A UNIQUE EXPLORATION OF GERMAN CULTURE, FROM SAUSAGE ADVERTISEMENTS TO WAGNERSitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?"This book is an attempt to answer that questi...

A charmingly personal history of Hapsburg Europe, as lively as it is informative, by the author of GermaniaFor centuries much of Europe and the Holy Roman Empire was in the royal hands of the very peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off—through luck, guile and sheer mulishness—any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the D...

Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of EuropeIn 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the t...

A brilliantly unconventional history of England from the 1850s to the 1980s—from the bestselling author of Germania.Traversing England from the industrial shipyards of Barrow-in-Furness, to the wind-whipped shores of Great Yarmouth, and the smoky jazz clubs of 1940s Soho, Winder reveals a place irrevocably shaped by its imperial past, and by all of those who, for better or worse, have called it home.Winder leads us expertly through the country’s mo...

Bond. James Bond. The ultimate British hero--suave, stoic, gadget-driven--was, more than anything, the necessary invention of a traumatized country whose self-image as a great power had just been shattered by the Second World War. By inventing the parallel world of secret British greatness and glamour, Ian Fleming fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death. In The Man Who Saved Britain, Simon Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs of his own fandom...

From the end of the Middle Ages to the First World War, Europe was dominated by one family: the Habsburgs. Their unprecedented rule is the focus of Simon Winder's vivid third book, Danubia.Winder's approach is friendly, witty, personal; this is a narrative that, while erudite and well researched, prefers to be discursive and anecdotal. In his survey of the centuries of often incompetent Habsburg rule which have continued to shape the fate of Central Europe, Winder does not...

Sitting on a bench at a communal table in a restaurant in Regensburg, his plate loaded with disturbing amounts of bratwurst and sauerkraut made golden by candlelight shining through a massive glass of beer, Simon Winder was happily swinging his legs when a couple from Rottweil politely but awkwardly asked: "So: why are you here?"This book is an attempt to answer that question. Why spend time wandering around a country that remains a sort of dead zone for many foreigners, surrounded...

Following Germania and Danubia, the third installment in Simon Winder's personal history of Europe.In 843 AD, the three surviving grandsons of the great emperor Charlemagne met at Verdun. After years of bitter squabbles over who would inherit the family land, they finally decided to divide the territory and go their separate ways. In a moment of staggering significance, one grandson inherited the area we now know as France, another Germany and the...

Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek—and our—consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time.Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after ...

From Silk to Silicon tells the story of who these men and women were, what they did, how they did it, and how their achievements continue to shape our world today. They include:• Genghis Khan, who united east and west by conquest and by opening new trade routes built on groundbreaking transportation and management innovations.• Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who arose from oppression to establish the most powerful bank the world has seen.• Cyrus Field, who becam...

On May 7, 1940, the House of Commons began perhaps the most crucial debate in British parliamentary history. On its outcome hung the future of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's government and also of Britain—indeed, perhaps, the world. Troublesome Young Men is Lynne Olson's fascinating account of how a small group of rebellious Tory MPs defied the Chamberlain government's defeatist policies that aimed to appease Europe's tyrants and eventually forced the prime minister's resign...

This landmark collection, brimming with his signature wit and incomparable sensibility, is Larry McMurtry’s classic tribute to his home and his people.Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation’s perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winni...