Berlin is defined by its many edges - the blurred edge between Huns and Slavs, pagan and Christian, the competing spheres of influence of Western Europe and Russia, autocracy and democracy, ... read more
Walsh is an international correspondent for the New York Times of long standing who was bureau chief in Pakistan for a decade, before his encounter with an intelligence agent and subsequent ... read more
From being America's most significant ally in the region, Iran suddenly became its greatest adversary: this account, from 1941 onwards, explains how the Shah himself contrived to lose suppor... read more
A marvellous history of pilgrimage around the world. Sacred landscapes, geographical hotspots where cultures, religions and trade routes meet, the remote and the metropolitan - and humanity'... read more
From the author of the biography of Shchukin comes the story of another extraordinary pre-Revolutionary Russian collector of European art. He spent 1.5 million francs on 486 paintings, which... read more
This is not the Alexandria in the Nile Delta, but rather Alexandria 'Beneath the Mountains', in Afghanistan, discovered by a wandering scholar and archaeologist called Charles Masson in 1833... read more
Fabric - and our hunger for it - as the mother of invention, the driver behind technology, agriculture, trade, politics, culture... it funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal empire. H... read more