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.
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
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 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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.