A "charming, informative" firsthand account of Australia's wonderfully unique mammals—and how our perceptions impact their future (Tim Flannery, New York Review of Books ).Think of a platypus: They lay eggs (that hatch into so-called platypups), produce milk without nipples and venom without fangs, and can detect electricity. Or a wombat: Their teeth never stop growing, they poop cubes, and they defend themselves with rei...

Explore the rich diversity of the animal kingdom! Meet dozens of creatures with extraordinary abilities, then understand how they have adapted to thrive in the wild. Discover the endless teeth of a great white shark, learn how bats can 'see' in the dark and understand why gentoo penguins are so cleverly coloured. Written by award-winning zoology writer Jack Ashby and illustrated by the inimitable Sara Boccaccini Meadows, this is a book bursting with life like no other. Discover more in the...

A 'compelling, arresting' (New Scientist) behind-the-scenes tour through the world's greatest natural history museums, revealing their hidden secretsZoologist Jack Ashby spends his life working in Britain's natural history museums, and in Nature's Memory he guides us through a series of extraordinary collections, from marvellous mounted whale skeletons and impossibly tiny insect cabinets to buried treasures in vast museum storehouses.But l...

From a single beginning, countless millions of stories from the animal kingdom have – and continue to – run their course. Museum objects allow us to investigate some of those stories. Animal Kingdom journeys through both the evolutionary history of animals, and the ways that people have interpreted them in museums. Animals in museums are not only representatives of their entire species, but they also tell us something about the time in which they were collected. T...

"A gripping, forensic account of how climate extremes are no longer future threats but present-day shocks to Britain’s infrastructure and daily life." - PETER FRANKOPAN*"***While I saw the fragile beauty of our planet from space, David Shukman reveals how incredibly vulnerable we are on the ground. Brilliantly researched and compellingly told, this is a powerful book." - TIM PEAKE"This fascinating and gripping book has the power to open our eyes and shift o...

'Dazzling ... The remarkable story of how British culture was transformed by émigré architects, filmmakers and writers' GuardianBritain. Made in Europe.In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not...

**A groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today.“Goffe’s ear is tuned to songs of resistance, to what it looks like to make life amid (and after) colonial subjugation…noble and necessary.”—The New York Times Book Review“Dark Laboratory is stunning….With a vast archive an...

Combining poignant memoir and historical research, a son of Holocaust survivors grapples with the dream of Zionism and its consequences.Israel: A Personal History takes off where Göran Rosenberg’s internationally acclaimed and award-winning childhood memoir, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, ends. After his father’s suicide in 1960 in a small industrial town in Sweden, the remainder of the family, a single mother with two children, emigrate...

**In this charming journey into the past, a historian reveals medieval wisdom that can still guide us today"One of the most compelling medieval history books I have ever read."–Ian Mortimer, author of The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England**Peter Jones was teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia when his third icy winter there plunged him into a dark place. Luckily, he knew something few of us know-- that for all its reputation for darkne...

'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...

**Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-FictionA Book of the Year in The Times, TLS and ProspectThe definitive history of Britain’s tumultuous relationship with Europe – as it’s never been told before.‘Thought-provoking’ – The Sunday Times'Mesmerising' – LRB'A great big entertaining sweep of a book' – The Guardian'Excellent' – The Telegraph**'Rich and incisiv...

**FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE'Monumental and highly readable... by smartly knitting together the past with the present, Zubok brings a prescient and fresh perspective' Financial Times**A sweeping, original history of the Cold War, from an acclaimed historian of the USSRWhy did the Cold War erupt so soon after the Second World War? How did it escalate so rapidly, spanning five continents over six decades? And what led to the spectacula...