Shakespeare was not exaggerating when he defined being a soldier as one of the seven ages of man. Over the early modern period, many millions of young men from the four corners of the present United Kingdom went to war, often – and most bloodily – ag...

In this thoughtful and engaging book, Feargal Cochrane looks at Northern Ireland's "Troubles" from the late 1960s to the present day. He explains why, a decade and a half after the peace process ended in political agreement in 1998, sectarian attitud...

The book shows the background and mechanics of the Soviet mass executions in spring 1940 of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war – army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians – taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. The...

Mount Vesuvius has been famous ever since its eruption in 79 CE, when it destroyed and buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But less well-known is the role it played in the science and culture of early modern Italy, as Sean Cocco revea...

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elites and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavour. But in the second half of the 16th century...

"Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty" traces the vital and varied roles of science through the story of three generations of the eminent Exner family, whose members included Nobel Prize-winning biologist Karl Frisch, the teachers of Freud and of physici...

Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill Press, founded in 1757, is the most celebrated of the early English private presses, unique for the importance of the books, pamphlets and ephemera it produced. This illustrated study of the Press draws on a remarkabl...

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan...

William the Conqueror's victory in 1066 was the beginning of a period of major transformation for medieval English aristocrats. In this groundbreaking book, David Crouch examines for the first time the fate of the English aristocracy between the reig...

For sale in CIS only! "The Will to Survive" describes how a small country, for much of its existence squeezed between two empires, surrounded by hostile neighbours and subjected to invasion and occupation, survived the frequent tragedies of its even...