‘It is hard to write the history of the British Isles in these years as anything other than a success story.’ In reality, nothing about these successes was preordained. In the mid seventeenth century the British Isles were marginal to Europe. A warring group of islands, frequently the scene of catastrophe, they counted for less than the sum of their...

Recycling, buying locally-sourced food and vintage clothing, checking air miles and carbon footprints - our ever-growing obsessions with saving money and preserving the planet is beginning to affect the way many of us shop, travel and eat every day. After decades of plenty, we now face the credit crunch and climate change but the good news is that we don't...

A Strange Kind of Paradise is an exploration of India’s past and present, from the perspective of a foreigner who has lived in India for many years. Sam Miller investigates how the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Chinese, Arabs, Africans, Europeans and Americans – everyone really, except for Indians themselves – came to imagine India. His account of the engagement...

‘Littlejohn’s large-hearted nostalgia and aggression tempered with humour, remain a necessary tonic.’ The Times Born when wartime rationing was still in force and children ran free and wild, the world in which Richard Littlejohn grew up feels like it could be another country, let alone another century. In Littlejohn’s Lost World, he goes in search of his old childhood haunts...

In World Order, Henry Kissinger - one of the leading practitioners of world diplomacy and author of On China - makes his monumental investigation into the 'tectonic plates' of global history and state relations. World Order is the summation of Henry Kissinger's thinking about history, strategy and statecraft. As if taking a perspective from far above the globe, it examines...

The entertaining biography of Edward VII and his playboy lifestyle, by Stephen Clarke, author of 1000 Years of Annoying the French and A Year in the Merde. Despite fierce opposition from his mother, Queen Victoria, Edward VII was always passionately in love with France. He had affairs with the most famous Parisian actresses, courtesans and can-can dancers. He spoke French...

A great thinker's final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays from the author of Postwar and Thinking the Twentieth Century that feels all the more potent and important in today’s political climate. Edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans. Tony Judt’s widow and fellow historian, Jennifer Homans, has gathered together important essays from the span of Judt’s...

Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World is the outstanding book on Israeli foreign policy, now thoroughly updated with a new preface and chapters on Israel's most recent leaders In the 1920s, hard-line Zionists developed the doctrine of the 'Iron Wall': negotiations with the Arabs must always be from a position of military strength, and only when...

In Reappraisals award-winning historian Tony Judt argues that we have entered an 'age of forgetting', where we have set aside our immediate past before we could even begin to make sense of it. We have lost touch with generations of international policy debate, social thought and public-spirited social activism - and no longer even know how to discuss such concepts...

Evan S. Connell explores the quixotic obsession with the new, the hidden, the unattainable that burns in an individual's soul. Each essay is an extraordinary account of passionate pursuit by legendary explorers, visionaries, and seekers compelled by a singular desire. Here we find Marco Polo, El Dorado, Paracelsus, Columbus, the thousands of children in the Innocents' Crusade, Magellan, Mary Kingsley...

Peter Firstbrook spent many months in Kenya researching the history of Barack Obama's family. Peter is the only person to have traced Obama's roots from the present back through more than twenty generations, thanks to the Luo tribe's remarkable oral tradition. Seen though the eyes of the Obama family this will be the story of an African dynasty going back...

A shocking and timely reminder of the role Nazi women played in the Holocaust, not only as plunderers and direct witnesses, but on the Eastern Front. History has it that the role of women in Nazi Germany was to be the perfect Hausfrau and a loyal cheerleader for the Führer. However, Lower’s research reveals an altogether more sinister truth....

Frederick Douglass was a key figure in helping to secure the abolition of slavery in America – discover his Narrative. A masterpiece … [Douglass] was not only self-educated, with a love of language which should still be an inspiration; he was also self-created’ New York Times Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Maryland in 1818. After his escape...

By sea and on the airwaves, by dollar and yuan, a contest has begun that will shape the next century. China's rise has now entered a critical new phase, as it seeks to translate its considerable economic heft into a larger role on the world stage, challenging American supremacy. Yet he also shows why China may struggle to unseat the...

Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick examine the dark side of American history from the beginning of the twentieth century right up to the Obama administration. Looking at American intervention in foreign conflicts in Latin American, Asia and the Middle East, including taking part in covert operations and interfering to overthrow elected leaders in favour of right-wing dictators,...