Leadership and moral compromise in Occupied France, seen through the lens of P?tain's trial in 1945. Julian Jackson is superb on the French Occupation and his biography of de Gaulle was magi... read more
Unlike Dalrymple's The Anarchy, this deals just with the East India Company's early years. Howarth argues that it was more European than English in spirit.
Nubia and Egypt, the empires of the Sudan, the kingdoms of Ethiopia and Benin and those of the Asante, Yoruba, Hausa and Zulus... Nine scholars on African kingship; some illustrations.
The town is Krakowiec, forty miles from Lviv. In a powerful combination of memoir, family history and scholarship, Wasserstein creates a lens through which the particular becomes exemplar.
A charming self-published book about Great Bardfield, the Essex village that became home to several artists, including Ravilious and Bawden; like a picture within a picture, it's also about ... read more
From the Persian sack in 614AD to the end of the Crusaders. Hosler argues that despite horrific acts of violence, the medieval period is also one of tolerance, when the city's conquerors oft... read more
In one generation, the Mongols reshaped the balance of world power, aided by the internecine struggles of the Byzantines, Seljuks, Crusaders and others.
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.
A fascinating examination of how the prevailing causes of death have changed through history. It is a story of growing medical knowledge and social organisation, and is refreshingly optimist... read more