World

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws....

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us....

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

A Radio 4 Book Club Selection.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson's fascinating and humorous quest to understand everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization....

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

Otto English dives into the hidden lives of some of history's biggest names. Separating the myth-builders from the fraudsters and celebrating some of the genuine unsung heroes from our history, Fake Heroes exposes the truth of the past and helps us understand why that matters today....

Meet Don. Don is a genetics professor....

From the best-selling author of The Templars, Dan Jones' epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built....

Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus looked to the future. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century explores the present....

From a leading expert in Japanese history, this is one of the first full histories of the art and culture of the Samurai warrior....

For centuries, fame and fortune was to be found in the west—in the New World of the Americas. Today, it is the east which calls out to those in search of adventure and riches....

Graham Hancock's multi-million best seller Fingerprints of the Gods remains an astonishing, deeply controversial, wide-ranging investigation of the mysteries of our past and the evidence for Earth's lost civilisation....

In The Earth Transformed, ground-breaking historian Peter Frankopan shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic change and their effects on us are not new....

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’—that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever.....

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilisation, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts....

When Autobiography of a Yogi first appeared in 1946, it was acclaimed as a landmark work in its field....

In Ask a Historian, the author, BBC podcaster and public historian Greg Jenner provides answers to things you always wondered about but didn't know who to ask....

From his illegitimate birth in a small Austrian village to his fiery death in a bunker under the Reich chancellery in Berlin, Adolf Hitler left a murky trail....

A fun, authoritative and alternative history of the world that exposes some of the biggest lies ever told and how they've been used over time....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history....

Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history....

From his perspective in Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli's aim in this classic work was to resolve conflict with the ruling prince, Lorenzo de Medici....

We have never had so much information at our fingertips, and yet most of us simply don't understand how our world really works. Professor Vaclav Smil is not a pessimist or an optimist, he is a scientist, and this book is a much-needed reality check on a wide range of topics....

Harry Potter: A History of Magic reveals some of the hidden stories behind real-world magic and explores some of J.K. Rowling's magical inventions alongside their folkloric, cultural and historical forebears.... 

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

We are a wonder of evolution. Powerful yet dextrous, instinctive yet thoughtful, we are expert communicators and innovators. Our exceptional abilities have created the civilisation we know today. But we're also deeply flawed. Our bodies break, choke and fail, whether we're kings or peasants. Diseases thwart our boldest plans. Our psychological biases have been at the root of terrible decisions in both war and peacetime. This extraordinary contradiction is the essence of what it means to be human - the sum total of our frailties and our faculties.

A total of 305,000 enslaved Africans arrived in the New World aboard American vessels over a span of two hundred years as American merchants and mariners sailed to Africa and to the Caribbean to acquire and sell captives. Using exhaustive archival research, including many collections that have never been used before, historian Sean M. Kelley argues that slave trading needs to be seen as integral to the larger story of American slavery.

Cândido Rondon is by any measure the greatest tropical explorer in history. Between 1890 and 1930, he navigated scores of previously unmapped rivers, traversed untrodden mountain ranges, and hacked his way through jungles so inhospitable that even native peoples had avoided them—and led Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, on their celebrated "River of Doubt" journey in 1913-14. Originally published in Brazil, Into the Amazon is the first comprehensive biography of the Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, stateseman, and conservationist.

Having exposed some of the greatest lies ever told in Fake History, journalist Otto English turns his attention to some of history's biggest (and most beloved) figures. Whether it's virtuous leaders in just wars, martyrs sacrificing all for a cause, or innovators changing the world for the better, down the centuries supposedly great men and women have risen to become household names, martyrs, demigods, saints and heroes. But just how deserving are they of their reputations? Otto English dives into the hidden lives of some of history's biggest names.

Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, suddenly, around the turn of the millennium, history reversed. Faced with economic stagnation and internal political division, the West has found itself in freefall. This is not the first time the global order has witnessed such a dramatic rise and fall. The Roman Empire followed a similar arc from dizzying power to disintegration - a fact that is more than a strange historical coincidence.

Philosophy, art, democracy, language, even computers—the glories of Greek civilization have shaped our world even more profoundly than we realize. Pericles and the Parthenon may be familiar, but what of Epaminondas, the Theban general who saved the Greek world from Spartan tyranny? Alexander the Great's fame has rolled down the centuries, but the golden Hellenistic Age that followed is largely forgotten. "Byzantine" conjures decadence and deadly intrigue, yet the thousand-year empire that ruled from Constantinople and saved Europe twice from invasion was, in fact, Greek.

Entering World War II, America was emerging as a world power. Their geographic isolation from World War I allowed them to recover and prosper in the interwar era, and food invention during the Depression carried into World War II. Food items such as SPAM and M&Ms profoundly impacted the military, and were later incorporated into some American dishes after the war.

The concept of international trade was born in the ancient Mediterranean, which provided the perfect set of circumstances needed to produce an intricate trading system whose influence can still be seen in present-day economic practices.

Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett was among the last of a legendary breed of British explorers. For years he explored the Amazon and came to believe that its jungle concealed a large, complex civilization, like El Dorado. Obsessed with its discovery, he christened it the City of Z. In 1925, Fawcett headed into the wilderness with his son Jack, vowing to make history. They vanished without a trace. For the next eighty years, hordes of explorers plunged into the jungle, trying to find evidence of Fawcett's party or Z. Some died from disease and starvation; others simply disappeared.

In 1913 all the musk plants in the world stopped smelling. Unable to resist the lure of this mystery, Bob Gilbert turns detective, determined to find the truth in the tale. Mixing history, memoir, science and nature writing, The Missing Musk takes the listener on a journey of discovery, uncovering the truth behind six mysteries and myths from across the natural world.

The frozen wilderness of the Arctic captivated and mystified voyagers and explorers in the 1800s, driven by greed for riches, fame, and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. Delve into the jaw-dropping courage and awe-inspiring expeditions from the Golden Age of Arctic exploration with Frozen Frontier. Follow the footsteps of heroic explorers and their courageous penetrations into an unknown world of mammoth ice floes, terrifying polar bears, and bone-chilling cold.

The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, vexed, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard’s biography is a “black hole,” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) “immoral.” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. 

Get ready for an exhilarating journey through the captivating world of ancient civilizations. This audiobook invites you to discover the fascinating origins and evolution of human societies, exploring the rich tapestry of ancient cultures.

One of the masterpieces of classical literature, the "Histories" describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colorful digressions - a description of the natural wonders of Egypt; an account of European lake-dwellers; and far-fetched accounts of dog-headed men and gold-digging ants. With its kaleidoscopic blend of fact and legend, the "Histories" offers a compelling Greek view of the world of the fifth century BC.

One of the masterpieces of classical literature, the "Histories" describes how a small and quarrelsome band of Greek city states united to repel the might of the Persian empire. But while this epic struggle forms the core of his work, Herodotus' natural curiosity frequently gives rise to colorful digressions - a description of the natural wonders of Egypt; an account of European lake-dwellers; and far-fetched accounts of dog-headed men and gold-digging ants. With its kaleidoscopic blend of fact and legend, the "Histories" offers a compelling Greek view of the world of the fifth century BC.