A brilliant narrative of the interconnected lives of two Renaissance Portuguese men whose travels to India and China unseated contemporary certainties. Dazzling.
The Jena set: Caroline Schlegel's salon in the 1790s, in that small German university town, included Novalis, Schiller, Hegel, Goethe and Humboldt. They radically changed our ideas as the Fr... read more
Not just bar-room belles and pioneers wearing thin the soles of their boots on their immense journeys to the west, but Chinese laundresses and displaced native Americans too. Real stories, w... read more
A revisionist account by the distinguished historian, which argues that Magellan was less of a hero and more of a treacherous, irresponsible, tyrannical adventurer.
From the Bible to Simon Schama, a huge investigation of how the writing of history influences the record of human experience, and therefore its development.