A surprising story of obsession, necessity, invention and adventure. One could really turn the title around for ice has preserved human history as few other mediums have.
An engaging and idiosyncratic writer uses the machinations of the 1907 Peking-Paris car race as mirror to the geopolitical and technological changes which - not even a decade later - pitched... read more
If Mrs T is what she eats, who is Mrs T? A long journey to understand how food is connected to place and national identity, how tradition and innovation create culture. Warm, knowledgeable a... read more
How we might stabilise climate change and repair habitats and the environment, in consultation with geophysicists, oceanographers and meteorologists, engineers, economists, mathematicians, h... read more
Biotechnology is becoming big business, the stuff of both dreams and nightmares. Cobb is an eminently reasonable guide to this strange new world: gene-editing, cloning, GMOs, ethics, etc.
Although never the language of a state or ethnic group, Syriac remains widely used across the globe and is regarded as the third language of Christianity. It even reached China, thanks to th... read more
Compiled from Dervla's books and journalism: fifty years of travelling in Spain, Afghanistan, India, Nepal, the Andes, Africa, Palestine, the Balkans, Jamaica... She never went by car and w... read more
How, whether made on tally sticks or via electronic portal, systems of debt and credit have been a driving force in the development of states from Pisa in the C12th to the Bolshevik Revoluti... read more
A fascinating exploration of the use of wood in human history: half a million years of tools, devices, construction, art and architecture, from wedges, planes, screws and pulleys to stave ch... read more
An ambitious book that traces the collapse of empires and their ramifications in contemporary Eurasian geopolitics - in particular Iran, China, Turkey and Russia.
Encompasses natural events and their consequences on a vast scale, showing how these have shaped human responses, trade, empires... Particularly trenchant as we try to understand climate cha... read more
Forty of these remarkable horticultural institutions throughout the world, including Norway, Morocco, Kyoto, Kew, Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Malaysia...