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
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
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.
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 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.
Born in Kenya, the author was two when the Mau Mau uprising began. A powerful memoir of this very difficult period and the end of empire in Kenya.The author worked for many years for the BBC... read more
Seeing the writing on the wall, some Nazi profiteers set about removing their loot from Germany in the early months of 1945: to Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal and South America. Locher... read more
After the Armistice in 1918, the Allies' support for anyone contra-German mutated into anti-Bolshevik Intervention. Forces were deployed in Archangel, the Caucasus, the Far East and elsewher... read more
A new and updated edition of the great French historian's 1990 Europe: A History of Its Peoples. First published in 1990, this has now been brought up to date, from the fall of the Iron Curt... read more
The story of the first contact between the Haida and other indigenous peoples of the Pacific North West with Europeans - and what came after. Told very powerfully in a graphic form that comb... read more
Boxing, football, horse-racing, cricket: each grew from different social roots and so enable the dextrous Horspool to construct the framework for his ideas. He's an historian, an editor at t... read more
A surprising story of obsession, necessity, invention and adventure. One could really turn the title around for ice has preserved human history as few other mediums have.
An engaging and idiosyncratic writer uses the machinations of the 1907 Peking-Paris car race as mirror to the geopolitical and technological changes which - not even a decade later - pitched... read more
Bazaars in Tabriz, laxatives in Venice, sheep growing on trees and other marvels: an intrepid journey into the medieval mind and its furnishings, based on travellers accounts from Iceland to... read more
Xi Jinping is head of the CCP, head of state and commander-in-chief of the military, with an indefinite period in office; he's centralised power, increased state control of the economy and i... read more
A biography of the city founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, once the largest city in the world and for a thousand years the capital of Egypt. Looks at the modern period too.
1,500 years of cultural history: to accompany the tremendous exhibition at the British Museum that shows the many influences that have created contemporary Myanmar.
A study of the way in which Vesuvius and the excavations in the Bay of Naples in 1738 and afterwards became a potent political and emotional vehicle for artists, intellectuals, Grand Tourist... read more
Despite its often fraught encounters with democracy, science and secular culture, the Catholic Church's story in the modern era is one of remarkable survival.
By examining their individual backgrounds, Clark shows that Ramsay MacDonald's new cabinet represented a radical departure in its representation of Britain's social classes.
The British empire observed through the lens of a single day: the 29th September 1923, when the Mandate for Palestine became law and the British empire reached its maximum extent, just as i... read more
Whether in music, architecture, economics, art, mathematics, physics or philosophy - Vienna in the early C20th led the world. This astonishing vibrancy was dispersed by Nazism and WW2 to the... read more
Following High Minds, The Age of Decadence and Staring at God, this is the fourth in his series on the changing face of Britain. It covers the period 1919-1939.
A characteristically particular and original look at social change from the author of the hugely successful Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls' Boarding Schools, 1939-1979 and others.
Brilliant detective work by this French paleoanthropologist, who has studied Neanderthal traces from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and argues that their intelligence was different from our... read more
The author is an archaeologist who can spin technical straw into narrative gold. Her previous book, River Kings, was on the Vikings - and it was riveting.
An account of the many Scots involved in Arctic exploration, including the search for the North-West Passage: in particular John Ross, James Clark Ross, John Richardson, John Rae and their h... read more
The pioneering struggle of early C20th women gardeners, who were excluded from the profession on account of their sex by such august bodies as the RHS. Fiona Davidson's previous book was The... read more
The final vol of the history that he began in 1990. A staggering achievement for anyone, but for someone with a pretty demanding day job (he was Justice of the Supreme Court), it seems stagg... read more