Europe

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1961, this worldwide bestselling classic chronicles the most infamous era of our times.

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

Using a range of forgotten Afghan and Indian sources, William Dalrymple's masterful retelling of Britain's greatest imperial disaster is a powerful parable of colonial ambition and cultural collision, folly and hubris. Return of a King is history at its most urgent and important....

Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike....

Procopius appeared to be a loyal part of the Byzantine establishment, his official writing glorifying the deeds of the Emperor Justinian (d. AD 565). However, he also produced a work that he knew could never be published within the Emperor’s lifetime: The Secret History....

American journalist and author William L. Shirer was a war correspondent for six years in Nazi Germany, having a front-row seat to Hitler’s rise in influence and power....

The Mongol queens of the thirteenth century ruled the greatest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring”....

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

The Campaigns of Alexander, also titled The Anabasis of Alexander, is a history of Alexander the Great of Macedon, focusing on his conquest of the Persian Empire. Composed by Arrian of Nicomedia in the second century AD, the work comprises seven books.... 

What can we learn from the stunning rise and mysterious death of the ancient world’s greatest conqueror? An acclaimed biographer reconstructs the life of Alexander the Great in this magisterial revisionist portrait....

In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides the definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the Muqaddima....

This book explores why there is a major war again in Europe. Putin's actions need to be understood if not forgiven. With the Ukraine conflict seen as a proxy war of NATO versus Russia, how likely is the fighting to spread?

This broad and panoramic series, ripe with the telling detail on which history can turn, will help you pull an enormous sweep of history together into one coherent framework....

The Renaissance chronicles the history of Italy from1304 to 1576. In this masterful work, listeners will encounter the poets Petrarch and Boccaccio, the fathers of the Renaissance....

Take a probing historical journey through the recent history and near future of a key world power....

The fourth volume in Will Durant's Pulitzer Prize-winning series, The Age of Faith surveys the medieval achievements and modern significance of Christian, Islamic, and Judaic life and culture....

The Age of Voltaire, the ninth volume of The Story of Civilization, is an in-depth examination of France and England in the first half of the 18th century....

The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty—four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s....

History’s most unlikely friendship - this is the astonishing story of Queen Victoria and her dearest companion, the young Indian Munshi Abdul Karim....

Penguin presents the unabridged audiobook edition of Empire by Niall Ferguson, read by Jonathan Keeble....

Leonardo's Brain uses Da Vinci as a starting point for an exploration of human creativity....

Long sources of mystery, imagination, and inspiration, the myths and history of the ancient Mediterranean have given rise to artistic, religious, cultural, and intellectual traditions....

In Search of the Dark Ages is an unrivalled exploration of the origins of English identity, and the best-selling book that established Michael Wood as one of Britain's leading historians....

In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the Gulag....

In the tradition of The Rape of Nanking and A Problem from Hell, this account will change the way we think of Churchill and World War II....

Discover the prodigious global influence of il bel paese in this star-studded retelling of Italy's past-from a foremost author of historic Italy. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced book.

In England, Tom Baldwin, bestselling biographer of Keir Starmer, and Marc Stears, influential think tank head, unravel seven myths that have distorted ideas of this country and provided ammunition for charlatans or culture warriors from both left and right. Instead of vainly promising to solve everything all at once, Baldwin and Stears provide clues for how a humbler, less grandiose, set of ideas rooted in real lives can help fix some of the things that have gone so badly wrong in recent years.

In this fascinating and exhaustively researched book, the first of its kind in the English language, Tom Williams brings to life French football’s chequered coming of age over the last 40 years. Featuring exclusive interviews with great figures of the French game such as Alain Giresse, Jean-Pierre Papin, Emmanuel Petit and Blaise Matuidi, and with a cast of characters that also includes Michel Platini, Thierry Henry, Karim Benzema, Chris Waddle and Lionel Messi, it's a book no football fan will want to miss.

世界暦と黙示的文学が終末意識を突き動かすとき，ヨーロッパの歴史は大きく躍動した．古代末期に源流をもつ地中海＝ヨーロッパの歴史を，人びとを駆動し「近代」をも産み落とした〈力〉の真相とともに探究する．

In this brilliant, myth-busting account, Rodric Braithwaite, the former British ambassador to Moscow, challenges much of what we know about the Soviets in Afghanistan. He provides an inside look at this little-understood episode, using first-hand accounts and piercing analysis to show the war as it was fought and experienced by the Russians.

