History

White Mughals is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of Hyderabad when he met Khair-un-Nissa

This is an extraordinary and moving memoir by the award-winning author of "Palestinian Walks" - updated with a new foreword. Raja Shehadeh was born into a successful Palestinian family with a beautiful house overlooking the Mediterranean. When the state of Israel was formed in 1948 the family were driven out to the provincial... read more

"Paris is the World, the rest of the Earth is nothing but its suburbs" - Marivaux. In this intelligently-written and supremely entertaining new history, Colin Jones seeks to give a sense of the city of Paris as it was lived in and experienced over time. The focal point of generation upon generation of admirers and detractors,... read more

Robert Irwin's history of Orientalism leads from Ancient Greece to the present. He shows that, whether making philological comparisons between Arabic and Hebrew, cataloguing the coins of Fatimid Egypt or establishing the basic chronology of Harun al-Rashid's military campaigns against Byzantium, scholars have been unified not... read more

The Mediterranean has nurtured three of the most dazzling civilisations of antiquity, witnessed the birth or growth of three of our greatest religions and links three of the world's six continents. To the peoples living around its periphery, it has served at various times as a cradle and a grave, a bond and a barrier, a bless... read more

The beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered, Friedman argues, not for military conflicts or political events, but for a whole new age of globalization - a 'flattening' of the world. The explosion of advanced technologies now means that suddenly knowledge pools and resources have connected all over the planet,... read more

The Great War is Les Carlyon's extraordinary account of the Anzacs on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918. It combines a brilliant overview of this immense conflict with telling detail, stories, letters and diaries that breathe life into those terrible battles of 90 years ago. In The Great War, Carlyon has produced a masterpi... read more

The dramatic and little-known story of how, in the summer of 1920, Lenin came within a hair's breadth of shattering the painstakingly constructed Versailles peace settlement and spreading Bolshevism to western Europe.In 1920 the new Soviet state was a mess, following a brutal civil war, and the best way of ensuring its surviv... read more

Pakistan, the likely home of Osama Bin Laden and safe house for the Taliban forces fighting NATO in Afghanistan, stands on the front line of the war against terror. Yet, as recent events have shown, this long-time ally of the West and recipient of $10 billion of American aid in the past decade, is in deepening crisis. As Pres... read more

This unprecedented book, by one of Britain's leading intellectual historians, describes the intellectual impact that the study and consideration of the past has had in the western world over the past 2500 years, treating the practise of history not as an isolated pursuit but as an aspect of human society and an essential part... read more

The Tall Man is the story of Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house cell. It is the story of that policeman, the tall, enigmatic Christopher Hurley, who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest places in Australia, ... read more

Thomas Friedman's phenomenal "The World is Flat" helped millions of people see globalization in a new way. Now he takes a fresh, provocative look at the biggest challenge facing us today - our hot, flat and crowded world. Climate change and rapid population growth mean that it's no longer possible for businesses, or the rest ... read more

Proposes a fresh way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. This title describes how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes.

On 2 May, 1536, in an act unprecedented in English history, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, was imprisoned in the Tower of London. On 15 May, she was tried and found guilty of high treason and executed just four days later. Mystery surrounds the circumstances leading up to her arrest - did Henry VIII instruct Thomas Cr... read more

After the success of Making the Cut and The Patient, Mohamed Khadra looks at the topical subject of the healthcare system in Australia. He explains how our hospitals came to be stifled by bureaucracy; whether we can and should administer universally free health care to our population; and how best we can do that in 2010.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has written an original and important study of genocide that reconceives its very nature. He does so not by examining a series of genocides but by exploring the nature of mass killing itself. Our failure to clearly describe, explain, and understand the mechanisms of genocide has made it difficult to pre... read more

No-one knows a city like the people who live there - so who better to relate the history of Paris than its inhabitants through the ages? Taking us from 1750 to the new millennium, Graham Robb's "Parisians" is at once a book to read from cover to cover, to lose yourself in, to dip in and out of at leisure, and a book to return... read more

Bill Bryson describes himself as a reluctant traveller: but even when he stays safely in his own study at home, he can't contain his curiosity about the world around him. A Short History of Nearly Everything is his quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization - how we got from t... read more

The Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for "What I Saw," a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, "What I Saw" introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing ... 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