A journey through Europe’s old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent’s fraught history“[A] fascinating chronicle.”—Benjamin Balint, Wall Street JournalHistoric quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attra...

This is a discussion of the transformation of drug use (especially morphine and cocaine, which was once commonly available in any chemist's shop) into a national menace. It revolves around the death of Billie Carleton, a West End musical actress, in 1918. Its cast of characters includes Brilliant Chang, a Chinese restaurant proprietor and Edgar Manning, a jazz drummer from Jamaica. They were eventually identified as the villains of the affair and invested with a highly charged sexual menac...

A compelling argument about the importance of using more than one language in today’s worldIn a world that has English as its global language and rapidly advancing translation technology, it’s easy to assume that the need to use more than one language will diminish—but Marek Kohn argues that plural language use is more important than ever. In a divided world, it helps us to understand ourselves and others better, to live together better, and to make the most of our...

Marek Kohn - 'one of the best science writers we have' (AC Grayling) - paints an important and eye-opening portrait of Britain and Ireland after a century of global warming.Author of A Reason for Everything and Four Words for Friend Marek Kohn projects one hundred years into the future when, based on the climate change evidence we have now, some parts of Britain will be like regions of today's Mediterranean. But...

A fascinating journey through Europe's old towns, exploring why we treasure them—but also what they hide about a continent's fraught historyHistoric quarters in cities and towns across the middle of Europe were devastated during the Second World War—some, like those of Warsaw and Frankfurt, had to be rebuilt almost completely. They are now centers of peace and civility that attract millions of tourists, but the stories they tell about places, peoples, and nations a...

**How does a nation recover from fascism and turn toward a free society once more?This internationally acclaimed revelatory history—"filled with first-person accounts from articles and diaries" (The *New York Times)—*of the transformational decade that followed World War II illustrates how Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat and reckoned with the corruption of its soul and the horrors of the Holocaust.Featuring over 40 eye-opening black-and-white photographs a...

A look at Adolf Hitler's residences and their role in constructing and promoting the dictator's private persona both within Germany and abroad.Adolf Hitler's makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s. This provocative book exposes the dictator's preoccupation with his private persona, which was shaped by the aesthetic and ideological management of his domestic architecture. Hitler'...

The sensational story of a cache of masterpieces not seen since they vanished during the Nazi terror—a bizarre tale of a father and aged son, of secret deals, treachery and the search for truth.The world was stunned when eighty-year old Cornelius Gurlitt became an international media superstar in November 2013 on the discovery of over 1,400 artworks in his 1,076 square-foot Munich apartment, valued at around $1.35 billion. Gurlitt became known as a man who never wa...

**"A most valuable book." —Christian Science MonitorFor readers of The Monuments Men and The Hare with Amber Eyes, the story of the Nazis' systematic pillaging of Europe's libraries, and the small team of heroic librarians now working to return the stolen books to their rightful owners.**While the Nazi party was being condemned by much of the world for burning books, they were already hard at work perpetrating an even greater literary crime. Throu...

Until the end of World War II, East Prussia was the German empire's farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving and beautiful land on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its peopl...

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of the world’s leading historians of the Soviet Union, presents a spellbinding epic that brings to life the everyday wo...

Across 3,000 miles and over eight decades, this epic new people’s history of the Cold War makes eye-opening sense of a defining 20th-century conflict—and how it continues to shape our world today.Initially a victory line where Allies met at the end of World War Two, the Iron Curtain quickly became the front of a new kind of war. It divided Europe from north to south for a staggering forty-five years. Crossing it in either direction was always a political act; in ma...