Looks at three groups of wandering herders in three very different regions - the Central Sahara, the Arabian Gulf and the Central Eurasian steppes. Many photographs.
In the C13th, the largest library in Europe contained fewer than 2000 books. Baghdad alone contained five libraries with between 200,000 and a million books.
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.
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
Brought up in late-Victorian Presbyterian Aberdeenshire, McBey became a war artist in WW1. A decade later he married the American Marguerite Loeb and went to live in Tangier, in a house on O... read more
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