From the author of Blood River: “A splendid book, part memoir, part history,” about the teenager who killed Archduke Ferdinand and sparked WWI (Norman Stone, author of World War One).Sarajevo, 1914. On a June morning, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip drew a pistol from his pocket and fired the first shot of the First World War, killing the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Princip then launched a series of events that...

When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone.Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters f...

Because I am a girl I am less likely to go to schoolBecause I am a girl I am more likely to suffer from malnutritionBecause I am a girl I am more likely to suffer violence in the homeBecause I am a girl I am more likely to marry and start a family before I reach my twenties.Seven authors have visited seven different countries and spoken to young women and girls about their lives, struggles a...

This book offers an original critical evaluation of how freelance careers can be established and sustained in the increasingly uncertain global creative economy.Developing from the author’s theoretical and empirical research at the nexus of precarious work and entrepreneurial learning, it provides an in-depth understanding of why and how creatives can learn to become entrepreneurial and how this relates to creative entrepreneurship. This book traces how arts work became creative la...

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TIM BUTCHERThe silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming. Life on the river is brutal and unknown threats lurk in the darkness. Marlow's mission to captain a steamer upriver into the dense interior leads him into conflict with the others who haunt the forest. But his decision to hunt down the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who is the subject of sinister rumours, leads him into more than just physical peril.

When "Daily Telegraph" correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000 he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H M Stanley's famous expedition - but travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was 'suicidal', Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots. Making his way in an assortment of vessels including a motorbike and a dugout canoe, helped along by a cast of characters from UN aid work...

On a summer morning in Sarajevo almost a hundred years ago, a teenager took a pistol out of his pocket and fired not just the opening rounds of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history. By killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gavrilo Princip started a cycle of events that would leave 15 million dead from fighting between 1914 and 1918 and that proved fatal for empires and a way of ruling that had held for centuries.The Tr...

For many years Sierra Leone and Liberia have been too dangerous to travel through. With their wars officially over, Tim Butcher sets out on a journey across both countries, trekking for 350 miles through remote rainforest and malarial swamps, pursuing a trail blazed by Graham Greene in 1935. Weaving history and anthropology with personal narrative - as well as new discoveries about Greene - it is as exciting as it is enlightening.

Between 1539 and 1542, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led a small army on an expedition of almost four thousand miles across Southeastern America. De Soto's path had been one of history's most intriguing mysteries until the publication of Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun. Using a new route reconstruction, anthropologist Charles Hudson maps the story of the de Soto expedition, tying the route to a number of specific archaeological sites.De Soto's journey cut a b...

Philosophical esotericsim—the practice of communicating one's unorthodox thoughts "between the lines"—was a common practice until the end of the eighteenth century. The famous Encyclopédie of Diderot, for instance, not only discusses this practice in over twenty different articles, but admits to employing it itself. The history of Western thought contains hundreds of such statements by major philosophers testifying to the use of esoteric writing in their own work or others'. Despi...

A riveting narrative about America's ferocious drive towards empire during the Gilded Age, told by one of our most acclaimed historians.On February 15, 1898, the American ship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in the Havana Harbor. News of the blast quickly reached U.S. shores, where it was met by some not with alarm but great enthusiasm.A powerful group of war lovers agitated that the United States exert its muscle across the seas. Theodore Roosevelt and Hen...

Immerse yourself in the vanished world inhabited by Jane Austen's contemporaries. Packed with detail and anecdotes, this is an intimate exploration of how the middle and upper classes lived from 1775, the year of Austen's birth, to the coronation of George IV in 1820. Sue Wilkes skillfully conjures up all aspects of daily life within the period, drawing on contemporary diaries, illustrations, letters, novels, travel literature, and archives.● Were all unmarried affluent men really ...