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
The brilliant Princeton historian guides us through the relationship between magic and the Renaissance, demystifying the Magus' relationship with science, art, and engineering in early-moder... read more
The post-war eclipse of the rural by the urban. Joyce interweaves his own Irish family history into wider story of European peasantry to create a rich and varied cultural account of what it ... read more
Already receiving praise for revolutionising the history of sexuality, this book is bound to be a fascinating analysis of sex and identity in early-modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.
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.
Aztec art in Brussels, West African ivories in Antwerp... the great artists (D?rer, Bosch etc) were drawing on more than rediscovered classical texts. JJ considers the Renaissance as "a conv... read more
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
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 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
In a particularly elegant diplomatic gesture, the Caliph Harun al-Rashid sent an elephant to Aachen in 802 AD. This fresh perspective draws on many Arabic sources.
Brilliant detective work by this French paleoanthropologist, who has studied Neanderthal traces from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and argues that their intelligence was different from our... read more
A huge work of scholarship that brings the late C5th/early C6th world to life. Theoderic stabilised Italy and extended his kingdom to include parts of France, the Iberian peninsula and the w... read more
Whether in music, architecture, economics, art, mathematics, physics or philosophy - Vienna in the early C20th led the world. This astonishing vibrancy was dispersed by Nazism and WW2 to the... read more