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...

For sale in CIS only! In 1609, the entire Muslim population of Spain was given three days to leave Spanish territory or else be killed. In a brutal and traumatic exodus, entire families were forced to abandon the homes and villages where they had li...

A haunting portrait of France at war On August 1, 1914, war erupted into the lives of millions of families across France. Most people thought the conflict would last just a few weeks. Yet before the month was out, twenty-seven thousand French soldier...

Born in 1915 in Cambridge, England, Rupert John Cornford was a committed communist who fought in defence of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War and was killed in uncertain circumstances at Lopera, near Cordoba in 1936. Though his life was tragically...

For sale in CIS only! Protestant numbers in France fell from ten per cent of the population in 1598, when Henri IV gave protection by the Edict of Nantes, to a persecuted two per cent in 1700 following its revocation in 1685 by Louis XIV. The destru...

A contemporary of Shakespeare and Monteverdi, and a colleague of Galileo and Artemisia Gentileschi at the Medici court, Francesca Caccini was a dominant musical figure there for thirty years. Dazzling listeners with the transformative power of her pe...

The Seven Years' War, often called the first global war, spanned North America, the West Indies, Europe, and India. In these locations diseases such as scurvy, smallpox, and yellow fever killed far more than combat did, stretching the resources of Eu...

For sale in CIS only! The opening month of the Great War ending in the Battle of the Marne (6-9 September 1914) was a turning point in modern history. The French and British armies were forced into a long retreat from Belgium but subsequently regrou...

In this brave and original work, Federica Clementi focuses on the mother-daughter bond as depicted in six works by women who experienced the Holocaust, sometimes with their mothers, sometimes not. The daughters' memoirs, which record the "all-too-hum...

The city of Florence has long been admired as the home of the brilliant artistic and literary achievement of the early Renaissance. But most histories of Florence go no further than the first decades of the sixteenth century. They thus give the impre...