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
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 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.
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 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