In the wake of Brexit, Ian Morris chronicles the ten-thousand-year history of Britain’s relationship to Europe as it has changed in the context of a globalizing world.
When Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016, the 48 percent who wanted to stay and the 52 percent who wanted to go each accused the other of stupidity, fraud, and treason. […Learn More]
Hailed as the “first freedom,” free speech is the bedrock of democracy. But it is a challenging principle, subject to erosion in times of upheaval. Today, in democracies and authoritarian states around the world, it is on the retreat.
In Free Speech, Jacob Mchangama traces the riveting legal, political, and cultural history of this idea. Through captivating stories of free speech’s many defenders […Learn More]
In this essential and “enlightening” (The New York Times Book Review) work, Barry Strauss tells the story of the Roman Empire from rise to reinvention, from Augustus, who founded the empire, to Constantine, who made it Christian and moved the capital east to Constantinople.
During these centuries Rome gained in splendor and territory, then lost both. By the fourth century, the time of Constantine, the Roman Empire had changed so dramatically in geography, ethnicity, religion, and culture that it would have been virtually unrecognizable to Augustus. […Learn More]
A revelatory history of Antwerp—from its rise to a world city to its fall in the Spanish Fury—by the New York Times Notable author of The Edge of the World.
Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. […Learn More]
At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. […Learn More]
When the once-mighty city of Rome was sacked by barbarians in 410 and lay in ruins, it signaled the end of an era–and the beginning of a thousand years of profound transformation. In a gripping narrative bursting with big names—from Sts Augustine and Attila the Hun to the Prophet Muhammad and Eleanor of Aquitaine—Dan Jones charges through the history of the Middle Ages. Powers and Thrones takes readers on a journey through an emerging Europe, the great capitals of late Antiquity, as well as the influential cities of the Islamic West, and culminates in the first European voyages to the Americas. […Learn More]
World War I was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation.
To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. […Learn More]
A revelatory history of the transformational decade that followed World War II, when Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust. This book received wide acclaim and spent forty-eight weeks on the best-seller list in Germany when it was published there in 2019. […Learn More]
What is it about Brittany that makes it such a favourite destination for the British?
To answer this question, Bretons and Britons explores the long history of the Bretons, from the time of the first farmers around 5400 BC to the present, and the very close relationship they have had with their British neighbours throughout this time. More than simply a history of a people, Bretons and Britons is also the author’s homage to a country and a people he has come to admire over decades of engagement. […Learn More]