President Nixons famous 1972 trip has gone down in history as the first great opening between the West and Communist China. However, eighteen years previously, former prime minister Clement Attlee...
Ovids Art and the Wife of Bath examines how Ovids Ars amatoria shaped the erotic discourses of the medieval West. The Ars amatoria circulated in medieval France and England as...
The year 1945 was a chaotic one, both for the world, of course, and for Winston Churchill. Communism was on the march and the people of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and...
If a nineteenth century lady had neither a husband to support her nor money of her own, almost her only recourse was to live in someone else's household and educate...
He had one of the more unglamorous jobs in the Second World War, but self-taught violinist George Warner s letters home from the North African and Italian campaigns in which...
The London Olympics of 1908, was intended to reveal Britain and its empire at its zenith. Before the games had ended, almost everything that could go wrong had, the organisers...
Sheep grazing on Lord's Cricket Ground, frost fairs on the Thames and rural scenes in Highgate and Notting Hill seem strange sights today, but a 17th-century view of Covent Garden...
This extraordinary book encompasses the time period from the first Christian evangelists' arrival in Latin America to the dictators of the late twentieth century. With unsurpassed knowledge of Latin American...
From November 2006 to January 2007 the Swiss film maker Dominique de Rivaz, who lives in Berlin, traced and photographed the original circular route of the Berlin Wall, both in...
As this book shows, Nazi ideology was based on two central beliefs: in war and race. Peace was merely a preparation for war, war which would redraw the racial map...
What is English about the English novel, and how has the idea of the English nation been shaped by the writers of fiction? How do the novels profound differences from...
Traditionally, the Restoration has been regarded by historians as a period in which European governments returned to the reactionary policies which prevailed before the upheavals of 1789, and which involved...
How might Hercules, the most famous of the Greek heroes, have used mathematics to complete his astonishing Twelve Labors? From conquering the Nemean Lion and cleaning out the Augean Stables,...
Whilst sailing between Hawaii and Tahiti in January 1824, the captain and officers of the Nantucket whaling ship the Globe were attacked with whaling gear, shot, and dumped overboard under...
In 1953, Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In fact, Churchill was a professional writer before he was a politician, and published a stream of books and articles...
The medieval woman was both idealised and vilified. The idea that she might stray outside the boundaries established by her family and husband threw the medieval man into a veritable...
An obsession with perpetual youth may seem a particularly modern phenomenon, but it is a goal that western scientists and philosophers have aspired to (and worked towards) for the last...
Daniel Defoe's fictional heroine Moll Flanders is famous for her criminal and sexual adventures, racily portrayed on big and small screens. But who was she? And what world did she...
The world has changed faster during the 20th century than ever before. All our previous assumptions about God, our social, economic and political structures, science and technology, and - by...
Under Moctezuma the mighty Aztec empire reached the height of its power; under Moctezuma, the Aztec empire met its ultimate downfall. The Aztecs ruled from the island metropolis of Tenochtitlan...
