Englishness is an idea, a consciousness and a proto-nationalism. There is no English state within the United Kingdom, no English passport, Parliament …
The extraordinary creative energy of Renaissance Italy lies at the root of modern Western culture. In her elegant new introduction, Virginia Cox offer…
This respected history of British television drama is an indispensable guide to key developments in the field since 1930. Thoroughly revised and updat…
This revised edition examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the Renaissance preoccupation with cosmetics. Farah Karim-…
This revised edition examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the Renaissance preoccupation with cosmetics. Farah Karim-…
This book begins in 1820 with the Portuguese attempt to create a third, African, empire after the virtual loss of Asia and America. In the nineteenth …
What did people really believe in the Middle Ages? Much of our sense of the medieval period has come down to us from the writings of the learned: the …
This comprehensive overview traces the evolution of modern Mozambique, from its early modern origins in the Indian Ocean trading system and the Portug…
Palaeolithic hunters who learnt how to kill two mammoths instead of one had made progress. Those who learnt how to kill 200 by driving a whole herd ov…
As long as we have been human, we have been mythmakers. In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong holds up the mirror of mythology to show us the hi…
A comic history of humankind's love affair with booze, from the Sunday Times No. 1 bestselling author of The Etymologicon Almost every culture on ear…
Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller, but even when he stays safely at home he can't contain his curiosity about the world around hi…
What does it mean to call Western society 'secular'? What is 'secularism'? And how should we understand the concept of 'secularism' in international r…
On the frozen island of Skane, the sky speaks. Beautiful lights appear on clear nights, and their colours have meaning: Green means all …
In 1917 revolutionary fervour swept through Russia, ending centuries of imperial rule and instigating political and social changes that would lead to …
