History > European

The Ottoman Empire has exerted a long, strong pull on Western minds and hearts. Over six hundred years the Empire swelled and declined; the royal line bent, but never broke, from Osman, born in a desert tent around 1280 to Abdul Mecid, dying in a Paris flat in 1942. Its precipitous rise from a dusty fiefdom in the foothills o... read more

Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is an organism with its own laws of growth and change, so this book is a biography rather than a history. Ackroyd reveals the dozens of ways in which the continuity of ... read more

Born almost a hundred years ago in Vienna - the cultural heart of a bourgeois Mitteleurope - Eric Hobsbawm, who was to become one of the most brilliant and original historians of our age, was uniquely placed to observe an era of titanic social and artistic change. As the century progressed the forces of Communism and Dadaism,... read more

From Eduardo Galeano, one of Latin America's greatest living writers, author of the Memory of Fire trilogy, comes Children of the Days a new kind of history that shows us how to remember and how to live. This book is shaped like a calendar. Each day brings with it a story: a journey, feast or tragedy that really happened on t... read more

An extraordinary chronicle of Venice, its people, and its grandeur Thomas Madden's majestic, sprawling history of Venice is the first full portrait of the city in English in almost thirty years. Using long-buried archival material and a wealth of newly translated documents, Madden weaves a spellbinding story of a place and i... read more

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, two literary gentlemen took on a monumental task: selecting and editing her vast correspondence. The book they produced would influence perceptions of Victoria for generations to come - but it was not the full story. The Queen's two editors, Baron Esher and Arthur Benson, were deeply eccentri... read more

Elizabeth I acceded to the throne in 1558, restoring the Protestant faith to England. At the heart of the new queen's court lay Elizabeth's bedchamber, closely guarded by the favoured women who helped her dress, looked after her jewels and shared her bed. Elizabeth's private life was of public, political concern. Her bedf... read more

This title is an impassioned, controversial plea for us to recognise the importance of writing history - from world-famous historian David Cannadine. David Cannadine is one of Britain's most distinguished historians and this is his masterpiece. "The Undivided Past" is an agonised attempt to understand how so much of the writi... read more

In MAFIA REPUBLIC, John Dickie, Professor of Italian Studies at University College, London and author of the international bestsellers COSA NOSTRA and MAFIA BROTHERHOODS, shows how the Italian mafias have grown in power and become more and more interconnected, with terrifying consequences. The Financial Times described John D... read more

Falling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air, and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its s... read more

Provides a illustrated look at world of luxury objects in 18th-century Paris. This title seeks to re-imagine objects from 18th-century Paris within their original context, showing how they were used in the daily routines of the elite members of society.

Half a millennium of European warfare brilliantly retold by masterly historian Brendan Simms. At the heart of Europe's history lies a puzzle. In most of the world humankind has created enormous political frameworks, whether ancient (such as China) or modern (such as the United States). Sprawling empires, kingdoms or republics... 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

In the 6th century AD, the Near East was divided between two venerable empires: the Persian and the Roman. A hundred years on, and one had vanished forever, while the other seemed almost finished. Ruling in their place were the Arabs: an upheaval so profound that it spelt, in effect, the end of the ancient world. In The Shado... read more

Stephen Greenblatt, one of the world's most celebrated scholars, has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it. Nearly six hundred years ago, a sh... read more

This is a completely new and updated edition of J. M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad's widely acclaimed, landmark bestseller "The Penguin History of the World". For generations of readers "The Penguin History of the World" has been one of the great cultural experiences - the entire story of human endeavour laid out in all its gr... read more

How did an illiterate seventeen-year-old peasant girl manage to become one of histories most salient females? It is almost 600 years since Joan of Arc heard the voices of angels that would change her life for ever: in a breathtaking story her quest saved France from English domination and restored France's hereditary monarchy... read more

A landmark study of Habsburg Vienna in the late 19th and 20th centuries by one of the truly original scholars of our time. Photos included.

Prince Grigory Potemkin was Catherine the Great's lover, secret husband and partner in ruling the Russian Empire. Catherine called him 'one of the greatest, strangest and wittiest eccentrics' of her epoch - her 'twin soul' and 'tiger'; her 'master' in politics. Their affair was so tumultuous that they negotiated an arrangemen... read more

Rome - as a city, as an empire, as an enduring idea - is in many ways the origin of everything Robert Hughes has spent his life thinking and writing about with such dazzling irreverence and exacting rigour. In this magisterial book he traces the city's history from its mythic foundation with Romulus and Remus to Fascism, Fell... read more