Macartney's 1793 mission was a failure, but the Dutch were better informed. This new study argues that the Qing court was not arrogant and narrow-minded, as the English concluded, but was in... read more
The first English translation of this often overlooked French intellectual's last lecture, in which Aron emphasises the importance of liberal democracy during the tumultuous years of the Col... read more
Genial mix of aesthetics, lit crit, philosophy, art and history. Rabelais, Vermeer, ancient Rome and a classical Greek text in 16 vols about a single meal. The latter would have given Proust... read more
A gorgeous, illustrated study of the ways in which shells were circulated, depicted, collected and valued during a time of remarkable global change, by aristocrats and apothecaries, scholars... read more
Beard on the faces of power through history. She asks why - for over two millennia - the striking, stony realism of Roman portraiture has been a touchstone for subsequent depictions of power... read more
Erudition and curiosity impel this vivid, detailed portrait by the world's foremost expert on Linnaeus: this biography won several prizes when it was first published in Sweden in 2019.
The distinguished historian of China, author of Vermeer's Hat, argues that it was not so much the Manchu invasion as climate change that brought collapse to the Ming Dynasty.
The great historian of late antiquity mixes the personal with the scholarly in telling the story of his life and work. Engagement with the non-European world has been intrinsic to his work.
Fortitude and patience: Cicero's text in Latin and in English translation, with a commentary. One of three niftily pocket-sized philosophical guides from Princeton.
Inspired by Darwin and von Humboldt, ARW travelled to the Amazon Basin and the Malay Archipelago. He published a paper on natural selection in 1858, a year before Darwin's Origin of Species... read more
'Drawing from such diverse sources as Newton's Principia, military manuals, eighteenth-century games, and cookbooks among others, Lorraine Daston seeks to define the role rules have played i... read more