarRaised by her grandparents i theUSA, Inara Verzemnieks grew up among expatriates, scattering...

In July 1991, nine skeletons were exhumed from a grave in Siberia, a few miles from the infamous cellar where the last Tsar and his family were murdered seventy-three years...

The 'Northern Crusades', inspired by the Pope's call for a Holy War, are less celebrated than those in the Middle East, but they were also more successful: vast new territories...

These memoirs of Speaker Thomas (Tip) O'Neill cover 50 years of public office in American politics, including 34 years as a member of Congress and a decade as Speaker of...