Upheaval - How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change by Jared Diamond

$24.99 AUD

Category: History

In his landmark international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel, and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now in the third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis. Diamond’s analysis of the ways i n which half a dozen modern countries that he knows well – Finland, Chile, Indonesia, Japan, Germany and Australia – have coped with crises, is shot through with reflections on the fragility of democracy. These nations coped, to varying degrees, through mechanisms such as acknowledgment of responsibility, painfully honest self-appraisal, and learning from models of other nations. Looking to the future, Diamond examines whether the United States, Japan, and the whole world are successfully coping with the grave crises they currently face. Can we learn from lessons of the past? Exhibiting the awe-inspiring grasp of history, geography, economics and anthropology that marks all Diamond's work, Upheaval reveals how both nations and individuals can become more resilient. The result is a book epic in scope, but also his most personal yet. ...Show more

A History of Ancient Greece in 50 Lives by David Stuttard

$21.99 AUD

Category: History

The Ratline by Philippe Sands

$24.99 AUD

Category: History

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Hypnotic, shocking and unputdownable' JOHN LE CARRÉ 'Remarkable' THE SUNDAY TIMES 'Breathtaking, gripping, shattering' ELIF SHAFAK 'A taut and finely crafted factual thriller' OBSERVER 'A triumph of research and brilliant storytelling' ANTONY BEEVOR 'Extraordinary' EVENING STANDARD In this riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War. Eventually the door is unlocked to a mystery that haunts Wächter's youngest son, who continues to believe his father was a good man - what happened to Otto Wächter while he was preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline', assisted by a Vatican bishop, and what was the explanation for his sudden and unexpected death? ...Show more

Barbarossa by Stewart Binns

$34.99 AUD

Category: History

Drawing on remarkable and never-before-seen material, the extraordinary story of one of the most horrific and devastating encounters of the Second World War. Sunday June 22nd 1941: 6 million Nazi troops marched on Moscow, with a brutal scorched-earth tactic that saw millions of Soviet citizens massacre d. A level of brutality only paralleled after the Soviet's triumphed at Stalingrad, and took mindless revenge as they marched back into Berlin. Beginning with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, to the appalling circumstances of the Fall of Berlin in April 1945 and told from the perspective of the people of Russia and Eastern Europe, Barbarossa is a heartrending story of tragedy, suffering and heroism. Stewart Binns draws on Russian archives to paint a uniquely intimate picture of the war from the Soviet side of this terrible conflict - presenting this dark moment in history in panoramic detail, matching sweeping accounts of tactical manoeuvres with harrowing personal stories of civilian hardship and bravery. ...Show more

Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History by Peter Furtado

$39.99 AUD

Category: History

When the great Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta visited Damascus in 1348 it was in the throes of a great plague which killed half of the population. Even so, he reported 'God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain 2,000, while in Cairo it reached the figure of 24,000 a day'. Humankind has always struggled with illness and the experiences of different cities and countries have been compared and connected for thousands of years. Plague, pestilence and pandemics have been part of the human story through the ages and have been reflected on at every turn. Many great authors have left us their eyewitness accounts or survivor stories. From the plagues of ancient Egypt recorded in Genesis to the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages to Covid-19, this anthology contains intimate, revelatory accounts. Across the world the array of human responses ranges from rage, despair, the blackest of humour, heartbreak and, finally, hard-won hope that it may all be over before so many of these events recede into the fog of history. Peter Furtado's anthology places the human experience at the centre of the story. ...Show more

