* In A World by Itself, six distinguished British historians offer the most definitive & compelling history of the British ...

A chronological history of the world, which begins with hunting & gathering, & continues with the most fundamental transition in the whole of human history
- the adoption of farming & the settled communities it produced. It then examines the beginning of 'civilisation' in the Americas & the Pacific, before their first contact with Europeans. Eurasia dominates the central part of the book, with the empires of China & the Mongols & the rise of Islam. This is followed by a section on world balance after Europeans had made contact with the long-established societies of the Americas & Asians, while the last part deals with the massive economic changes of the modern world. Themes include contact between different cultures & how history interlocks; the passing on of ideas, technology & religions; how 'civilisation' spread; the relationship between settled societies & nomadic groups; the importance of trade; how Europe moved from the periphery to the centre in the last 1, 000 years; & the coming of industrialisation.
...

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation & concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire & the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India & Japan, & therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters & gatherers & their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica & Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them & how technologies, ideas & the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China & of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations & social & economic change. ...

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation & concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire & the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India & Japan, & therefore the experience of the majority of the world's people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters & gatherers & their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica & Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them & how technologies, ideas & the world's great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China & of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations & social & economic change. ...

A packet of letters, found in an attic, leads a young girl into the world of love. The attic is in Montefort, a corroding country house in County Cork, which harbours a group of people held together by odd ties of kinship or habit, & haunted by the memory of its former owner who was killed in France as a young man. At Montefort, under the domination of the deceased's cousin & heiress, Antonia, & in the midst of an unusually hot & dry summer, young Jane pursues her own imaginings. Not far off an immigrant from another world
- a rich promiscuous, parvenue Englishwoman Lady Latterly, who will play a part in Jane's awakening.
...

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its ...

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its ...

Vasily Grossman's masterpiece Life & Fate is rated by many as the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century. Among its ...

How has Gay Talese found his subjects? How has he gotten them onto the page? What drives him to write? These are some of the questions at the heart of the narrative that combines memory, reflection, explanation & a satisfying obsession. I his trademark prose ...

From 1892, when he was eighteen, until 1949, when this book was first published, Somerset Maugham kept a notebook. It is without doubt one of his most important works. Part autobiographical, part confessional, packed with observations, confidences, experiments & jottings it is a rich & exhilarating admission into this great writer's workshop ...