General & world history

Through the analysis of surviving archival traces, this book constructs a history of the imagination and memory of the town of Peacehaven. Built as a speculative development atop iconic chalk cliffs on the Sussex Coast and marketed as a garden city by the sea, the estate quickly attracted adverse...

Taking the ten biggest lies from history and looking at the people who propagated them, social commentator and expert historian Otto English shows how our past has been bent and broken, used and abused over time to fit the ends of some of the world's most powerful people.

It's been said that, after 9/11, the 2008 financial crash and the Covid-19 pandemic, we're a more fearful society than ever before. Yet fear, and the panic it produces, have long been driving forces - perhaps the driving force - of world history: fear of God, of famine, war, disease, poverty, and...

Countering the atheist claim that believers are by default violent fanatics and religion is the cause of all major wars, Karen Armstrong demonstrates that religious faith is not inherently violent. In fact, the world's major religions have throughout their history displayed ambivalent attitudes t...

Kenneth Clark's 1969 BBC series 'Civilisation' is perhaps the most celebrated documentary series ever made, except that it was entirely of its time: patrician to the exclusion of women and western to the exclusion of all other cultures. Spring 2018 sees an ambitious 10-part BBC re-make, presented...

In 1096, an expedition of extraordinary scale and ambition set off from Western Europe on a mass pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Against all the odds, the First Crusade had returned Jerusalem to Christian hands. This text addresses the history of the expedition from the perspective of Constantinople.

With the devastating effects of COVID-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilisation, we live in unprecedented times - or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease live side by side. Over the centuries, our ability...

'Forgotten Women' reaches around the world and its history to rediscover, retell and reinstate the lives of over 190 important and significant women. From Neolithic times to modernity, Zing Tsjeng has traced the women who have shaped their age and revolutionised society. In this book lies the str...

How old exactly is the Earth? How do we know what was here before us? Are we still evolving? 'From Cells to Ourselves' is the story of the beginnings of life around 3.8 billion years ago, to the millions of species alive today, including humans. Learn about mythology giants who formed the Earth, ...

In very recent times humanity has learnt a vast amount about the universe, the past, and itself. But through our remarkable successes in acquiring knowledge we have learned how much we have yet to learn: the science we have, for example, addresses just 5% of the universe; pre-history is still bei...