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 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
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
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
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
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
Street scenes, portraits, people at work, a classroom, children: this is powerful and poignant record of Kashgar as it used to be. All the photographs were taken in 1998, on the cusp of swee... read more
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
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
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 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.
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 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.
Although never the language of a state or ethnic group, Syriac remains widely used across the globe and is regarded as the third language of Christianity. It even reached China, thanks to th... read more
9000BC years ago there were pastoral economies; by 3000BC the desert reasserted itself. A fascinating study of human adaptability in the face of early climate change and geophysical influenc... read more
A compelling account of the world's first empire, drawing extensively on recent discoveries in the field with the use of new archaeological techniques.
For all those who, in their heart of hearts, yearn to shoot backwards from the saddle with a compound bow, sitting astride an embroidered saddle rug, wearing tattered silk and a metal bonnet... read more