Franklin and Washington - The Founding Partnership by Edward J. Larson

$32.99 AUD

Category: History

Larson's elegantly written dual biography reveals that the partnership of Franklin and Washington was indispensable to the success of the Revolution. --Gordon S. Wood From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a masterful, first-of-its-kind dual biography of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, illuminating their partnership's enduring importance. NATIONAL BESTSELLER - One of Washington Post's 10 Books to Read in February - One of USA Today's "Must-Read Books of Winter 2020 - One of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Spring 2020 Memoirs/BiographiesTheirs was a three-decade-long bond that, more than any other pairing, would forge the United States. Vastly different men, Benjamin Franklin--an abolitionist freethinker from the urban north--and George Washington--a slavehold-ing general from the agrarian south--were the indispensable authors of American independence and the two key partners in the attempt to craft a more perfect union at the Constitutional Convention, held in Franklin's Philadelphia and presided over by Washington. And yet their teamwork has been little remarked upon in the centuries since.Illuminating Franklin and Washington's relationship with striking new detail and energy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward J. Larson shows that theirs was truly an intimate working friendship that amplified the talents of each for collective advancement of the American project.During the French and Indian War, Franklin supplied the wagons for General Edward Braddock's ill-fated assault on Fort Duquesne, and Washington buried the general's body under the dirt road traveled by those retreating wagons. After long sup-porting British rule, both became key early proponents of inde-pendence. Rekindled during the Second Continental Congress in 1775, their friendship gained historical significance during the American Revolution, when Franklin led America's diplomatic mission in Europe (securing money and an alliance with France) and Washington commanded the Continental Army. Victory required both of these efforts to succeed, and success, in turn, required their mutual coordination and cooperation. In the 1780s, the two sought to strengthen the union, leading to the framing and ratification of the Constitution, the founding document that bears their stamp.Franklin and Washington--the two most revered figures in the early republic--staked their lives and fortunes on the American experiment in liberty and were committed to its preservation. Today the United States is the world's great super-power, and yet we also wrestle with the government Franklin and Washington created more than two centuries ago--the power of the executive branch, the principle of checks and balances, the electoral college--as well as the wounds of their compromise over slavery. Now, as the founding institutions appear under new stress, it is time to understand their origins through the fresh lens of Larson's Franklin & Washington, a major addition to the literature of the founding era. ...Show more

Strange Antics: A History of Seduction by Clement Knox

$24.99 AUD

Category: History

When is seduction about more than just sex? In this brilliantly original history, Clement Knox explores these questions as well as the philosophy, legality, politics, art and literature of a force that underwrites our world. In the first history of its kind, Clement Knox reassesses our idea of seductio n in a narrative that moves from Casanova's pursuit of pleasure, to America's racialised seduction laws, to the Nazi propaganda designed to stoke sexual panic, and up to #MeToo. Modern, big-thinking and enormously entertaining, Knox offers an extraordinary range of stories to chart the many guises of seduction, showing that our ideas about desire, courtship, and power have always developed in step with a changing world. ...Show more

Orcadia by Mark Edmonds

$22.99 AUD

Category: History

The Orcadian archipelago is a museum of archaeological wonders. Its largest island, Mainland, is home to some of the oldest and best-preserved Neolithic sites in Europe, the most famous of which are the passage grave of Maeshowe, the megaliths of Stenness, the Ring of Brodgar and the village of Skara Br ae - evidence of a dynamic society with connections binding Orkney to Ireland, to southern Britain and to the western margins of continental Europe. Despite 150 years of archaeological investigation, however, there is much that we do not know about the societies that created these sites. What historical background did they emerge from? What social and political interests did their monuments serve? And what was the nature of the links between Neolithic societies in Orkney and elsehwere? Following a broadly chronological narrative, and highlighting different lines of evidence as they unfold, Mark Edmonds traces the development of the Orcadian Neolithic from its beginnings in the early fourth millennium BC through to the end of the period nearly two thousand years later. Juxtaposing an engaging and accessible narrative with beautifully evocative photographs of Orkney and its monuments, he uses artefacts, architecture and the wider landscape to recreate the lives of Neolithic communities across the region. ...Show more

Princes of the Renaissance by Mary Hollingsworth

$59.99 AUD

Category: History

A beautifully illustrated history of the Renaissance told through the lives of its most important and influential patrons - the princely rulers of Italy's dynastic states and their families. From the late Middle Ages, the independent Italian city-states were taken over by powerful families who installed themselves as dynastic rulers. Inspired by the humanists, the princes of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy immersed themselves in the culture of antiquity, commissioning palaces, villas and churches inspired by the architecture of ancient Rome, and offering patronage to artists and writers. Many of these princes were related by blood or marriage, creating a web of alliances that held society together but whose tensions sometimes threatened to tear it apart. Thus were their lives defined as much by the waging of war as the nurturing of artistic talent. Mary Hollingsworth charts these developments in a sequence of chronological chapters, each centred on two or three main characters with a cast of minor ones - from Ludovico Sforza of Milan to Isabella d'Este of Mantua, from Pope Paul III to Emperor Charles V, and from the painters Mantegna and Titian to the architect Sansovino and the polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Princes of the Renaissanceis a vivid depiction of the lives and times of the élite whose power and patronage created the art and architecture of the Renaissance. In a narrative that is as rigorous and closely researched as it is accessible and informative, Mary Hollingsworth sets their aesthetic achievements in the context of the volatile, ever-shifting politics of a tumultuous period of history. PRAISE FOR MARY HOLLINGSWORTH: 'An excellent study of the Medici ... A careful, understated book that is never short on drama' Helen Castor on The Medici, a TelegraphBook of the Year 'A lucid and beautifully illustrated family history. In Hollingsworth's surefooted telling, this ruthless but enlightened family were at their best when they were true to the Florentine motto of 'profit and honour'' The Timeson The Medici, selected for The TimesBook of the Week ...Show more

