Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and ani...
We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and isn't, have a long and contested history. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war "civi...
A lively, expansive history of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the momentous changes they set in motion This fast-paced survey of Western civilization's transition from the Middle Ages...
Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the vory v zakone, ...
Stalin exchanged more than six hundred messages with Allied leaders Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War. In this riveting volume – the fruit of a unique British-Russian schola...
Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) was one of the most influential, imaginative and inspirational designers at the turn of the millennium. His fashions both challenged and expanded the conventional para...
Evocative and often highly erotic works on paper by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Pablo Picasso are presented along with new details about Scofield Thayer (1889-1982), the unusual and complicated...
The definitive history of the supernatural in Nazi Germany, exploring the occult ideas, esoteric sciences, and pagan religions touted by the Third Reich in the service of power.The Nazi...
In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism – that it leads to...
While the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are understood to be related texts, the sacred scripture of Islam, the third Abrahamic faith, has generally been considered separately. Noted religious ...
Ten years after its first publication, Michael Reid's best-selling survey of the state of contemporary Latin America has been wholly updated to reflect the new realities of the "Forgotten Cont...
This revelatory publication provides a comprehensive and multifaceted account of Cy Twombly's masterpiece Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), a series of ten paintings based on Alexander Pope's 18th-centur...
Change is no stranger to us in the twenty-first century. All of us must constantly adjust to an evolving world, to transformation and innovation. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torre...
Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, photography, film, and posters played an essential role in the campaign to disseminate modernity and Communist ideology. From early experimental works by Alex...
A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic – its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audien...
Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero – these are the names history associates with the early Roman Empire. Yet, not a single one of these emperors was the blood son of his predece...
Alexander Calder (1898-1976) as a radical inventor: an artist who discarded convention and disrupted hierarchies, overturning the traditional basis of culture while revolutionising the way people p...
A lively, inviting account of the history of economics, told through events from ancient to modern times and the ideas of great thinkers in the field. What causes poverty? Are economic crises inevi...
Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward quest...
From the walls of the Salon to the pages of weekly newspapers, war imagery was immensely popular in postrevolutionary France. This fascinating book studies representations of contemporary conflict ...