General & world history
Showing 1–16 of 51 results
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A little history of art
£10.99A little history of art
Here is a thrilling journey through 100,000 years of art, from the origins of mark making to art’s pivotal role in culture today. Why did our ancestors make art? What did art mean to them and what does their art mean for us today? Why is art even important at all? Charlotte Mullins brings art to life by focusing on those who made it, from teenage prodigies to nonagenarians. This little history introduces us to overlooked artists, busts a few art history myths, and celebrates global networks of art, from Japan and India to South America and the Middle East. Mullins shows us the first artworks ever made and early masterpieces such as the Terracotta Army and Nok sculptures. She tells the story of the Renaissance, from Giotto to Michelangelo, and introduces us to subsequent leading artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, and Hokusai.
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A little history of music
£10.99A little history of music
Human beings have always made music. Music can move us and tell stories of faith, struggle, or love. It is common to all cultures across the world. But how has it changed over the millennia? Robert Philip explores the extraordinary history of music in all its forms, from our earliest ancestors to today’s mass-produced songs. This is a truly global story. Looking to Europe, South America, Asia, Africa, and beyond, Philip reveals how musicians have been brought together by trade and migration and examines the vast impact of colonialism. From Hildegard von Bingen and Clara Schumann to Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin, great performers and composers have profoundly shaped music as we know it.
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A little history of the world
£10.99A little history of the world
The World has existed for over 4 billion years, but humanity arrived much more recently. Here E.H. Gombrich brings to life the full story of human experience on Earth. He paints a colourful picture of remarkable people and events, from Confucius to Catherine the Great, from the invention of art to the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
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Abortion
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All or nothing
£25.00All or nothing
With extraordinary behind-the-scenes access, it follows every turn of Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign. In disgrace after the January 6 attack on the Capitol and sent into exile, Trump immediately sputters back to life. To the shock of the Republican Party leadership, the Trump base has not abandoned him. Hardly a year on, he is as strong as any challenger has ever been. The American establishment is stunned by his comeback and determined to stop it and hold him accountable for his abuses of law and power. Equally, he has vowed retribution on anyone who tries to stand in his way. The 2024 presidential race is elemental: the system breaks Donald Trump or Donald Trump breaks the system. Michael Wolff tells this story from inside the Trump campaign.
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Behind Closed Doors
£11.99Behind Closed Doors
Using an impressive range of source materials, including literary memoirs, the transcripts of burglary trials and upholsterer’s ledgers, Amanda Vickery provides a detailed insight to home life in Georgian England for a wide cross section of the society.
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Big caesars and little caesars
£12.99Big caesars and little caesars
Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of strong men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Yet in modern times it’s become a strangely neglected subject. Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why caesars seize power and why they fall. There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators from Fukuyama back to Macaulay, Mill and Marx, that history progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd hiccup. In reality, every democracy, however sophisticated or stable it may look, has been attacked or actually destroyed by a would-be caesar, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Marx was wrong. This Caesarism is not an absurd throwback, it is an ever-present danger.
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Blood on the snow
£30.00Blood on the snow
The great historian of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia returns with an enthralling revisionist history of the Russian Revolution.
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Catland
£22.00Catland
‘Part-biography, part-social history, Catland is its own breed of historical investigation’ Amanda Foreman
Some called it a craze. To others it was a cult. Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with cats and ushered in a new era.
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Civilisation
£10.99Civilisation
Kenneth Clark’s narrative looks at how Western Europe evolved in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, to produce the ideas, books, buildings, works of art and great individuals that make up our civilisation.
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Courting India
£12.99Courting India
When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. Meanwhile, the court he entered in India was wealthy and cultured, its dominion widely considered to be one of the greatest and richest empires of the world. In Nandini Das’s fascinating history of Roe’s four years in India, she offers an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown.
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Enchanted creatures
£20.00Enchanted creatures
We have always created and destroyed monsters. They give form to what we don’t wish to know or understand; to our anxieties and irrational terrors. They have helped us manage the extraordinary complexity of our minds and deal with the challenges of being human. In ‘Enchanted Creatures’, Natalie Lawrence delves into the dark histories of creatures we have imagined over 15,000 years of history: from strange beasts carved in Palaeolithic caves and hybrid snake women, to deep-sea leviathans and apocalyptic dino-monsters. She reveals what lies beneath the monstrous menagerie that has shaped our minds, our societies and how we see our place in nature. Understanding our monsters allows us to understand ourselves, perhaps the most important quest there is.
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England’s Anglo-Saxon Heritage
£19.99England’s Anglo-Saxon Heritage
The Anglo-Saxons held sway in this country from the time the Romans departed until the Norman Conquest; a period of over 600 years, in other words the same length of time from the present day back to late medieval England of the War of the Roses. By any standard, a considerable period.
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Execution
£8.99Execution
The No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling series set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, perfect for fans of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy and Netflix’s The CrownÂ
‘Gripping’ Sunday Times
‘Fast-paced and entertaining’ Mail on Sunday
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Hands of time
£10.99Hands of time
An intricate and personal history of watches and time, told by an extraordinary watchmaker and historian.
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High Caucasus
£12.99High Caucasus
Emotionally scarred after witnessing the bloody climax of the Beslan school siege in Russia’s North Caucasus, in which 314 hostages died, Tom Parfitt set out on a journey. In ‘High Caucasus’, he shares his remarkable thousand-mile quest in search of personal peace – and a greater understanding of the roots of violence in a region whose fate has tragic parallels with the Ukraine of today.
£12.99