This is a bewitching and sympathetic account of a deliciously odd, brilliantly clever man. He was prone to headstands, toothbrushing and - like Lord Lundy - to tears.
The rise and fall of the Bacris and Busnachs, two Jewish families whose prominence in trade and banking led them to play a small but crucial diplomatic and logistical role in the Napoleonic ... read more
A panoramic account by the distinguished Harvard historian of five generations of a French provincial family originally from Angouleme, crammed with stories and archival research. ER has a d... read more
A biography of the man so vividly presented in Robert Edric's 2008 novel 'In Zodiac Light': the poet and composer who, following his experiences as a soldier in WW1, was confined to an asylu... read more
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
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
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
The long shadow of Ottoman rule: Mestyan argues that new local polities were based on recalibrated Ottoman structures rather than on European colonialism (with the exception of Palestine).
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.
In a particularly elegant diplomatic gesture, the Caliph Harun al-Rashid sent an elephant to Aachen in 802 AD. This fresh perspective draws on many Arabic sources.
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.