Oxford University political theorist Stein Ringen offers a thought-provoking meditation on the art of democratic rule: how does a government persuade the people to accept its authority? Every government must make unpopular demands of its citizens, fr...

Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein in southern Ukraine, Trotsky was both a world-class intellectual and a man capable of the most narrow-minded ideological dogmatism. He was an effective military strategist and an adept diplomat, who staked the fate of th...

With accuracy, wit, and intelligence, this remarkable new translation of "The Golden Ass" breathes new life into Apuleius' classic work. Sarah Ruden, a lyric poet as well as a highly respected translator, skilfully duplicates the verbal high jinks of...

In this fascinating book Monica Rico explores the myth of the American West in the nineteenth century as a place for men to assert their masculinity by "roughing it" in the wilderness and reveals how this myth played out in a transatlantic context. R...

The California Gold Rush began in 1848 and incited many "wagons west". However, only half of the 300,000 gold seekers travelled by land. The other half travelled by sea. And it's the story of this second group that interests Malcolum Rohrbough in his...

After two centuries of ascent, the United States finds itself in economic decline. Some advise America to cure its woes alone. But the road to isolation leads inevitably to the end of US leadership in the international system, warns Richard Rosecranc...

Spanning nearly 500 years of cultural and social history, this book examines the ways that literature and surveillance have developed together, as kindred modern practices. As ideas about personhood – what constitutes a self – have changed over time,...

This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but...

Considered one of the most important of the early German modernists, the painter Paula Modersoln-Becker (1876-1907) challenged traditional representations of the female body in art. She was the first modern woman artist to paint herself nude, as well...

Six hundred thousand lives were lost between 1861 and 1865, making the conflict between North and South the nation's deadliest war. If the "War Between the States" was the test of the young republic's commitment to its founding precepts, it was also...