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.

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman - the Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust survivor story'The most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' Wall Street Journal'The first masterpiece in comic book history' The New YorkerThe Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. Maus approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon ...

'excellent' LSE Review of BooksChina is the world's most populous country and newest superpower, whose place on the international stage can only be understood through the lens of its modern history. The Oxford History of Modern China is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this rising power in what promises to be the 'Chinese century'. Covering the period of dramatic shifts and surprising transformations which comprise China's modern history, the book spans from the founding o...

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

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...

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.

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler's son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry-a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the oth...