An enthralling 2,000-year journey through the history of books and reading. An international bestseller.

10 June 1907, Peking. Five cars set off in a desperate race across two continents on the verge of revolution.

An Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a conman and various journalists battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert. The contestants need teams of helpers to drag their primitive cars up narrow gorges, lift them over rough terrain and float them across rivers. Petrol is almost impossible to find, there are barely any roads, a...

The great historian of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russia returns with an enthralling revisionist history of the Russian Revolution.

It has been seventy yeas since the battle of Stalingrad ended. The city at the river Wolga drew German troops to it like a magnat. Hitler had officially declared the city as ‘fallen’, but then the Red Army encircled the German 6th Army. What followed was a major human tragedy. Honderds of thousands were trapped in the city. Food and ammunition were scarce and an attempt to break through from the South failed. The German troops were left with an air bridge. The daily air transport flew on ...

Winston Churchill followed his own star. He yearned to be 'great', to gain historical immortality. And he did so through deeds and words: his actions as a soldier and politician, gilded by his writings as a journalist and historian.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

'Masterful. Galor answers the ultimate mystery' LEWIS DARTNELL

'Completely brilliant and utterly original' JON SNOW

'Astounding in scope and insight' NOURIEL ROUBINI

The stunning advances that have transformed human experience in recent centuries are no accident of history - they are the result of universal and timeless forces, operating since the dawn of our species. Drawing on a lifetime's scientific investigation, Oded Galor's ground-breaking new vision identif...

This is a book about the amazing journey of people discovering the Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, looking for traces of a small historical event against the backdrop of the ending of the Soviet Union.

At the start of the age of exploration, the North Pole was believed to be hiding a continent, a land mass warmed by the midnight sun still inspiring today’s ‘Lost World’ fantasies. In the summer of 1596, two ships departed from Amsterdam to sail by its shores. The nine-month struggle for ...

From the #1 bestselling author Hugh Sebag Montefiore, a spellbinding and fiercely told history of one of the most extreme episodes of the Second World War.

Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced.

From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to ris...