'A characteristically radical re-reading of history that places the social and political experiments of pirates at the heart of the European Enlightenment. A brilliant companion volume to the best-selling Dawn of Everything' Amitav Ghosh

The Enlightenment did not begin in Europe. Its true origins lie thousands of miles away on the island of Madagascar, in the late seventeenth century, when it was home to several thousand pirates. This was the Golden Age of Piracy, a period of violent buccanee...

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

In this spellbinding account of three World War Two collaborators, prize-winning historian Ian Buruma examines questions of truth as he investigates their complex and tangled lives.

Steeped in honey, Juventius,

your golden eyes, and as sweet too

when I press my lips to them -

three hundred thousand kisses

is not close to enough

For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first ti...

Peter Bellerby is the founder of Bellerby & Co. Globemakers, the world's only truly bespoke makers of globes. His team of skilled craftspeople make exquisite terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes for customers around the world. The story began after his attempt to find a special globe for his father's 80th birthday. Failing to find anything suitable, he decided to make one himself which took him on an extraordinary journey of rediscovering this forgotten craft.

The chapters...

In this book, reality always trumps fiction, truth always trumps myth. Get ready for a personal encounter with police inspectors and filles à la cuisse légère, Impressionists and art thieves, collaborators and résistants, Cubists and anarchists, artists’ models and terrorists, criminals and executioners.

In fascinating and often unknown stories, such as ‘The Chanel-Wertheimer Case’, ‘Lenin’s Yellow Jersey’ and ‘Selling the Eiffel Tower’, hundreds of Parisian souls are brou...

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 journey out of time along the biblical shores and the great sites of ancient Egypt, to the delicate rhythm of the ship...

From the medieval bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane ...

From the author of the critically acclaimed The Phantom Atlas and The Madman’s Library (Sunday Times Literature Book of the Year) comes a magnificent new illustrated work. From prehistoric carvings and ancient Egyptian statues, to medieval spell books and Victorian code-writing, this unique collection gathers a wealth of curious objects and surprising stories to trace the story of love through the ages.

Discover the royal marriage that crossed the boundary of death in 14th-century Port...