A biography of the celebrated Italian artist and his influence on the Baroque style that defines and immortalizes Rome.Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the ...

Plague was one of the enduring facts of everyday life on the European continent, from earliest antiquity through the first decades of the eighteenth century. It represents one of the most important influences on the development of Europe’s society and culture. In order to understand the changing circumstances of the political, economic, ecclesiastical, artistic, and social history of that continent, it is important to understand epidemic disease and society’s response to it.To date...

**ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 • See ancient Rome through the eyes of a gladiator—from the evening before the games at the Colosseum to the evening after"A grippingly original way of making the alien world of the Roman Amphitheatre both accessible and comprehensible." —Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History**What did a gladiator feel when he stepped out onto the sand of the Colosseum, his life in the balance? What ran through the minds of...

Wreckers sinks the old narratives of imperialism, revealing the violent, chaotic and improvised reality of empire-building from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.'Clever and compelling book. The storytelling and the scholarship fairly spark off each other. It could be a model for how academics should write history for a general audience' The Times‘A flowing, gripping narrative, Wreckers is distinguished by en...

The most engaging, surprising and revealing look at the Beatles story you’ll read.Everyone knows a Beatles tune. But their story goes beyond the omnipresent songs and iconic albums. Theirs is a tale that has become one of the core stories we tell about ourselves as a nation. The Beatles narrative has both shaped and reflected the country we live in today. Four lads from Liverpool have taken a seat alongside Shakespeare as one of our key cultural exports to the worl...

'Cannon has a keen descriptive eye and a striking, lyrical turn of phrase . . . a rich, warm, authoritative book' TLSThis is the definitive tale of how our island history is written in stone.The Stones of Britain is about how rocks make places, exploring the connection between geology and landscape, the stones beneath the surface and the history that has played out above it. It movingly investigates the diverse character o...

The definitive history of the self-destruction of the autocratic Romanov dynasty.**“Filled with revelations and fresh insights and rich with observations.” —**The Wall Street JournalIn 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest, that culminated in Tsar Nicholas II’s dramatic fall from power. Though Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, a trove of new archival discoveries confirms t...

In the early years of Vladmir Putin’s Russia, Yevgeny Prigozhin emerged as one of the President’s most trusted assets. By 2023, he had become a dangerous warlord – and also one of Putin’s chief rivals in Russia’s tumultuous political climate, exiled after leading an attempted coup, and shortly after killed in a mysterious plane crash.But what is the truth about this enigmatic figure, his role in the war with Ukraine, and the chaos unleashed across Russia by his turn against Putin? ...

'Murder in the Gulag is brilliant journalistic writing: punchy, eloquent, page-turning and factual. It's a powerful reminder of what an extraordinary man Navalny was' - Roland Oliphant, TelegraphIn this revised and updated paperback edition, award-winning journalist John Sweeney goes behind the headlines to investigate what really happened to Alexei Navalny in the freezing Polar Wolf penal colony in a remote part of Siberia in February 2024. This ...

In war, there is no easy victory.When troops invaded Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime, most people expected an easy victory. Instead, the gamble we took was a grave mistake, and its ramifications continue to reverberate through the lives of millions, in Iraq and the West. As we gain more distance from those events, it can be argued that many of the issues facing us today – the rise of the Islamic State, increased Islamic terrorism, intensified violenc...

"The remarkable story of the two seventeenth-century geniuses. . . . A highly successful double biography." — BooklistThe rivalry between the brilliant seventeenth-century Italian architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini is the stuff of legend. Enormously talented and ambitious artists, they met as contemporaries in the building yards of St. Peter's in Rome, became the greatest architects of their era by designing some of the most beautiful bu...

The New York Times–bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome captures the Renaissance spirit in this biography of "the king of the world's booksellers."During the Renaissance, Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars, and booksellers blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world.At the heart of this activity, which bestselling author...