General

In AD 378 the Roman Empire had been the unrivalled superpower of Europe for well over four hundred years. And yet, August that year saw a small group of German-speaking asylum-seekers rout a vast Imperial army at Hadrianople, killing the Emperor and...

Latin inscriptions can appear daunting - a jumble of letters without any structure or meaning. However, once you know how, most are easy to read as they follow strict rules of grammar and abbreviation. This book will teach readers how to 'decipher' them...

Histories of the Light Division have tended to be incomplete, being based on memoirs of a few well known diarists, principally from the 95th Rifles. The authors of this book, the first volume of two, have sought memoirs from across the division,...

Bill Bellamy was a young officer in the 8th King's Royal Irish Hussars from 1943 to 1955. He served in 7th Armoured Division in the North West Europe campaign, landing in Normandy on D+3, fought throughout the Battle for Normandy and into the Low...

Ancient Greek sculpture seems to have a timeless quality - provoking reactions that may range from awe to alienation. Yet it was a particular product of its age: and to know how and why it was once created is to embark upon an understanding of its...

What does it mean to write a history of the night? Evening's Empire is a fascinating study of the myriad ways in which early modern people understood, experienced, and transformed the night. Using diaries, letters, and legal records together with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781785374111Author John BreslinFormat HardbackPage Count 272Imprint Merrion PressPublisher Merrion Press

Bestselling author Philip Matyszak explores how the Greeks and Romans used magic, who performed it - and why. Magic was everywhere in the ancient world. The supernatural abounded, turning flowers into fruit and caterpillars into butterflies. Magic...

'Majestic, ambitious' Literary Review ____________________________________ We are endlessly fascinated by the French. We are fascinated by their way of life, their creativity and sophistication, and even their insistence that they are exceptional. But...

What happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience? In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although...

Brilliant horsemen and great fighters, the Scythians were nomadic horsemen who ranged wide across the grasslands of the Asian steppe from the Altai mountains in the east to the Great Hungarian Plain in the first millennium BC. Their steppe homeland...

In The Secrets of Alchemy, Lawrence M. Principe, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, brings alchemy out of the shadows and restores it to its important place in human history and culture. By surveying what alchemy was and how it began,...

No other soldier has provoked as much anger or as much fervour as Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he a monster, driven on by an endless, ruinous quest for military adventure - or was he a social and political visionary, brought down by petty reactionaries...

Edward Gibbon's six-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) is among the most magnificent and ambitious narratives in European literature. Its subject is the fate of one of the world's greatest civilizations over thirteen...

A short but powerful study of one of the great watersheds of European historyAlthough for generations the Reformation was regarded as a major turning point in European history, in recent years its significance has been downgraded. But in this book...

For over three and a half years, from 1779 to 1783, the tiny territory of Gibraltar was besieged and blockaded, on land and at sea, by the overwhelming forces of Spain and France. It became the longest siege in British history, and the obsession with...

Swansong 1945 chronicles four significant days in the last three weeks of WWII: 20 April, Hitler's last birthday; 25 April, when American and Soviet troops first met at the Elbe; 30 April, the day Hitler committed suicide; and 8 May, the day of the...

The kind of events that took place in the great free government of the ancient world may, by reason of unchanging human nature, be repeated in the modern world. The course that Athens followed can be to us not only a record of distant and forgotten...

A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne...

This is a short and succinct summary of the unique position of Roman law in European culture by one of the world's leading legal historians. Peter Stein's masterly study assesses the impact of Roman law in the ancient world, and its continued unifying...

A sweeping narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The Fall of the Roman Empire has been a best-selling subject since the 18th century. Since then, over 200 very diverse reasons have been advocated for the collapse of the western half of...

The story of poison is the story of power... For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781594039355Author Rupert DarwallFormat HardbackPage Count 352Imprint Encounter Books,USAPublisher Encounter Books,USA

The People's Peace: Britain since 1945 is the first comprehensive study by a professional historian of British history from 1945 to the present day. It examines the transformation of post-war Britain from the planning enthusiasm of 1945 to the rise of...

General Bernard Law Montgomery, affectionately known as "Monty," exerted an influence on the Canadian Army more lasting than that of any other Second World War commander. In 1942 he assumed responsibility for the exercise and training of Canadian...

In Rome the echoes of the past resound clearly in its palaces and monuments, and in the remains of the ancient imperial city. But another presence has dominated Rome for 2,000 years -the pope, whose actions and influence echo down the ages. In this epic...

This book is a major survey of urbanization and the making of modern Europe from the mid-eighteenth century to the First World War. During these years Europe experienced startling rates of urbanization, with the populations of numerous cities growing by...

In this highly original and now classic text, Ian Buruma explores and compares how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their violent pasts, and investigates the painful realities of living with guilt, and with its denial.As Buruma...

Neil Kent's book sweeps through Sweden's history from the Stone Age to the present day. Early coverage includes Viking hegemony, the Scandinavian Union, the Reformation and Sweden's political zenith as Europe's greatest superpower in the seventeenth...

A perennial favourite, Edith Hamilton's best-selling The Greek Way captures with "Homeric power and simplicity" (The New York Times) the spirit of the golden age of Greece in the fifth century BC, the time of its highest achievements. She explores the...

Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire compresses thirteen turbulent centuries into an epic narrative shot through with insight, irony and incisive character analysis. Sceptical about Christianity, sympathetic to the barbarian invaders and...

There has been a strong interest in Roman roads in Britain for centuries and a vast amount of information has been accumulated from observation and excavation. For the first time this new study analyses the data systematically and evaluates it from a...

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at...

Geert Mak spent the year 1999 criss-crossing the continent, tracing the history of Europe from Verdun to Berlin, St Petersburg to Auschwitz, Kiev to Srebrenica. He set off in search of evidence and witnesses, looking to define the condition of Europe at...

The World Crisis is considered by many to be Winston S. Churchill's literary masterpiece. Published across five volumes between 1923 and 1931, Churchill here tells the story of The Great War, from its origins to the long shadow it cast on the following...

"Another Man's Shoes" is a gripping first-hand account of a Norwegian scientist's escape from German custody during the Second World War after his arrest for spying. Written just after the war, Sven Somme vividly describes his 200-mile trek across the...

"Another Man's Shoes" is a gripping first-hand account of a Norwegian scientist's escape from German custody during the Second World War after his arrest for spying. Written just after the war, Sven Somme vividly describes his 200-mile trek across the...

On June 22, 1941, Hitler began what would be the most important campaign of the European theater. The war against the Soviet Union would leave tens of millions of Soviet citizens dead and large parts of the country in ruins. The death and destruction...

In blood-soaked lore handed down the centuries, the vampire is a monster of endless fascination: from Bram Stoker's "Dracula" to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", this seductive lover of blood haunts popular culture and inhabits our darkest imaginings. The...

Histories you can trust. The Renaissance is one of the most celebrated periods in European history. But when did it begin? When did it end? And what did it include? Traditionally regarded as a revival of classical art and learning, centred upon...