'Exhilaratingly whizzes through billions of years . . . Gee is a marvellously engaging writer, juggling humour, precision, polemic and poetry to enrich his impossibly telescoped account . . . [making] clear sense out of very complex narratives' - The Times 'Henry Gee makes the kaleidoscopically changing canvas of life understandable and exciting. Who will enjoy reading this book? - Everybody!' Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel For billions of years, Earth was an inhospitably alien place - covered with churning seas, slowly crafting its landscape by way of incessant volcanic eruptions, the atmosphere in a constant state of chemical flux. And yet, despite facing literally every conceivable setback that living organisms could encounter, life has been extinguished and picked itself up to evolve again. Life has learned and adapted and continued through the billions of years that followed. It has weathered fire and ice. Slimes begat sponges, who through billions of years of complex evolution and adaptation grew a backbone, braved the unknown of pitiless shores, and sought an existence beyond the sea. From that first foray to the spread of early hominids who later became Homo sapiens, life has persisted, undaunted. A (Very) Short History of Life is an enlightening story of survival, of persistence, illuminating the delicate balance within which life has always existed, and continues to exist today. It is our planet like you've never seen it before. Life teems through Henry Gee's lyrical prose - colossal supercontinents drift, collide, and coalesce, fashioning the face of the planet as we know it today. Creatures are engagingly personified, from 'gregarious' bacteria populating the seas to duelling dinosaurs in the Triassic period to magnificent mammals with the future in their (newly evolved) grasp. Those long extinct, almost alien early life forms are resurrected in evocative detail. Life's evolutionary steps - from the development of a digestive system to the awe of creatures taking to the skies in flight - are conveyed with an alluring, up-close intimacy.

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria in April 1889, and shot himself in a bunker in Berlin in April 1945 with Russian soldiers beating at the door, surrounded by the ruins of the country he had vowed to restore to greatness. Adolf Hitler: The Curious and Macabre Anecdotes - part biography, part miscellany, part historical overview - presents the life and times of der Fuhrer in a unique and compelling manner. The early life of the loner son of an Austrian customs official gave little clue as to his later years. As a decorated, twice-wounded soldier of the First World War, through shrewd manipulation of Germany's offended national pride after the war, Hitler ascended rapidly through the political system, rousing the masses behind him with a thundering rhetoric that amplified the nation's growing resentment and brought him the adulation of millions. By the age of 44, he had become both a millionaire with secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Holland, and the unrivalled leader of Germany, whose military might he had resurrected; six years later, he provoked the world to war. Patrick Delaforce's book is a masterly assessment of Hitler's life, career and beliefs, drawn not only from its subject's own writings, speeches, conversation, poetry and art, but also from the accounts of those who knew him, loved him, or loathed him. The journey of an ordinary young man to callous dictator and architect of the 'Final Solution' makes for provocative and important - thought not always comfortable - reading.

The Greek myths are among the world's most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories.

Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, from the Trojan War to Jason and the Argonauts. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women’s stories. And when they do, those women are often painted as monstrous, vengeful or just plain evil. But Pandora – the first woman, who according to legend unloosed chaos upon the world – was not a villain, and even Medea and Phaedra have more nuanced stories than generations of retellings might indicate.

Now, in Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths, Natalie Haynes – broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist – redresses this imbalance. Taking Pandora and her jar (the box came later) as the starting point, she puts the women of the Greek myths on equal footing with the menfolk. After millennia of stories telling of gods and men, be they Zeus or Agamemnon, Paris or Odysseus, Oedipus or Jason, the voices that sing from these pages are those of Hera, Athena and Artemis, and of Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Eurydice and Penelope.

Volume Two of this new documentary history of the Soviet Union comprises over 270 documents and is organised into four chronologically distinct parts, subdivided thematically; it runs from the fraught diplomatic and military preamble of the Great Patriotic War to the final fracturing of the USSR along the national fault-lines of its 15 Union Republics. Slight overlap of chronological coverage with Volume One allows increased attention in Volume Two to foreign affairs. Areas in this volume that attract greatest student interest are the epic dramas at the beginning and end of the period -- the Great Patriotic War and Perestroika. The commentary is by Edward Acton, Professor of Modern European History at the University of East Anglia, who has published widely on the Russian revolution and the history of Russia and the USSR. The documents have been translated by Tom Stableford, Assistant Librarian, Slavonic and East European Collections, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

This work sets out to examine the policy of the British Foreign Office towards Yugoslavia and the Tito Government, during and immediately following World War II. It looks at the relationship between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and the effects on Soviet-Western relations.

"A rich study of the role of personal psychology in the shaping of the new global order after World War I. So long as so much political power is concentrated in one human mind, we are all at the mercy of the next madman in the White House." -Gary J. Bass, author of The Blood Telegram The notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, rediscovered nearly a century after it was written by Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt, sheds new light on how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events. When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do? Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson's destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president. He gathered material from personal archives and interviewed members of Wilson's inner circle. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil resurrects this forgotten portrait of a troubled president. After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud's death and only months before Bullitt's. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson's legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud's descendants denied his involvement in the project. For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud's findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.

First published in 1930, New Zealand in the Making is an economic history of the democratic experiments in New Zealand. The geography, population, government ownership of public utilities, compulsory arbitration, pensions and all other factors have been covered in detail. The book will be of interest to anyone keen on learning about New Zealand as well as to students of economy, history, agriculture, and government.

