The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. This book shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.

In this effortlessly erudite account, Russell Shorto traces the evolution of one of the world's greatest cities. From the building of its first canals in the 1300s, through the brutal struggle for Dutch independence and its golden age as the capital of a vast empire, to its complex present in which its cherished ideals of liberalism are under siege, Shorto provides an ever-surprising, intellectually entertaining story of Amsterdam. He also weaves in his own experiences of his adopted home. In...

The extraordinary adventure-filled story of how England came to own Manhattan in the seventeenth century

A new edition of Primo Levi's classic memoir of the Holocaust, with an introduction by David Baddiel, author of Jews Don't Count'With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose... One of the greatest human testaments of the era' Philip Roth'Levi's voice is es...

An enhanced facsimile of Jones's Icones, one of the most scientifically important and visually stunning works on butterflies and moths ever created.

A unique approach to Egyptian mythology that takes the reader on a tour up the Nile, stopping at the most famous monuments and vividly retelling the myths connected to each site.

A definitive reference that showcases the groundbreaking work of William Smith, the unsung ‘father of English geology’.