The untold story of how British-French rivalry drew the battle-lines of the modern Middle East

What did medieval people call the animals they lived and worked with? Why did they give them the names they did? This book sets out to answer these questions.

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

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 vibrant and evocative account of how the great scientific ideas of the ancient world were lost and found.

‘Popular history at its very best, thought-provoking and accessible. Underpinned by serious research, and written with panache, it summons up a vanished world’ SUNDAY TELEGRAPH