History > European

The Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds and hearts. Over six hundred years the Empire swelled and declined; the royal line bent, but never broke, from Osman, born in a desert tent around 1280 to Abdul Mecid, dying in a Paris flat in 1942. Its precipitous rise from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills o... read more

Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is an organism with its own laws of growth and change, so this book is a biography rather than a history. Ackroyd reveals the dozens of ways in which the continuity of ... read more

Born almost a hundred years ago in Vienna - the cultural heart of a bourgeois Mitteleurope - Eric Hobsbawm, who was to become one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age, was uniquely placed to observe an era of titanic social and artistic change. As the century progressed the forces of Communism and Dadaism,... read more

An extraordinary chronicle of Venice, its people, and its grandeur Thomas Madden's majestic, sprawling history of Venice is the first full portrait of the city in English in almost thirty years. Using long-buried archival material and a wealth of newly translated documents, Madden weaves a spellbinding story of a place and i... read more

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, two literary gentlemen took on a monumental task: selecting and editing her vast correspondence. The book they produced would influence perceptions of Victoria for generations to come - but it was not the full story. The Queen's two editors, Baron Esher and Arthur Benson, were deeply eccentri... read more

In MAFIA REPUBLIC, John Dickie, Professor of Italian Studies at University College, London and author of the international bestsellers COSA NOSTRA and MAFIA BROTHERHOODS, shows how the Italian mafias have grown in power and become more and more interconnected, with terrifying consequences. The Financial Times described John D... read more

Falling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air, and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its s... read more

Provides a illustrated look at world of luxury objects in 18th-century Paris. This title seeks to re-imagine objects from 18th-century Paris within their original context, showing how they were used in the daily routines of the elite members of society.

Stephen Greenblatt, one of the world's most celebrated scholars, has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a sh... read more

What do reading a book, smoking a cigarette, throwing confetti and voting in an election have in common? The answer, of course, is paper. Paper serves nearly every function of our lives. It is the technology with which we have made sense of the world. Yet the age of paper is ending. Ebooks now outsell their physical counterpa... read more

This is a completely new and updated edition of J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad's widely acclaimed, landmark bestseller "The Penguin History of the World". For generations of readers "The Penguin History of the World" has been one of the great cultural experiences - the entire story of human endeavour laid out in all its gr... read more

This tremendously attractive, ambitious, dizzying book is in every way a worthy successor to Figes' bestselling "A People's Tragedy". The whole panorama of Russia's mighty culture is conjured up in a way that is fresh, intimate and immediate. Whether talking about music or novels, buildings or paintings, Figes' enthusiasm and... read more

In the former East there was one agent of the Stasi, the secret police, for every six citizens. What did it do to people to be so watched? And what sort of people were they, all those watchers? In her internationally acclaimed debut, Anna Funder presents with startling humour and sympathy the human face of the twentieth centu... 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 ear... read more

In the 6th century AD, the Near East was divided between two venerable empires: the Persian and the Roman. A hundred years on, and one had vanished forever, while the other seemed almost finished. Ruling in their place were the Arabs: an upheaval so profound that it spelt, in effect, the end of the ancient world. In The Shado... read more

This title was selected for the "Daily Telegraph" Books Of The Year. If in the year 1411 you had been able to circumnavigate the globe and compare the dazzling civilizations of the Orient with Europe and North America, the idea that the West would dominate the Rest for most of the next half millennium would have struck you as... read more

Jerry Brotton is the presenter of the acclaimed BBC4 series "Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession". Here he tells the story of our world through maps. Throughout history, maps have been fundamental in shaping our view of the world, and our place in it. But far from being purely scientific objects, world maps are unavoidably id... read more

Otto Dov Kulka's "Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death", translated by Ralph Mandel, is a memoir of astounding literary and emotional power, exploring the permanent and indelible marks left by the Holocaust and a childhood spent in Auschwitz. As a child the distinguished historian Otto Dov Kulka was sent first to the ghetto ... read more

How did an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl manage to become one of histories most salient females? It is almost 600 years since Joan of Arc heard the voices of angels that would change her life for ever: in a breathtaking story her quest saved France from English domination and restored France's hereditary monarchy... read more

Roberto Calasso is one of the most original and acclaimed of writers on literature, art, culture and mythology. In "Baudelaire's Folly", Calasso turns his attention to the poets and writers of Paris in the nineteenth century who created what was later called 'the Modern.' His protagonist is Charles Baudelaire: poet of nerves,... read more