Showing titles in Europe

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style. Perhaps most famously, the book tells the heroic tale of the Greeks' resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, king of Persia. Here are not only the great battles - Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis - but also penetrating human insight and a powerful sense of epic destiny at work.

One of the last cavalry units to ride horses into battle, the Sherwood Rangers were transformed into a “mechanized cavalry” of tanks in 1942. After winning acclaim in the North African campaign, they spearheaded one of the D-Day landings in Normandy and became the first British troops to cross into Germany. Their courage, skill, and tenacity contributed mightily to the surrender of Germany in 1945.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Thomas Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to...

An extraordinary account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination “A galloping tour of Christianity’s influence across the last 2,000 years.” —New York Times Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How...

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz NAMED ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2020 BY The Washington Post HuffPost The Seattle Times Lit Hub...

A candid and brutal account of murder, abduction, and violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland—from two men on opposite sides of the conflict.

In this compelling, eye-opening story of six women who exercised power against the odds-and one, Jane Grey, who never got the chance-acclaimed historian Helen Castor explores the provocative subject of women and power in England. “The boy in the bed was just fifteen years old. He had been...

The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world. Rubicon paints a vivid portrait of the Republic at the climax of its greatness—the same greatness which would herald the catastrophe of its fall.

The richness of the Irish language is closely tied to the natural landscape and offers a more magical way of seeing the world. Most people associate Britain and Ireland with the English language, a vast, sprawling linguistic tree with roots in Latin, French, and German. But the inhabitants of these islands originally spoke another tongue. Look closely enough and English contains traces of the Celtic soil from which it sprung, found in words like bog, loch, cairn, and crag. Today, this heritage can be found nowhere more powerfully than in modern-day Gaelic.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Drawing on exhaustive research, this “masterful narrative history” (Booklist) details how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world. “Thundering, magnificent...

In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of pilgrimage and ritual. Told in Macfarlane’s distinctive voice, The Old Ways folds together natural history, cartography, geology, archaeology, and literature.

England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest takes you through the mists of time to the rugged landscape of the British Isles. Over the course of 24 sweeping lectures, Professor Jennifer Paxton of The Catholic University of America surveys the forging of a great nation from a series of warring kingdoms and migrating peoples. From Germanic tribes to Viking invasions to Irish missionaries, she brings to life an underexamined time and place.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

The Vikings evoke striking images of horned helmets, battle axes, and merciless coastal raids. Remembered for their shocking brutality and impressive naval prowess, these marauding pirates from the North have inspired poetry, fantasy novels, plays, symphonies, and even comic book heroes over the last 12 centuries. But do any of these enduring tropes reflect reality? Who were the Vikings really? What do we know about the period that bears their name? Explore these questions and more in The Viking Age, a 12-lecture course that corrects the record on a transformative period in world history.

"Ambitious... With meticulous research and in lively style, Jones presents us with the man beyond the Shakespeare character."—The New York Times “The best biography yet of England’s greatest king."—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and Jerusalem The New York Times...

New York Times bestselling author and master of nonfiction spy thrillers Larry Loftis writes the first major biography of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch watchmaker who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews during WWII—at the cost of losing her family and being sent to a concentration camp, only to...

Forget the image of Denmark as just a land of Vikings! While their legendary adventures capture our imagination today, this small Nordic nation boasts a far richer and more influential history–one where it consistently "punched above its weight."

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city’s descent into utter annihilation In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war...

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler’s son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry―a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism.