Offers an understanding of Vermeer's paintings and of the era they portray.

A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank.

Slavery existed from the earliest societies and played a leading role in world history. For a long time, slavery was portrayed in history books as a fringe phenomenon.

Currently, slavery is receiving a lot of attention and it is rightly being brought out of oblivion. Those who know the history can thereby avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. The book ‘Slavery Throughout World History’ focuses on an overall overview of the phenomenon of slavery in history and it delves deeper i...

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. This book shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.

In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the evolution of one of the world's greatest cities. From the building of its first canals in the 1300s, through the brutal struggle for Dutch independence and its golden age as the capital of a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals of liberalism are under siege, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually entertaining story of Amsterdam. He also weaves in his own experiences of his adopted home. In...

The extraordinary adventure-filled story of how England came to own Manhattan in the seventeenth century

A controversial, timely reassessment of the environmentalist agenda by outstanding historians, scientists, and critics.

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation.

A landmark history of the war that firmly places the First World War in the context of imperialism and gives due weight to the role of non-Europeans in the conflict.