European history

This is a new history of the region known as Kyivan Rus', a state in eastern and northern Europe from the late ninth to the mid-sixteenth century that encompassed a variety of polities and peoples, including Lithuanian, Polish, Ottoman and...

The English Actor charts the uniquely English approach to stagecraft. In thirty chapters, Peter Ackroyd describes, with superb narrative skill, the genesis of acting - deriving from the Church tradition of Mystery Plays - through the flourishing of the...

'England' and 'Englishness' have received much attention in the twenty-first century, not least in debates over Brexit. About England explores how these concepts have been imagined since the 1960s, covering themes...

A history of pets and their companions in Britain from the Victorians to today.Pet Revolution tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets we keep, as well as how we relate to and care for them, has...

This book is the first history of medieval European anatomical images. Richly illustrated, The Art of Anatomy in Medieval Europe explores the many ways in which medieval surgeons, doctors, monks, and artists understood and depicted human anatomy. Taylor...

A recreation of medieval people's experience of time.Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people's experience of time: as continuous and discontinuous, linear and cyclical, embracing Creation and Judgement, shrinking to...

"Hausgeister!is as creepy as it is beautiful. Informative and fascinating, I thoroughly enjoyed this little gem."- BROMEnter the world of ancient Germany where household spirits once held sway and linger within the tales that we know and love today.The...

In the 1880s two Edinburgh architects began to survey, measure and sketch the castles of Scotland, travelling the length and breadth of the country on trains, bicycles and on foot. Together they produced the five magnificent volumes of The Castellated...

A witty and concise look at the beginnings of English history, when the nation consolidated after clashes between the Saxons and invading Vikings.In 871, three of England's four kingdoms were overrun by Vikings, the ruthless, all-conquering Scandinavian...

These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka Ugresic, winner of the Neustadt International Prize and one of Europe's most influential writers, with biting humor and a multitude of cultural references--from La La Land and Dawn of the Planet...

How do we move from defensive tactics that respond to the latest stages of capitalist urbanization, to transformative, strategic revolts, attacking the root causes and putting into practice alternative forms of urban life? One proposal for such a...

From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s ItalyFlashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and...

From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerising account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects.Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used in worship a plethora of objects, not only...

"Duras's language and writing shine like crystals."-The New Yorker"A spectacular success. . . . Duras is at the height of her powers."-Edmund WhiteAvailable for the first time in English, Abahn Sabana David is a late-career masterpiece from one of...

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."-The Washington PostIt all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather,...

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia during the 1920s and 30s, and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, hides in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique...

Featuring the thoughts of more than 180 players who have represented Scotland since the very first Test match in 1871 all the way through to the present day,Behind the Thistlegives a unique insight into the drama and emotion of playing for Scotland in...

A new edition in full colour, reproducing the original illustrations from 1946. At last she reached the brow of the hill...now the country opened out below her and she looked down into a wide and lovely valley...Still patched with snow the little fields...

In 1935 Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a well-established novelist, reviewer, columnist and feminist wit. She was part of the 'intellectual aristocracy' of England, but was also passionately interested in everyday life and its foolishnesses. Personal...

The Highland Clearances are a well-documented episode in Scotland's past but they were not unique. The process began in the Scottish Lowlands nearly a century before, when tens of thousands of people significantly more than were later exiled form the...

In this informative and beautifully illustrated book, Carol Foreman traces Glasgow's history through buildings which have been demolished, but which once played a central part in the life of the city. Beginning with the medieval age, she goes on to look...

The creation of large new tracts of forest, together with the development of a modern wood processing sector, was the single biggest transformation to occur in the Scottish countryside during the twentieth century. While the environmental and landscape...

The archipelagic kingdoms of Man and the Isles that flourished from the last quarter of the eleventh century down to the middle of the thirteenth century represent two forgotten kingdoms of the medieval British Isles. They were ruled by powerful...

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in...

'Long Live Freedom!'-Hans Scholl's last words before his executionThe White Rose (die Weie Rose) resistance circle was a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich who in the early 1940s secretly wrote and...

