History, Politics and Commentary - History

'My object in writing this little book is to show you how you may prepare and cook your daily food, so as to obtain from it the greatest amount of nourishment at the least possible expense; and thus, by skill and economy, add, at the same time, to your comfort and to your comparative slender means.' First published in 1852, Charles Elme Francatelli's "Plain Cookbook for the Working Classes" features 241 recipes suitable for small budgets. From the simple art of boiling potatoes to the more advanced Pumpkin Porridge, each recipe is ... read more

Add Review

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the 26 British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. ... read more

"The First World War, the worst calamity humanity has ever inflicted on itself, still reverberates in our lives. In its immediate aftermath, a few young men who had fought in it went looking for a healing challenge, and found it far from the Western Front. In recreating their astonishing adventure, Wade Davis has given us an elegant meditation on the courage to carry on."
--George F. Will
"I was captivated. Wade Davis has penned an exceptional book on an extraordinary generation. They do not make them like that any more. And there woul..read more

This book takes a dramatically original approach to the history of humanity, using objects which previous civilisations have left behind them, often accidentally, as prisms through which we can explore past worlds and the lives of the men and women who lived in them. The book's range is enormous. It begins with one of the earliest surviving objects made by human hands, a chopping tool from the Olduvai gorge in Africa, and ends with an object from the 21st century which represents the world we live in today. Neil MacGregor's aim is ... read more

A History of the World in 100 Objects ... has been a triumph: hugely popular, and rightly lauded as one of the most effective and intellectually ambitious initiatives in the making of 'public history' for many decades. - John Adamson Sunday Telegraph

Highly intelligent, delightfully written and utterly absorbing - Timothy Clifford Spectator

Allen Lane has done Mr MacGregor proud... The objects have been beautifully photographed, Mr MacGregor's voice comes through distinctively and his arguments about the..read more

"The Whales Companion" seeks to capture the idea of the whale in the human imagination through a collection of evocative writings and images from ancient times up to the present day. Ranging across the cultures of the world for its material, this superbly produced visual and literary anthology explores the complexity of humankind's relationship with the whale: the awe-inspiring creature that fills our myths and legends, art and literature, with its mystical, sometimes fearsome, often tragic, presence.

Add Review

Plants are so ubiquitous, such a common feature of the world around us, that we rarely stop to consider the profound impact they have on our everyday lives. We give flowers on special occasions, spend many dedicated hours nurturing gardens, use them for dyes and construction, and turn them into cosmetics and medicines. We are also entirely dependent on them for sustenance - even when we eat meat, the animals that provide it have been raised on plants. Fifty Plants that Changed the Course of History is a beautifully presented guide ... read more

Add Review

The fascinating story of how royal power came to lie in female hands for the first time under the Tudor queens - and of the four women who came before them who, whilst never reigining monarchs, held great power. When Edward VI - Henry VIII's longed-for son - died in 1553, extraordinarily, there was no one left to claim the title King of England. For the first time, all the contenders for the crown were female. In 1553, England was about to experience the 'monstrous regiment' - the unnatural rule - of a woman. But female rule in ... read more

Add Review

On 11th April 1919, less than a year after the assassination of the Romanovs, the British battleship HMS Marlborough left Yalta carrying the Russian Imperial Family into perpetual exile. The Russian Court at Sea vividly recreates this unlikely voyage, with its bizarre assortment of warring characters and its priceless cargo of treasure.

Add Review

E.H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images... read more

Add Review

The RMS Titanic was built as one of the world′s largest and most luxurious liners. A marine Ritz, it was a 45,000-tonne hotel of thin steel plates, travelling at a speed of 21 knots across the North Atlantic.

