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
A labour of love and scholarship, this is a study of the extraordinary Royal Library of Dom Joao V (1706-1750) of Portugal that was destroyed in 1755 in the Lisbon earthquake. The library co... 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
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 European revolutions of 1848 and their aftermath, explored through a series of set-pieces by the renowned historian, author of The Sleepwalkers and Iron Kingdom.
In less than a month in 1870, the Prussian army invaded France, captured Napoleon III and changed the balance of world power. Its success had far-reaching effects...
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.
The great historian of late antiquity mixes the personal with the scholarly in telling the story of his life and work. Engagement with the non-European world has been intrinsic to his work.
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
A feast of counterfactuals by a very clever writer ('HHHH', 'The 7th Function of Language') with a talent for black comedy: it's1531 and the Incas have invaded Europe, armed with a copy of M... read more
Cities, economies and national infrastructures of every kind were reduced to rubble by the end of WW2. Betts looks at the efforts made by western European countries to rebuild their societi... read more