A first edition, first impression of William Dalrymple's evocative and riveting portrayal of the last days of the Mughal empire and of Zafar, its last emperor. The book is in fine condition ... read more
Following his outstanding book 1913: The Year Before the Storm, , Illies looks at the affairs of de Beauvoir, Sartre, Dietrich, Mann (both T & K), Nabokov and others, set against the looming... read more
He ruled an area of the Indian subcontinent greater than anyone until the British 2000 years later; famously he renounced war for Buddhism and promoted religious toleration throughout his mu... read more
How the daughter of Babur, first Mughal Emperor, wrangled her way out of the harem (for a while) to travel around India, to Persia and beyond. Based on her own account.
Anne Clifford's diaries, Mary Sidney's translations, Aemilia Lanyer's poems, Elizabeth Cary's playwriting: out of these a fine scholar of Renaissance literature constructs an illuminating gr... read more
By looking at the relationships Queen Victoria had with her ten Prime Ministers, AS shows us her changing - and often surprising - involvement in affairs of state.
The Nuremberg Trials had their counterpart in Japan. This is a thorough investigation of that process, and its significance to what happened afterwards in Asia.
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.
From the home of the indigenous Formosans to a European trading post, from a Japanese colony to the last bastion of the Republic of China. Essential reading for anyone who wants to understan... read more
An elucidating account of the conditions that led to, and subsequently shaped the Iraq war. This book casts a light on both CIA intrigue in the Middle East and Hussein's own political motiva... read more
A deeply personal social history. From ancient Greece to 70s' New York, from Diogenes to her father, Eberstadt explores how people have used their bodies to challenge the world around them.
A society's way of dealing with death can be very revealing. Here, the distinguished historian of Victorian Britain and the domestic sphere shows how their behaviour around death offers deep... read more
Looks back to a group of brave women in the later C18th and onwards - at a time when women had no property and no rights: Elizabeth Montagu, who took on Voltaire and won; Catherine Macauley,... read more
The brilliant Princeton historian guides us through the relationship between magic and the Renaissance, demystifying the Magus' relationship with science, art, and engineering in early-moder... read more
The post-war eclipse of the rural by the urban. Joyce interweaves his own Irish family history into wider story of European peasantry to create a rich and varied cultural account of what it ... read more
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
Already receiving praise for revolutionising the history of sexuality, this book is bound to be a fascinating analysis of sex and identity in early-modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
"Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!" grumbled Mrs Elton at the marriage of Emma and the divine Mr Knightley. How times have changed!
An investigation of Jesus' messianic contemporaries and the reasons for Christianity's success. From the author of the highly regarded The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Cla... read more
Walls are famous for their ears - but they can also speak: Pelling gathers these silent shouts into a remarkable history through the scratchings and carvings in prisons, walls, lead roofs, t... read more
Traces the history of Sefton Delmer, the English propagandist who waged a disinformation war in Nazi Germany, and how that history can help us understand the present.
Contacts and connections as the drivers of cultural change: the West was built on far more than the values of ancient Greece and Rome, as per the Victorian paradigm. Erudite and compelling.
Joseph Seligman arrived in the US with $100 sewn into the lining of his clothes; the Lehman brothers followed; then Marcus Goldman and the 'forty-eighters' fleeing European anti-semitism. A ... read more
The C10th synthesis of Greek thought in Central Asi. Starr's magnificent book is a cultural and intellectual history of the Islamic Enlightenment and its two chief proponents - Ibn Sina and ... read more
This rich historical analysis argues that the Enlightenment was a failure on its own terms. Terror, revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and Empire prevailed instead of Reason.
How, whether made on tally sticks or via electronic portal, systems of debt and credit have been a driving force in the development of states from Pisa in the C12th to the Bolshevik Revoluti... read more
Like a detective novel of the time, the story of two booksellers who uncovered the forgeries of a pompous bastion of the literary scene in 1930s' London.
The vast Byzantine walls are a powerful image for the conflict between history and the present that squeezes modern Turkey. Structured around encounters with people during his walks, this is... read more