Venice stands, as she loves to tell you, on the frontiers of the east and west, half-way between the setting and the rising sun. Goethe calls her ‘the market-place of the Morning and the Evening lands’. Certainly no city on earth gives a more immediate impression of symmetry and unity, or seems more patently born to greatness. So Jan Morris remarks, with graceful literary distinction, on the qualities that have made Venice a unique place among the world’s great destinations. She has known ...

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves? This history of art shows how painters, sculptors and architects have expressed the belief systems of their age: religious, political and aesthetic. From the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, to the revolutionary years of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artist has acted as a mirror to the ideals and conflicts of...

Bach, Vivaldi and Handel are the three great composers of the Baroque era, though there are many other well-known figures, including Albinoni, Pachelbel and Scarlatti. This engaging introduction, interspersed liberally music, shows how the music of these composers graced the courts and churches of Europe from 1600-1750. It is a fascinating story.

Venice stands, as she loves to tell you, on the frontiers of the east and west, half-way between the setting and the rising sun. Goethe calls her ‘the market-place of the Morning and the Evening lands’. Certainly no city on earth gives a more immediate impression of symmetry and unity, or seems more patently born to greatness. So Jan Morris remarks, with graceful literary distinction, on the qualities that have made Venice a unique place among the world’s great destinations. She has known ...

This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.De...

This brilliant new audiobook explores the lives of eight generations of the greatest kings and queens that this country has ever seen, and the worst. The Plantagenets – their story is the story of Britain.England’s greatest royal dynasty, the Plantagenets, ruled over England through eight generations of kings. Their remarkable reign saw England emerge from the Dark Ages to become a highly organised kingdom that spanned a vast expanse of Europe. Plantagenet rule saw the establishmen...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, read by John Sackville.Everything in the universe is made of them, including you.Like you, the elements have personalities, attitudes, talents, shortcomings, stories rich with meaning.Here you'll meet iron that rains from the heavens and noble gases that light the way to vice. You'll learn how lead can tell your future while zinc may one day...

#1 New York Times Bestseller • More than 10 million Copies SoldIn this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be ""positive"" all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people.For decades, we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. ""F**k positivity,"" Mark Manson says. ""Let’s be honest, shit is f**...

Winner of the 1997 Booker Prize. The richly exotic story of the childhood the twins Esthappen and Rahel craft for themselves amongst India’s vats of banana jam and mountains of peppercorns.Here, perhaps, is the greatest Indian novel by a woman. Arundhati Roy’s ‘The God of Small Things’ is an astonishingly rich, fertile novel, teeming with life, colour, heart-stopping language, wry comedy and a hint of magical realism.Set against a background of political turbulence in Keral...

A humorous deep-dive into the varied - and oft-gruesome - deaths of the King and Queens of England and Scotland.How the monarchs of England and Scotland met their deaths has been a wonderful mixture of violence, infections, overindulgence and occasional regicide. In Mortal Monarchs, medical historian Dr Suzie Edge examines 1,000 years of royal deaths to uncover the plots, accusations, rivalries, and ever-present threat of poison that the kings and queens o...