On the night of 14 April 1912, midway through her maiden voyage, the seemingly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg, sustaining a 300-feet gash as six compartments were wrenched open to the sea. In little over two hours, the palatial Titanic nose-dived to the bottom of the ocean. Over 1,500 people perished in the free... read more

'An astonishing work, of meticulous research, which allows us to know, in painful detail, the men and women on that fateful voyage. Even now, a hundred years later, Mr Davenport-Hines finds a new, and heart-breaking, story to tell.' - Julian Fellowes

The riveting true story of the men who ventured deep into the Amazon to find and protect a mysterious Indian who is the Last of the Tribe

Add Review

We all know that we should ask now, before it's too late, before the stories are gone forever. But knowing and doing are two different things. Cynthia Hart, author of "Cynthia Hart's Scrapbook Workshop", shows exactly how to collect, record, share, and preserve a family member's oral history in this practical and inspirational guide. "Tell Me Your Story" breaks down what too often feels like an overwhelming project into a series of easily manageable steps: how to prepare for an interview; how to become a better listener; why there'... read more

Add Review

No Description

Add Review

Brings the complexity of the Islamic religion and culture into clear focus. This miniguides, with its compact format, is an ideal short course for travelers, students and others without much time but with a great thirst for knowledge.

Add Review

Writing under the pen name of Fougasse, Cyril Kenneth Bird was one of the most popular cartoonists and illustrators of the first half of the twentieth century and arguably the most famous creator of British poster art.

Add Review

What do women look for in a man? And what do men look for in a woman? And how and why has this changed over the centuries? Every week thousands of people advertise for love either in newspapers, magazines or online. But if you think this is a modern phenomenon, think again - the ads have been running for over three hundred years. In 1695, a popular London pamphlet published the brave plea of a young gentleman who 'would willingly Match himself to some Good Young Gentlewoman, that has a Fortune of GBP3000 or thereabouts'. This was j... read more

Add Review

For thousands of years we have grown, cooked and traded food, and over that time much has changed. Where once we subsisted on gritty, bland grains, we now enjoy culinary creations and epicurean delights made with vegetables from the New World, fish trawled from the deep sea, and flavoured with spices from the Orient. But how did we make that change from eating for survival to the innovations of modern cuisine? How has food helped to shape our culture? And what will happen when global warming and peak oil have their inevitable effec... read more

Add Review

During the 1530s, rumours of a potentially revolutionary theory of how the heavens worked emanating from a small city in Poland began to spread throughout Europe. The architect of this theory was a Polish cleric named Nicolaus Copernicus. In around 1514 Copernicus had written and hand-copied an initial outline of his heliocentric theory, in which he placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of our universe, with the planets, including the Earth, revolving about it. Titled his Commentariolus, it circulated among a very few astron... read more

Add Review

When she was just nine years old, Fariba Nawa and her family fled Afghanistan, escaping the Soviet invasion, the last proxy of the Cold War. She settled in the United States and did not return to her homeland until 2000. The country she found upon her return was dramatically different than the Afghanistan of her youth, and she saw firsthand that the reality for most Afghans was now grim. Nawa was particularly struck when she met a 12-old-girl bartered as a bride to settle her father’s opium debt. With connections to both American... read more

Add Review

Claude Levi-Strauss, the 'father of modern anthropology' and author of the classic Tristes tropiques, was one of the most influential intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. Dislodging Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir from the pinnacle of French intellectual life in the 1950s, he brought about a sea change in Western thought and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers, including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan with his structuralist theories. Levi-Strauss's bohemian childhood and later studie... read more

'An intellectual biography that briskly and brilliantly assesses the great, original, creative ideas and their origins in the context of Levi-Strauss's life from the 1930s to the 1960s in Brazil, New York and Paris' - The Times Biographies of the Year 'Both a gratifyingly clear summary of a difficult body of work and a eulogy for a time "when the stream of consciousness of one mind could leave a deep cultural imprint"' - New Yorker 'Illuminating ... This book, with an admiring but not slavish appreciation of its subject ... appreciates and communicates the..read more

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia's greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December, 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After five weeks, tragedy struck. Ninnis was swallowed whole by a snow-covered crevasse, an... read more

Add Review