The end of Roman Britain and the arrival of the invading Saxons forms part of the most disruptive period in Britain's history. Centuries of relative stability as a Roman province gave way to an age of conquest and destruction. It is a period which is difficult to comprehend, coming at the end of the Roman era and in the pre-dawn of the Medieval. It is a Dark Age, both in terms of our apparent lack of source material and in our understanding of events.

Ils ont commencé comme pèlerins, ont combattu comme moines guerriers, se sont enrichis comme banquiers et ont fini sur le bûcher comme hérétiques : Dan Jones a relu les sources sur les Templiers et offre avec ce livre un chef-d'œuvre de narration historique : à la pointe de la recherche, avec un flair certain pour les épisodes extraordinaires et passionnant de la première à la dernière page.

Who are the English? Today, the dominant story told about our national history solely serves the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of 'Englishness' are cheerleaders for isolationism and imperial nostalgia. But there is another story, equally compelling, about who we are: about the English people's radical inclusivity, their ancient commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all.

Inhalt: Londoner Vergnügungen und Ergötzlichkeiten charakterisiert amüsant die englische Mittelklasse, deren Feierabend- und Wochenendaktivitäten durch die Konstanz bzw. Regelmäßigkeit der Abläufe das mehr oder weniger ewig Gleiche in winzigen Variationen reflektiert. Der Strom richtet den Fokus auf die Wassersportbegeisterung der Londoner und zwar in aktiver wie passiver Weise. Zu einer Zeit als Die Morgenpostkutschen ein alternatives Beförderungsinstrument der Großstadt abbildeten, war es mit gewissen Unannehmlichkeiten verbunden sich einen Platz in selbigen zu sichern.

"My Life in the Red Army" by Fred Virski offers a rare, firsthand account of a soldier's experiences within the Soviet military machine during a critical period of the 20th century. Through the lens of Virski's personal journey, the book sheds light on the inner workings, struggles, and day-to-day life of the Red Army from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.

Das neue Hörbuch von Katja Eichinger über den Sehnsuchtsort Côte d'Azur. Ultramarinblaues Meer, weiße Strandpromenaden, Palmen, Mimosen und ein einzigartiges Licht: die Côte d'Azur. Nirgends sonst ist die Dichte der Geschichten und der Künstlerinnen und Künstler, die sie verewigt haben, höher. Nietzsche war hier, Coco Chanel, Marlene Dietrich, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, James Baldwin und die Rolling Stones. Ein Ort, an dem Extreme und Exzess, die Yachten und Bauten der Superreichen, die Glitterati und Easyjet-Touristen vor der unbeeindruckt bezaubernden Natur aufeinandertreffen.

There are many reasons to be fascinated by Germany: forests, architecture and fairy tales, not to mention its history and inhabitants’ penchant for very peculiar food. Our distant and often maligned cousin, this is a place in which innumerable strange characters have held power, in which a chaotic jigsaw of borders have moved about seemingly at random, and which at the dark heart of the 20th century fell into the hands of truly terrible forces. And now Simon Winder is here to tell us everything else there is to know about this mesmerizing, tortured and endlessly fascinating country.

In AD 843, the three surviving grandsons of the great Emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited what became France, another Germany and the third Lotharingia: the chunk that initially divided the other two. The dynamic between these three great zones has dictated much of our subsequent fate.

For centuries much of Europe was in the hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off – through luck, guile and sheer mulishness – any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere – indeed the history of Europe hardly makes sense without them.

Ольга Тогоева — специалист по истории средневековой Франции, доктор исторических наук, главный научный сотрудник Института всеобщей истории РАН. В книге Истинная правда. Языки средневекового правосудия на материале архивов Парижского парламента, королевской тюрьмы Шатле, церковных и сеньориальных судов исследуется проблема взаимоотношений судебной власти и простых обывателей во Франции эпохи позднего Средневековья. Каковы особенности поведения и речи обвиняемых в зале суда, их отношение к процессуальному и уголовному праву? Как воспринимают судьи собственную власть?