Non-fiction

In this revelatory book, Ha-Joon Chang destroys the biggest myths of our times and shows us an alternative view of the world, including: There's no...

Ice is beautiful and complex. It regulates our planet's temperature. And it is vanishing - fast. Peter Wadhams, the world's leading expert on sea i...

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...

From the teenager in provincial Russia in 1875 to his premature death in Germany in 1904, Chekhov wrote over 4,500 letters to a range of correspond...

In this remarkable memoir of love, loss and literature, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin turns her eye to another fascinating literary life: her...

What explains spectral sightings? Why do we fear the supernatural? What proof is there? Growing up in a haunted house, Roger Clarke spent much of h...

The pirate and adventurer William Dampier circumnavigated the globe three times, and took notes wherever he went. This is his frank, vivid account ...

Ranging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted imaginary sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and the effects of poverty and sexual constr...

In A Rough Ride to the Future, James Lovelock - the great scientific visionary of our age - presents a radical vision of humanity's future as the t...

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

'Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one's enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival' Advocating lo...

New technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. In the past, such fears have been misplaced, and many economi...

Advertisements for Myself is a comprehensive collection of the best of Norman Mailer's essays, stories, interviews and journalism from the Forties ...

Aesthetics, the second volume of the complete collection of Michel Foucault's courses, articles and interviews, focuses on the philosophy, literatu...

Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identi...

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was...

'I am a woman's rights. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I am as strong as any man tha...

All Points North is part-memoir and part-excursion. Charting the rugged and uneven terrain of a writer's formative years - from tax problems to pro...

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...

Eric Gill's opinionated manifesto on typography argues that 'a good piece of lettering is as beautiful a thing to see as any sculpture or painted p...

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

'Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor' Fuelled by anger at injustice and optimism about hum...

Tough times don't last. Tough people do. In The Black Swan, Taleb showed us that highly improbable and unpredictable events underlie almost everyth...

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...

From the graphic destruction of war-torn Vietnam to her tumultuous romantic affairs, in the second volume of her diaries, Sontag is profoundly cand...

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...

The tools required to avoid a climate disaster already exist. Between emissions cuts and emerging technologies, we can do it. Here Professor Tim Fl...

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...

They called him the 'angriest black man in America'... Celebrated and vilified the world over for his courageous but bitter fight to gain for milli...

The chant of 'Azadi!' - Urdu for 'Freedom!' - is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation....

This an essential tool kit for understanding the world around us. It's about our obsession with collecting, the quest for authenticity and the crea...

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

Originally published in 1868, when it was attacked as an "indecent book" authored by a "traitorous eavesdropper," Behind the Scenes is the story of...

'It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly and justly' The ancient Greek philosopher and teacher Epicurus argu...

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

Human history is a tale not just of constant change, but of perpetual restlessness. In Beneath Another Sky the esteemed historian Norman Davies emb...

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...

In Freud's view we are driven by the desire for pleasure as well as by the desire to avoid pain. But the pursuit of pleasure has never been a simpl...

Black Milk is the affecting and beautifully written memoir on motherhood and writing by Turkey's bestselling female writer Elif Shafak, author of H...

An art expert sees a ten-million-dollar sculpture and instantly spots it's a fake. A marriage analyst knows within minutes whether a couple will st...