After comparing the great emperors of antiquity, Lieven turns to the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese emperors. Imperial in ambition and achievement.
An ambitious book that traces the collapse of empires and their ramifications in contemporary Eurasian geopolitics - in particular Iran, China, Turkey and Russia.
By looking at the work and methods of thirteen C20th anthropologists, LM shows how they ended by changing how we see ourselves as much as the 'primitive' societies they were studying.
Many readers will remember Daniel Yergin's brilliant history of oil Prize, but that was 30 years ago and things look pretty different now. Here is the backdrop to Marriott & Macalister's sup... 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.
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
Essays on cultural and artistic exchange in the age of imperialism as European powers vied for domination of the oceanic routes between Asia and the Americas. Illustrated.
Unusual and interesting plants photographed and described in their natural habitats, often in very remote places - anyone remember the heady uplands of tulip and meadows of fritillary in Gar... 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
The history of the world through the lens of the family, from a group walking along a beach 950,000 years ago to Caesars, Medicis, Bonapartes, Krupps, Assads, etc.
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
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