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 Frank.

James Walvin offers a new and an original interpretation of the barbaric world of slavery and of the historic end to the slave trade in April 1807. John Newton (1725-1807), author of 'Amazing Grace', was a slave captain who marshalled his human cargoes with a brutality that he looked back on with shame and contrition.

Before long, with the enterprising nuns working tirelessly as typesetters, the Ripoli Press began printing a series of books and pamphlets that triggered an explosion of ideas in politics, philosophy and religion.

Read this specially designed new edition of Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-prize winning exploration of what makes us human. Why has human history unfolded so differently across the globe?

Yuval Noah Harari's bestselling phenomenon now in a beautifully packaged new special edition. Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

Read the devastating story of the Spanish flu - the twentieth century's greatest killer – and discover what it can teach us about the current Covid-19 pandemic. 'Both a saga of tragedies and a detective story...