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
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
Over 40 years and many travels, the distinguished photographer has taken many pictures of children. A selection of them is gathered here for the first time.
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
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
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
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
Quick and easy, bang it into the oven... Iyer is beloved by younger, less confident cooks, and does what she does very well. This is her third roasting tin installment.
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
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.
Draws on his own family's experience of emigrating from India to Britain and America to show how the West is being destroyed not by immigrants but by its fear of immigrants.