"This is the E8," my father said. "It runs from London to Moscow."For a million years people have been travelling throughout Europe, from the mysterious homo antecessor who left his footprints on the coast of England to travellers on the motorways of today. Under every footstep lies an older one, under every paved road a donkey trail or wagon rut, under every footpath the prints of a hunter or his prey.And yet the long, nation-spa...

INTRODUCED BY JAN MORRIS'[This] gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classic' ROBERT MACFARLANE'The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.'In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. Three decades later he wrote ...

The acclaimed travel writer's youthful journey - as an 18-year-old - across 1930s Europe by foot began in A Time of Gifts, which covered the author's exacting journey from the Lowlands as far as Hungary. Picking up from the very spot on a bridge across the Danube where his readers last saw him, we travel on with him across the great Hungarian Plain on horseback, and over the Romanian border to Transylvania.The trip was an exploration of a continent which was already showin...

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor's spellbinding part-travelogue, part inspired evocation of a part of Greece's past. Joining him in the Mani, one of Europe's wildest and most isolated regions, cut off from the rest of Greece by the towering Taygettus mountain range and hemmed in by the Aegean and Ionian seas, we discover a rocky central prong of the Peleponnese at the southernmost point in Europe.Bad communications only heightening the remoteness, this Greece - south of ancient Sparta ...

Walk a day in a Roman’s sandals.What was it like to live in one of the ancient world’s most powerful and bustling cities – one that was eight times more densely populated than modern day New York?In this entertaining and enlightening guide, bestselling historian Philip Matyszak introduces us to the people who lived and worked there. In each hour of the day we meet a new character – from emperor to slave girl, gladiator to astrologer, medicine woman to water...

A magnet for trade and travellers from all over the world, stylish, cosmopolitan Amsterdam is a city of dreams and nightmares, of grand civic architecture and legendary beauty, but also of civil wars, bloody religious purges, and the tragedy of Anne Frank.In this fascinating examination of the city's soul, part history, part travel guide, Geert Mak imaginatively recreates the lives of the early Amsterdammers, and traces Amsterdam's progress from waterlogged settlement to a major fi...

Thoroughly updated and with a new foreword'The Viking Age is shot through with the spirit of adventure. For 300 years, from just before AD800 until well into the eleventh century, the Vikings affected almost every region accessible to their ships, and left traces that are still part of life today'Far from being just 'wild, barbaric, axe-wielding pirates', the Vikings created complex social institutions, oversaw the coming of Christianity to Scandin...

New time travel military adventure from New York Times best-selling novelist S.M. StirlingIT’S THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW ITEveryone could see it coming. But one man could do something about it. Oh, he couldn’t avert the nuclear holocaust, but a scientist in Austria, ruthlessly using billions of research dollars for his own purposes, set himself up an out: he created a time machine, and filled a warehouse with low-tech survival gear. Too bad h...

Syria, 262 AD.Imperial agent Abascantius has failed his superiors and now faces the unwelcome prospect of a return to the legions. With only hours to work with, he will need resourcefulness and ruthlessness in equal measure if he is to salvage the situation and save himself. From Agent of Rome author Nick Brown, this compelling short story is set in the violent, corrupt underbelly of third century Antioch.

The Vikings hold a particular place in the history of the West, both symbolically and in the significant impact they had on Northern Europe. Magnus Magnusson's indispensable study of this great period presents a rounded and fascinating picture of a people who, in modern eyes, would seem to embody striking contradictions. They were undoubtedly pillagers, raiders and terrifying warriors, but they were also great pioneers, artists and traders - a dynamic people, whose skill a...

Patrick Leigh Fermor was only 18 when he set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, described many years later in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.It was during these early wanderings that he started to pick up languages, and where he developed his extraordinary sense of the continuity of history: a quality that deepens the colours of every place he writes about, from the peaks of the Pyrenees to the cell of a Trappist monastery...

Whether you're planning your first seige, building a fortress or just looking for a way to escape the peasants below, 'Castles: A Very Peculiar History' is full of tips, tricks and horror stories from the castle-building trade. We can't all match up to the combined beauty and danger of the Tower of London, but in this title you'll learn who developed the world's first flat-pack castle, the difference between donjeons and dungeons (it's important, trust us) and even the best time of year fo...