A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise

Ian Buruma explores the life and death of Baruch Spinoza, the Enlightenment thinker whose belief in freedom of thought and speech resonates in our own time

A reappraisal of the tumultuous Partition and how it ignited long-standing animosities between India and Pakistan

Offering an introduction to the New Testament, the author presents an historical study of the origins of Christianity by analyzing the literature of the earliest Christian movements. Focusing mainly on the New Testament, he also considers non-Biblical Christian writings of the era.

The calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were not only unprecedented, they were agonisingly widespread. The author examines first-hand accounts of men and women throughout the world describing what they saw and suffered during a sequence of political, economic and social crises that stretched from 1618 to the 1680s.

A masterfully researched and compelling history of Iran from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first