Tip and Run: the Untold Tragedy of the First World War in Africa by Edward Paice

$49.99 AUD

Category: History

In the aftermath of the Great War the East Africa campaign was destined to be dismissed by many in Britain as a remote 'sideshow' in which only a handful of names and episodes - the Königsberg, von Lettow-Vorbeck, the 'Naval Expedition to Lake Tanganyika' - achieved any lasting notoriety. But to the oth er combatant powers - Germany, South Africa, India, Belgium and Portugal - it was, and would remain, a campaign of huge importance. Africa quite simply mattered. A 'small war', consisting of a few 'local affairs', was all that was expected in August 1914 as Britain moved to eliminate the threat to the high seas of German naval bases in Africa. But two weeks after the Armistice was signed in Europe British and German troops were still fighting in Africa after four years of what one campaign historian described as 'a war of extermination and attrition without parallel in modern times'. The expense of the campaign to the British Empire was immense, the Allied and German 'butchers bills' even greater. But the most tragic consequence of the two sides' deadly game of 'tip and run' was the devastation of an area five times the size of Germany, and civilian suffering on a scale unimaginable in Europe. Such was the cost of 'The White Man's Palaver', the final phase of the European conquest of Africa. 'Superb' Sunday Times 'Masterful' Daily Mail 'Gripping' Daily Telegraph ...Show more

The First Kingdom by Max Adams

$59.99 AUD

Category: History

The bestselling author of The King in the Northturns his attention to the obscure era of British history known as 'the age of Arthur'. Somewhere in the shadow time between the departure of the Roman legions in the early fifth century and the arrival in Kent of Augustine's Christian mission at the end of the sixth, the kingdoms of Early Medieval Britain were formed. But by whom? And out of what? In The First Kingdom, Max Adams scrutinizes the narrative of this period handed down to us by later historians and chroniclers. Stripping away the more lurid claims made for a warrior-hero named Arthur, he synthesises the research carried out over the last forty years to tease out the strands of reality from the myth. He reveals how archaeology has delivered evidence of a diverse and dynamic response to Britain's new-found independence, of material and intellectual trade between the Atlantic islands and the rest of Europe, and of the environmental context of those centuries. A skilfully wrought and intellectually probing investigation of the most mysterious epoch in our history, The First Kingdompresents an image of post-Roman Britain whose resolution is high enough to show the emergence of distinct political structures in the sixth century - polities that survive long enough to be embedded in the medieval landscape, recorded in the lines of river, road and watershed, and memorialised in place names. PRAISE FOR MAX ADAMS: 'A triumph. The most gripping portrait of seventh-century Britain that I have read ... A Game of Thronesin the Dark Ages' Tom Holland in The Timeson The King in the North 'Gripping, hugely enjoyable and deeply scholarly' History Today, Books of the Year, on The King in the North 'Brilliantly combines history and archaeological research ... A compelling read' The Ladyon Ælfred's Britain ...Show more

Cleopatra: The Queen who Challenged Rome and Conquered Eternity by ALBERTO ANGELA

$34.99 AUD

Category: History

One of Italy's most revered cultural figures reconstructs the extraordinary life of the legendary Cleopatra at the height of her power in this epic story of passion, intrigue, betrayal, and war.Our world today would not be the same without Cleopatra. While she is one of the most famous figures in histor y, the legendary Egyptian queen remains, in many ways, an enigma. In this mesmerizing history, Alberto Angela offers a fresh and dynamic portrait of this extraordinary ruler, revealing a strikingly modern woman born in an ancient era and skilled in the art of diplomacy and war, who would conquer the heart of a general-Marc Antony-and Rome itself. Cleopatra focuses on a twenty-year period that marked a sweeping change in Roman history, beginning with the assassination of Julius Caesar that led to the end of the Republic, and ending with the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra and the birth of the Augustan Empire. Angela brings the people, stories, customs, and traditions of this fascinating period alive as he transports us to the chaotic streets of the capital of the ancient world, the exotic port of Alexandria in Egypt, and to the bloody battlefields where an empire was won and lost. Meticulously researched and rich with vivid detail, this sweeping history, reminiscent of the works of Simon Schama, Mary Beard's SPQR, and Tom Holland's Rubicon, recreates this remarkable era and the woman at its turbulent center. ...Show more