Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus shows us where we're going. War is obsolete. You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict. Famine is disappearing. You are at more risk of obesity than starvation. Death is just a technical problem. Equality is out - but immortality is in. What does our future hold? Yuval Noah Harari, author of the bestselling phenomenon Sapiens envisions a not-too-distant world in which we face a new set of challenges. Homo Deus explores the...

The extraordinary story of William Adams, the real-life inspiration for the TV series Shogun.

An entertaining collection of strange, delightful and unexpectedly apt words from the origins of English.

From the famous Arthurian legends to monsters and faeries, The Little Book of Folklore explores the magical and mystical tales that have shaped the British Isles. Filled with stories of iconic characters like Robin Hood and Merlin, as well as lesser-known tales of giants and witches, this book is a beginner's guide to this world of myth and wonder.

Few concepts have become as charged over the past decades as antisemitism. In public debate, the word serves as a warning, an accusation, and at times even as a political weapon. But what do we actually mean by it?

From an abundance of information, misinformation and noise, Hans Wallage and Jaap Tanja bring back antisemitism to its essence: the hatred of Jews within a long history of persecution, exclusion, and stereotyping. They show how antisemitism continually takes on new forms (from medi...

During the sixties a wave of renewals surged through western civilisation, including the Catholic churches and convents. Almost everything changed in the life of religious: their work, their way of life, their appearance and their contacts with each other, and with others. Many left their congregation; others developed a new way of being religious within religious life. This book describes this process of change among the 'Sisters of Charity of Our Lady Mother of Mercy', a congregation with s...

This volume traces how colonial powers from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century built, adapted, and expanded systems of slave trading and coerced labour across different regions of the globe. Bringing together diverse geographical perspectives and source materials, the contributors investigate how European practices of enslavement—shaped above all by experiences in the Atlantic world—were transferred to, or reshaped by, societies in the Indian Ocean and Asia. In examining the manageme...

Leiden University was founded as an institution that would embody a particular set of academic ethics that sought to improve society through the acquisition of knowledge. In this book, author Willem Otterspeer draws on the idea of Leiden as 'a “bastion of liberty”' and proposes that concepts such as 'equilibrium' and 'scale' are key to understanding the university as an institution, ultimately showing how universities are a form of social capital, one of Western society’s answers to the...