The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
Niall Ferguson
Penguin, PB, 9780718194000
Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot. Call if what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that financial history is the back-story to all history. From the banking dynasty who funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock market bubble that caused the French Revolution, this is the story of booms and busts as ... More/Buy
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies
Ben Macintyre
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408819913
D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit, aimed at convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong invasion force. he deception involved every branch of Allied wartime intelligence - ... More/Buy
The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the WayYou Think, Feel, and Live-and How You Can Change Them
Richard J Davidson, Sharon Begley
Hudson Street, HB, 9781594630897
For more than thirty years, Richard Davidson has been at the forefront of brain research. Now he gives us an entirely new model for understanding our emotions, as well as practical strategies we can use to change them. Davidson has discovered that personality is composed of six basic emotional 'styles,' including resilience, self-awareness, and attention. Our emotional fingerprint results from where ... More/Buy
Empire
Jeremy Paxman
Penguin, PB, 9780670919598
The influence of the British Empire is everywhere: from the very existence of the United Kingdom to the way we send our troops to war, from the way we travel to the way we trade. In his brilliantly illuminating new book, Jeremy Paxman goes to the very heart of empire. As he describes the crazed end of General Gordon of Khartoum ... More/Buy
God's Jury: The Inquisition & the Making of the Modern World
Cullen Murphy
Allen Lane, HB, 9780713995343
For centuries states have used their power to censor information, to conduct surveillance, to impose belief, to manipulate and to punish. Cullen Murphy's extraordinary, provocative new book explores the idea that the Inquisition - the Catholic body that existed in Europe and beyond for over 700 years - is not a medieval oddity, but is intrinsically bound up with the creation ... More/Buy
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror & an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Erik Larson
Scribe Publications, PB, 9781921844799
Berlin, 1933. William E. Dodd, a mild-mannered academic from Chicago, becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany, where he is about to witness a turning point in history. Dodd and his family observe firsthand the many changes - some subtle, some disturbing, and some horrifically violent - that signal Hitler's consolidation of power. The ambassador has little choice but to ... More/Buy
International Human Rights Movement: A History
Aryeh Neier
Princeton Unversity Press, HB, 9780691135151
During the past several decades, the international human rights movement has had a crucial hand in the struggle against totalitarian regimes, cruelties in wars, and crimes against humanity. Today, it grapples with the war against terror and subsequent abuses of government power. In The International Human Rights Movement, Aryeh Neier--a leading figure and a founder of the contemporary movement--offers a comprehensive ... More/Buy
London In The Eighteenth Century: A Great and Monstrous Thing
Jerry White
Bodley Head, HB, 9781847921802
London in the eighteenth century was very much a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire. With thousands of homes and many landmark buildings destroyed, it had been brought to the brink. But the following century was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an ... More/Buy
Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World
Jacqueline Yallop
Atlantic, PB, 9781843547518
During the Victorian age, British collectors were among the most active, passionate and eccentric in the world. Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves tells the stories of some of the nineteenth century's most intriguing collectors following their perilous journeys across the globe in the hunt for rare and beautiful objects; From art connoisseur John Charles Robinson, to the aristocratic scholar Charlotte Schreiber, who ... More/Buy
Midnight in Peking
Paul French
penguin, PB, 9780143567523
January, 1937: Peking is a heady mix of privilege and scandal, lavish cocktail bars and opium dens, warlords and corruption, rumours and superstition - and the clock is ticking down on all of it. In the exclusive Legation Quarter, the foreigners are jumpy. Japanese troops are poised to attack, and word has it the Chinese government is about to cut a ... More/Buy
The Nazi, the Painter, and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road
G H Bennett
Reaktion Books, HB, 9781861899095
In 2005 an old canister of film was discovered in a Devon church. How it got there was a mystery and its contents were tantalizing. The grainy black and white footage appeared to have been shot in Ukraine and Crimea in 1943, and showed the German SS and Police building a road. Aired on the BBC it caused a sensation, but ... More/Buy
The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution
Faramerz Dabhoiwala
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846144929
Nowadays we believe that consenting adults have the freedom to do what they like with their own bodies. We publicise and celebrate sex; we discuss it endlessly; we are obsessed with the sex lives of celebrities. We think it wrong that in other cultures people suffer for their sexual orientation, that women are treated as second-class citizens, or that adulterers are ... More/Buy
Rome
Robert Hughes
Phoenix, PB, 9780753823057
For almost a thousand years, Rome held sway as the spiritual and artistic centre of the world. Hughes recreates the ancient Rome of Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Nero, Caligula, Cicero, Martial and Virgil. With the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, he casts his unwavering critical eye over the great works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Brunelleschi, shedding new light on the Old ... More/Buy
Running the Show: The Extraordinary Stories of the Men Who Governed the British Empire
Stephanie Williams
Penguin, PB, 9780141041216
Who were the men governing the Empire in the nineteenth century? How were they chosen and controlled? How did they see their mission? And why did they do it? From Fiji to the Falkland Islands, from Malaysia to Australia and South Africa, from Lagos to Ottawa, ordinary British men and women, with no training, were dispatched to strange places, among strange ... More/Buy
The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 1832-1914
Robert Bickers
Penguin, PB, 9780141015859
From opium wars, conquest and rebellion to the end of the Qing imperial dynasty, the history of the European colonial 'scramble' for China is one of brutality and idealism, oppression and adventure - a story that is still central to the country's image of itself today. Robert Bickers' extraordinary book tells this epic story from both European and Chinese viewpoints, as ... More/Buy
The Spirit of Venice: From Marco Polo to Casanova
Paul Strathern
Jonathan Cape, HB, 9780224089791
The Republic of Venice was the first great economic and naval power of the modern Western world. After winning the struggle for ascendency against its bitter Genoese rivals in the late 13th century, the Republic enjoyed centuries of unprecedented glory and a trading empire which at its apogee reached as far afield as China, Syria and West Africa. This golden period ... More/Buy
The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England
Ian Mortimer
Bodley Head, HB, 9781847921147
We think of Queen Elizabeth I as 'Gloriana': the most powerful English woman in history. We think of her reign (1558-1603) as a golden age of maritime heroes, like Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, and of great writers, such as Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. But what was it actually like to ... More/Buy