The University Archives was established in 1634. Based in the Bodleian Library, it is the institutional archive of Oxford University, holding records which span just over 800 years, documenting the University's activities and decisions throughout that...

What is life? This was a question of particular concern for Mary Shelley and her contemporaries. But how did she, and her fellow Romantic writers, incorporate this debate into their work, and how much were they influenced by contemporary science,...

How did a library founded over 400 years ago grow to become the world-renowned institution it is today, home to over thirteen million items? From its foundation by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 to the opening of the Weston Library in 2015, this...

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval...

At first sight, this intriguing map appears to offer a guide to the pubs of Victorian Oxford, designed in a similar way to tourist maps today. Beerhouses, breweries and other licensed premises are all shown, clustered around a specific part of the city...

In the seventeenth century most English households had gardens. These gardens were not merely ornamental, even the most elaborate and fashionable gardens had areas set aside for growing herbs, fruit, vegetables, and flowers for domestic...

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs.Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna...

Pronunciation governs our regional and social identity more powerfully than any other aspect of spoken language. No wonder, then, that it has attracted most attention from satirists. In this intriguing book, David Crystal shows how our feelings about...

In late medieval England, ordinary people, apothecaries and physicians gathered up practical medical tips for everyday use. While some were sensible herbal cures, many were weird and wonderful. This book selects some of the most revolting or remarkable...

Early manuscripts in the English language include religious works, plays, romances, poetry and songs, as well as charms, notebooks, science and medieval medicine. How did scribes choose to arrange the words and images on the page in each manuscript? How...

Based mainly on examples in the Bodleian Library, this lavishly illustrated account tells the story of manuscript production from the early Middle Ages to the high Renaissance. Each stage of production is described, from the preparation of the parchment,...

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution irrevocably changed the course of history, with consequences still being felt a century later. This book offers a dramatic depiction of the chaotic events of the revolution, drawn from selected firsthand accounts. Assembling...

English spas have a long and steamy history, from the thermal baths of Aquae Sulis in Bath to the stews of Southwark, the elegant pump rooms of Cheltenham and Buxton to the Victorian mania for hydrotherapy and Turkish hammams.The Secret History of...

For the first six centuries from the institution's foundation, Latin was the language spoken and written at the University of Oxford. It's no surprise, then, to find that the inscriptions carved into the monuments, colleges and municipal buildings of the...

From the tale of the goatherd whose animals became frisky on coffee berries to a duchess with a goblet of poisoned chocolate, this book, illustrated with eighteenth-century satirical cartoons and early advertisements, tells the extraordinary story of our...

Contrary to popular belief, the author of the first English dictionary is not Samuel Johnson, but Robert Cawdrey, who published his Table Alphabeticall in 1604 - nearly 150 years before Johnson's dictionary.Here is a real treat for lovers of English -...

Published to mark the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, this book celebrates the greatest of English novelists by illustrating some of his abiding preoccupations. Prompted by quotations from the novels and other writings, each themed chapter explores...

This entertaining little book veers from savage satire to idealized adoration, and offers a refreshingly irreverent overview of British rulers all the way from Caesar to George, Prince of Wales, the future king.Henry Eighth from 1509 to 1547 - in his...

Shepherd Mead, bestselling author of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, came to live in England with his family in 1958. Six years later he published a satirical handbook for fellow Americans to guide them through the nuances of British...

Ralph Ayres was head cook at New College in the 1770s. This book is a fascinating insight into the eighteenth-century kitchen, a period of great interest to social and culinary historians, and includes recipes for famous dishes such as Quaking Pudding,...

'Iceland's 1100 Years' recounts the history of a society on the margin of Europe as well as on the margin of reaching the size and wealth of a proper state. Iceland is unique among the European societies in being founded as late as the Viking Age, and in...

The history of the Latvian people begins some four and a half millennia ago with the arrival of the proto-Baltic Indo-Europeans to northern Europe. One branch of these migrants coalesced into a community which evolved a distinctive and remarkably robust...