People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or …

During the age of discovery, in the autumn of 1550, a little-known public servant in the Venetian government, Giovambattista Ramusio, anonymously published Navigationi et Viaggi (Journeys and Navigations). Containing a wealth of …

Ancient Greece and Rome are considered the parents of Western civilisation. But the ancient world was much more interconnected than we realise - a place of constant exchange, commerce and theft, sex, war and enslavement.Journeying…

In Nostalgia, historian Agnes Arnold-Forster blends neuroscience and psychology with the history of medicine and emotions to explore the evolution of nostalgia from seventeenth-century Switzerland (when it was held to be an illnes…

Did you love Madeline Miller's Circe? Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls? Jennifer Saint's Elektra? Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships?But did you ever wonder who the real women behind the myths of the Trojan War were?Now award-w…

How one visionary inspired 200 years of art, poetry, and protest… Weaving between the historical, cultural and personal, award-winning author Philip Hoare reveals a web of creative minds and artistic iconoclasts fired with the wil…

A landmark history of the alliance that won the war and made the peace by the Sunday Times-bestselling author of Appeasing HitlerAfter the fall of France in June 1940, only Britain stood between Hitler and total victory. Desperate…

In November 2023, the Dublin riots shocked Ireland and the wider world. They were sparked by a knife attack by an immigrant on three children. Inflammatory online rumours spread in minutes.Part of the north inner city were wrecked…

In 38 Londres Street, Philippe Sands blends personal memoir, historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama to probe a secret double story of mass murder, one that reveals a shocking thread that links the horrors of the 19…

A Short History of the World in 50 Animals provides a new perspective on the grand sweep of our planet’s making, taking readers from the time of the dinosaurs to the time of Dolly, the first cloned mammal. This book will include a…

The explosion over Hiroshima of the first nuclear bomb reduced, in an instant, an entire city to rubble and killed over 100,000 men, women and children. It also announced a new era in human history: the Atomic Age. Written only a …

There is not just one story of silk. In silk is science, history and mythology. In silk is the future.Aarathi Prasad’s Silk is a gorgeous new history weaving together the story of a unique material that has fascinated the world fo…

The history of the Middle Ages is typically the story of the rich and powerful, but archaeology represents another way of interrogating our history. By using cutting-edge science to examine human remains and burials, it is possibl…

September 1613. In Belvoir Castle, the heir of one of England’s great noble families falls suddenly and dangerously ill. His body is ‘tormented’ with violent convulsions.Within a few short weeks he will suffer an excruciating deat…

An essential guide to one of the world’s most remarkable, and often misunderstood, cities by the author of Why the Dutch Are Different. When Ben Coates injures his leg and needs to rebuild his strength by walking, he finds himself…

An original, revolutionary new social and scientific history, A History of the World in Six Plagues is a deeply reported, insightful account of humankind's battles with epidemic disease.Epidemic diseases enter the world by chance,…

This is a remaindered copy and may be slightly damaged. The Book of Symbols combines original and incisive essays about particular symbols with representative images from all parts of the world and all eras of history. The compell…

'Reveals an until-now hidden history of women's self-portraiture. A gift that keeps on giving' ALI SMITH, NEW STATESMAN, Books of the Year'A fascinating survey . .. Extraordinary' DAILY MAIL'A bewitching, invigorating history' OLI…

A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpetsBeautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination.…

Could we ever see Vladimir Putin in the dock for his crimes? What about a Western ally like Benjamin Netanyahu? Putting a country's leader on trial once seemed unimaginable. But as Steve Crawshaw describes in Prosecuting the Power…

Do you feel like we're living in the end times? Does it seem like everything is on fire, and one disaster follows another? Here's a small comfort: you're not the first to feel that way. If there's one thing that people throughout …

The brutal war launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in in response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, or Operations Swords of Iron to give it its official name, was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-P…

The history of the world's most successful military alliance, from the wrecked Europe of 1945 to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. As they signed NATO into being after World War II, its founders fervently believed that only if…

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time.What they left behind, in a vast region that once sat between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers…

A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of …

In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans tha…

When Ovid was exiled from Rome to a border town on the Black Sea, he despaired at his new bleak and barbarous surroundings. Like many Greeks and Romans, Ovid thought the outer reaches of his world was where civilisation ceased to …

This rich and enjoyable book by the acclaimed author of Japan Story explores the many ways in which Asia has influenced Europe and North America over centuries of tangled, dynamic encountersFrom the time of the ancient Greeks onwa…

From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel city. Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He h…

A gripping reconstruction of the daring escape to freedom of hundreds of East Germans in the summer of 1989 - and how it led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.  In August 1989, a group of activists did the unthinkable: they entered t…