One of the great historians of our age asks: how far can a single leader alter the course of history?

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose personalities had somehow given them the ability to do whatever they wished.

Ian Kershaw's new book ...

The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of history

The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. But we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centu...

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK | AN INSTANT #2 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

'Humanity has transformed the Earth: Frankopan transforms our understanding of history' Financial Times

'Vast, learned and timely work' Sunday Times

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From the international bestselling author of The Silk Roads comes a major history of how a changing climate has dramatically shaped the development-and demise-of civilisations across time.

When we think about history, we rarely pay much attention to the most destructive...

A fascinating and surprising history of the world told through the lines people have drawn on maps, by the 'charming and outstandingly nerdish' author of The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything.

People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way....

From the bestselling author of Chums comes an explorer's tale of a naïf getting to understand a complex, glittering, beautiful and often cruel city.

Simon Kuper has experienced Paris both as a human being and as a journalist. He has grown middle-aged there, eaten the croissants, taken his children to countless football matches on freezing Saturday mornings in the city's notorious banlieues, and in 2015 lived through two terrorist attacks on his family's neighbourhood. Over two decades of bec...

Airborne to Arnhem is the second of three volumes of reminiscences of the Battle of Arnhem, Operation MARKET, 17th-26th September 1944 published by Helion and Company. The three volumes contain over 150 personal accounts received from veterans of the 1st Airborne Division alongside those from RAF aircrew and XXX Corps.

The study is the culmination of over forty years of research concentrating on the British 1st Airborne Division's role in the capture of the north end of the Arnhem bridge and ...

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

A TIMES SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR

A SUNDAY TIMES SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR

'Powerfully argued... Fascinating and pacy' Sunday Times, Book of the Week

'Superbly written... sure to please readers of Yuval Noah Harari or Rutger Bregman' The Times

'Full of amazing facts' Observer

'The book shines when it brings cutting-edge science to bear' Financial Times

'A dizzying range of material' The Economist

'A humbling story for humankind' Spectator

Challenges some of the gr...

Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe.

Drawing on half a century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered.

Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe. Highly personal and deeply felt, this book is also...

'This vital history shatters many myths about the Nazi genocide . . . . surprising . . . provocative . . . fizzes with ideas. Even if you think you know the subject, you'll probably find something here to make you think' Sunday Times

'Erudite...remarkable' The Observer

'Outstanding' The Telegraph

An authoritative, revelatory new history of the Holocaust, from one of the leading scholars of his generation

The Holocaust is much-discussed, much-memorialized and much-portrayed. But there are majo...

Even before Amsterdam there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp.

Antwerp was sensational like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York, somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed: killer bankers, easy kisses, a market in secrets and every kind of heresy. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules - religious, sexual, intellectual.

In Antwerp, things changed. One man cornered all the money in the c...