'Nothing so fully displays the grandeur of his mind as his immense and rare collections ... perhaps the fullest and most curious in the world', National Gazette, 1753 Hans Sloane (1660-1753) was the g
George IV spent most of his life waiting to become king, first a pleasure-loving and rebellious Prince of Wales during the 60-year reign of his father, George III, and for 10 years as Prince Regent, w
Edward I (1272-1307) is one of the most commanding of all English rulers. He fought in southwest France, in Wales, In Scotland and in northern France, he ruled with ruthlessness and confidence, undoin
In 1461 Edward Earl of March, a handsome 18-year old of massive charisma and ability, usurped the English throne from his vacant Lancastrian predecessor Henry VI. Ten years on, following outbreaks of
Richard II (1377-1399) came to the throne as a child, following the long, domineering, martial reign of his grandfather Edward III. He suffered from the disastrous combination of a most exalted sense
In 1570, after numerous plots and assassination attempts against her, Elizabeth I of England was excommunicated by the Pope. It was the beginning not only of the well-known identification of England w
Most of the time, the maths in our everyday lives works quietly behind the scenes. Until someone forgets to carry a '1' and a bridge collapses, a plane drops out of the sky or a building rocks when it
In his new intervention on cultural theory, Eagleton argues that the age of "high" theory has come to a close, and offers a candid assessment of its gains and losses, claiming that it has been silent
Why don't flight attendants get tipped? If you were a terrorist, how would you attack? And why does KFC always run out of fried chicken? Over the past decade, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ha
Known as 'the anarchy', the reign of Stephen (1135-1141) saw England plunged into a civil war that illuminated the fatal flaw in the powerful Norman monarchy, that without clear rules ordering success
Explains how the author found a radical solution to his need for freedom, one as ancient as the experiences of the hermits of old Russia: he decided to lock himself alone in a cabin in the middle taig
Explores New York from high to low, tracing the invisible threads that bind a handful of ambitious urban hustlers, from a Harvard-educated socialite running a high-end escort service to a Harlem crack
We live in small worlds. An astonishing literary debut and the first book in the monumental How To Live trilogy, How We Are explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. A story told in th
In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how by drawing on the ideas of communism, we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism. There i
The true story, told minute by minute, of the soldiers who defeated Napoleon - from Brendan Simms, acclaimed author of Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy Europe had been at war for over twenty years.
In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a s
James Lovelock, who has been hailed as `the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin' (Independent) and `the most profound scientific thinker of our
Zelda la Grange grew up in South Africa as a white Afrikaner who supported the rules of segregation. Yet just a few years after the end of Apartheid she would become a most trusted assistant to Nelson
