The author's Jewish great-grandfather was not simply a chemist who happened to get out of Germany in good time: he was involved in developing chemical weapons. An uncomfortable trail for the... read more
Larissa Salmina was a wild child of the USSR who rose to be Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage; Francis Haskell was a distinguished, deracinated Cambridge art historian. They met in... read more
The author, a scholar of C19th literature at Edinburgh, grew up Romani in the post-Communist Romania of the 1990s. She weaves memoir and travel writing into a wider, potted history of a peop... read more
A fascinating study of art and national identity which considers the influence of foreign artists such as Holbein and Gentileschi, and foreign influences in the work of Hogarth, Kauffman and... read more
Nearly 600 pieces of glass from the Mediterranean, Central Europe and the Middle East dating between 1500 BCE and 1000 CE: the lavishly ilustrated catalogue of the stupendous Getty collectio... read more
Mercier, a French journalist, travelled to London in 1780 and began writing his account of his experiences there. (He seems to have felt about London much as we tend to about Paris!). First ... read more
Following the path of a wolf who crossed the Alps from Slovenia to Verona and was tracked by GPS provides AW with a most particular view of wildness, culture, habitat and climate change - ab... read more
Married respectively to Franz Joseph and Napoleon III, these two young, beautiful, dynamic empresses were involved in most of the major aspects of their times. Looking at them in parallel - ... read more
RB is the ne plus ultra of Habsburg chroniclers. Readers will recall his bestselling memoir Last Days in Old Europe: Trieste '79, Vienna '85, Prague '89. Here is a biography of exemplary ele... read more
Pevsner, Gombrich, Weidenfeld... the list of 1930s' émigrés who profoundly enriched British culture is extraordinary and very long. OH argues that we forget our proud tradition of asylum a... read more
The 1,500-mile watershed stretching from Austria to Romania is still home to a third of Europe's wildlife, including lynx, chamois, bears, and bison that roam its high alpine meadows and its... read more
One married the Tsar, another wed Kaiser Wilhelm's brother, another a Russian Grand Duke, the fourth a Battenberg. Their lives were overshadowed (and some cut short) by the Russian Revolutio... read more
Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe: a spirited look at the lives of these four women that also illuminates the world around them, by a bright young academi... read more
What is freedom and how do we achieve it? The acclaimed historian of the C20th travels The Road to Unfreedom in reverse: freedom understood as the freedom to do and to be, rather than freedo... read more
A fascinating study of the evidence that craftsmen from North Africa, Islamic Spain and Sicily were deeply instrumental in the Romanesque architecture of places such as Durham Cathedral, Mon... read more
The man who walked everywhere spent a year in Italy with his family, and later lived in Paris and Switzerland; he travelled to America and Canada too. By his great-great granddaughter.
A scholarly collection of essays in memory of this remarkable man and his work. Contributions range from woodland studies in England to old-growth forests in the Eastern Alps, oak agro-fores... read more
One of the most pleasing private publications in recent years has been The Balkans by Bicycle, a reprint of a book from 1937 by Hamsher's father recounting a journey from Vienna to Istanbul.... read more
Meticulously researched, beautifully written, scholarly yet intimate, this narrative history of what was once called Eastern Europe will inform and delight. JM sweeps through two millennia w... 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
VM was the author of The Map of Knowledge, a compelling account of the survival of the ancient classics in the Muslim world, and their re-emergence in the West. Now she turns her attention t... 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