History

By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold ha...

How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book, now the most compre...

Judaism is by some distance the oldest of the three Abrahamic religions. Despite the extraordinarily diverse forms it has taken, the Jewish people ...

Why has opera transfixed and fascinated audiences for centuries? Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker answer this question in their scrupulous and provo...

The Bible is the central book of Western culture. For the two faiths which hold it sacred, it is the bedrock of their religion, a singular authorit...

Over the centuries the Middle East has confounded the dreams of conquerors and peacemakers alike. This now-classic book follows the historic strugg...

translated by Richard Howard* A Short History of Decay (1949) is E.M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the ...

The Reformation which engulfed England and Europe in the sixteenth century was one of the most highly-charged, bloody and transformative periods in...

The crucial 'difference', of course, was slavery. Here he examines its roots in the colonial era, early racial attitudes, the new Revolutionary com...

After regaining independence in 1947, India immediately adopted a firmly democratic political system. The famines of the British era disappeared, a...

From the bestselling author of Stalingrad, Berlin and D-Day, Antony Beevor's Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble tells the story of the German's il...

Translated by Ivan Morris As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams is a unique autobiography in which the anonymous writer known as Lady Sarashina intersper...

Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continu...

Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an ec...

Despite years of stagnation, Japan remains one of the world's largest economies and a country which exerts a remarkable cultural fascination. David...

Where have the people in any particular place actually come from? What are the historical complexities in any particular place? This evocative hist...

Checkpoint Charlie, 27 October 1961. At 9pm on a damp night, the Cold War reaches crisis point. US and Soviet tanks face off across the East-West d...

Over the last five decades, no other city has changed more than Berlin. Divided in 1961, reunited in 1989, it has morphed over the last twenty-five...

As Europe's borderlands emerged from Soviet rule, Anne Applebaum travelled from the Baltic to the Black Sea, through Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine an...

The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was...

Since Europeans first reached Brazil in 1500 it has been an unfailing source of extraordinary fascination. More than any other part of the 'New Wor...

Today, everybody seems to agree that something has gone badly wrong with the British welfare state. In the midst of economic crisis, politicians an...

This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses...

On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand...

Different countries give different opening dates for the period of the Second World War, but perhaps the most compelling is 1937, when the 'Marco P...

In November 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned mo...

'We're not Christians, Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli.' Exiled to a remote and barren corner of Italy for his opposition to Mussolini, Carl...

With a forensic, brilliant re-examination of all the key surviving texts of early Christianity, Geza Vermes illuminates the origins of a faith and ...

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is on...

Is America the new world empire? Presidents from Lincoln to Bush may have denied it but, as Niall Ferguson's brilliant and provocative book shows, ...

The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was awesome and ...

Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 at the behest of William the Conqueror, has been described as "the most valuable piece of antiquity possessed by an...

Drawing on a wide range of sources - from declassified documents to oral testimonies and his own decades of reporting - Enemies and Neighbours brin...

This chronicle of the Byzantine Empire, beginning in 1025, shows a profound understanding of the power politics that characterized the empire and l...

Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, dominated the eighteenth century in the same way that Napoleon dominated the start of the nineteenth. He was ...

We think we know ancient Greece, the civilisation that shares the same name and gave us just about everything that defines 'Western' culture today,...

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men, women and children, a new era in human history opened. Wri...

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms's ...

From the former director of GCHQ, learn the methodology used by the British intelligence agencies to reach judgements, establish the right level of...

The sixties: a decade of space travel, utopian dreams and - above all - sexual revolution. It liberated a generation. But mostly men. Meet dollybir...

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, a wealthy farmer, his wife and their two young children were found brutally murdered. B...

For all of India's myths, its sea of stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. Sunil Khilnani's Incarnations fil...

The Indian subcontinent might seem a self-contained world. Protected by vast mountains and seas, it has created its own religions, philosophies and...

Iran often appears in the media as a hostile and difficult country. But beneath the headlines there is a fascinating story of a nation of great int...

Prussia began as a medieval backwater, but transformed itself into a major European power and the force behind the creation of the German empire, u...

A significant contribution to the understanding of the medieval holy wars between Christians and Muslims, this volume brings together the best and ...

Islamic civilization was once the envy of the world. From a succession of glittering, cosmopolitan capitals, Islamic empires lorded it over the Mid...

It is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan's modernizers and nationalists...