A NEW YORK TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, HISTORY TODAY AND BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR'Masterly... This book is dynamite' - ROBERT GILDEA, author of Empires of the Mind**S...
**SUNDAY TIMES and NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**This is our world, as you've never seen it before.The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and t...
‘This is a history of intellectual courage, hard work, occasional inspiration and every conceivable form of human failing. It is also an extended invitation to wonder, to pleasure’
Between 1941-45, the Germans recruited around 175,000 men from a number of minorities in the USSR, distinguishing between 'Turkomans' (predominantly Muslims) and 'Caucasians' (predominantly Orthodo...
Driven out of Germany after his defeat at Leipzig in 1813, Napoleon seemed to face disaster. Some 345,000 Allied troops were converging on France from the east; and Napoleon had only about 80,000 m...
We are all dressed. But how often do we pause to think about the place of our clothes in our lives? What unconscious thoughts do we express when we dress every day? Can memories, meaning and ideas ...
The hard-hitting history of the Pacific War's 'forgotten battle' of Peleliu – a story of intelligence failings and impossible bravery.In late 1944, as a precursor to the invasion ...
We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other? Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of c...
An indispensable collection of Noam Chomsky's talks on the past, present and future of the politics of power Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the world's leading intellectuals of the ...
If you live to 80, you'll have barely more than four thousand weeks on earth. How will you decide how to spend them?Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,'...
Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe?In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, moulded the con...
FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER SAPIENS Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus shows us where we’re going. War is obsolete. You are more likely to commit suicide than be...
From the author of the No. 1 bestseller The Silk Roads: A New History of the WorldThe First Crusade is one of the best-known and most written-about events in history but in this new boo...
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel lik...
Great art has dreadful manners……The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they ...
**A NEW YORK TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, ECONOMIST, MAIL ON SUNDAY and GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR**From the dawn of life itself, every being that has ever lived owes its existence to the cel...
Why do human beings behave as they do?We are capable of savage acts of violence but also spectacular feats of kindness: is one side of our nature destined to win out over the other?
At the start of the American Civil War, neither side had warships on the Mississippi River, which was a vital strategic artery. In what would prove the vital naval campaign of the war, both sides f...
The Kriegsmarine's Scharnhorst was a German capital ship, described either as a battleship or battlecruiser, and the lead ship of her class, which included one other ship, Gneisenau. She was launch...
Contrary to the image portrayed by Hollywood, the infantry played as great a part in the Indian Wars of the 1860s-80s, and were more consistently successful than their more famous counterparts in t...