Explores the interaction of mass-market diamonds and German colonialism in Africa. Or how the new American fashion for diamond engagement rings funded Germany in two world wars.
The rise and fall of the Bacris and Busnachs, two Jewish families whose prominence in trade and banking led them to play a small but crucial diplomatic and logistical role in the Napoleonic ... read more
A fascinating exploration of the use of wood in human history: half a million years of tools, devices, construction, art and architecture, from wedges, planes, screws and pulleys to stave ch... read more
Considers the Mongols as law givers, economists, diplomats, builders and promoters of religious tolerance, whose legacy remains palpable now across the 2 million square miles of Eurasia tha... read more
A fascinating look at the way 29 European internal borders were made and have shifted; while some of these reflect the faultlines of old horrors, they also offer new hope. Perceptive and ext... read more
The democratic experiment of 1918-1933, from defeat in WW1 to the rise of the Nazis. Jähner's description of living through this chaotic period is almost as thrilling as Hitchcock.
The remarkable diplomatic mission (Harriman for the US, Archibald Clark Kerr for Britain) that braced Stalin against the Germans and brought him into WW2 as an ally.
While the author's grandfather (Walter Runciman) tried to mediate between the new Czech Republic and the Sudeten Germans, her grandmother publicly favoured the Germans. This is a fascinating... read more
This fascinating account of a forgotten moment in history is part family memoir, part the telling of a Texan offshoot of the early Zionist movement, when 10,000 Jews set sail for Galveston b... read more
Anne Clifford's diaries, Mary Sidney's translations, Aemilia Lanyer's poems, Elizabeth Cary's playwriting: out of these a fine scholar of Renaissance literature constructs an illuminating gr... 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.