First published in 1956, The Post-War Condition of Britain measures the extent of changes in Britain since the thirties. It contains more than two hundred tables on such matters as the national income, employment, production and productivity, investment and consumption; health, education, housing, and the insurance, assistance and similar services; on Trade Unions and industrial relations; class structure, political attitudes and party organizations; and the problems of local government and town and country planning. It is simply written, demanding from the reader the minimum of technical knowledge of economics or other specialized studies, and it should serve as an invaluable reference book for all who need exact information.

Before he had even conceived of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire there was another Edward Gibbon, a young expatriate living in Switzerland and writing in French. In the Essai, a work of remarkable erudition and energy completed by the age of twenty-one, Gibbon reflects on the present state of knowledge in post-Renaissance Europe - what he calls litterature. The first publication of the Essai since 1761, this critical edition sets Gibbon's work in its intellectual context. A detailed introduction examines the biographical, cultural and historical background to this text: the young writer's perception of European intellectual life as he observed it from Lausanne, his relation to the Encyclopedie and the French academies, the fate of erudition, and the modern organization of learning in books. An extensive commentary completes this edition, providing invaluable annotation of each chapter, including the important but little-known sections on religion that were replaced by Gibbon in the final text. As current debates revisit the meaning of Enlightenment, readers will find in this edition of Gibbon's Essai a new approach to the intellectual networks and tensions that lie at its heart.

6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, but this is only half the story. Doris Bergen reveals how the Holocaust extended beyond the Jews to engulf millions of other victims in related programmes of mas-murder. The Nazi killing machine began with the disabled, and went on to target Afro-Germans, Gypsies, non-Jewish Poles, French African soldiers, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexual men and Jehovah's Witnesses. As Nazi Germany conquered more territories and peoples, Hitler's war turned soldiers, police officers and doctors into trained killers, creating a veneer of legitimacy around vicious acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Using the testimonies of both survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as a wealth of rarely seen photographs, Doris Bergen shows the true extent of the catastrophe that overwhelmed Europe during the Second World War, in a gripping story of the lives and deaths of real people.

An unflinching examination of the moral and professional dilemmas faced by physicians who took part in the Manhattan Project. After his father died, James L. Nolan, Jr., took possession of a box of private family materials. To his surprise, the small secret archive contained a treasure trove of information about his grandfather's role as a doctor in the Manhattan Project. Dr. Nolan, it turned out, had been a significant figure. A talented ob-gyn radiologist, he cared for the scientists on the project, organized safety and evacuation plans for the Trinity test at Alamogordo, escorted the "Little Boy" bomb from Los Alamos to the Pacific Islands, and was one of the first Americans to enter the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Participation on the project challenged Dr. Nolan's instincts as a healer. He and his medical colleagues were often conflicted, torn between their duty and desire to win the war and their oaths to protect life. Atomic Doctors follows these physicians as they sought to maximize the health and safety of those exposed to nuclear radiation, all the while serving leaders determined to minimize delays and maintain secrecy. Called upon both to guard against the harmful effects of radiation and to downplay its hazards, doctors struggled with the ethics of ending the deadliest of all wars using the most lethal of all weapons. Their work became a very human drama of ideals, co-optation, and complicity. A vital and vivid account of a largely unknown chapter in atomic history, Atomic Doctors is a profound meditation on the moral dilemmas that ordinary people face in extraordinary times.

'This important new volume reconstructs the forms of production, distribution and exhibition of films made in and about the colonies. It then ties them to wider theoretical issues about film and liberalism, spectacle and political economy, representation and rule. The result is one of the first volumes to examine how imperial rule is intimately tied to the emergence of documentary as a form and, indeed, how the history of cinema is at the same time the history of Empire.' BRIAN LARKIN, Barnard College 'This superb collection of new scholarship shows how cinema both communicated and aided the imperialist agenda throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it shows film can be understood as one of the tools of empire, as much as the technology of weaponry or modes of administration: a means of education and indoctrination in the colonies and at home.' TOM GUNNING, University of Chicago At its height in 1919, the British Empire claimed 58 countries, 400 million subjects, and 14 million square miles of ground. Empire and Film brings together leading international scholars to examine the integral role cinema played in the control, organisation, and governance of this diverse geopolitical space. The essays reveal the complex interplay between the political and economic control essential to imperialism and the emergence and development of cinema in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Contributors address how the production, distribution and exhibition of film were utilised by state and industrial and philanthropic institutions to shape the subject positions of coloniser and colonised; to demarcate between 'civilised' and 'primitive' and codify difference; and to foster a political economy of imperialism that was predicated on distinctions between core and periphery. The generic forms of colonial cinema were, consequently, varied: travelogues mapped colonial spaces; actuality films re-presented spectacles of royal authority and imperial conquest and conflict; home movies rendered colonial self-representation; state-financed newsreels and documentaries fostered political and economic control and the 'education' of British and colonial subjects; philanthropic and industrial organisations sponsored films to expand Western models of capitalism; British and American film companies made films of imperial adventure. These films circulated widely in Britain and the empire, and were sustained through the establishment of imperial networks of distribution and exhibition, including in particular innovative mobile exhibition circuits and non-theatrical spaces like schools, museums and civic centres. Empire and Film is a significant revision to the historical and conceptual frameworks of British cinema history, and is a major contribution to the history of cinema as a global form that emerged amid, and in dialogue with, the global flows of imperialism. The book is produced in conjunction with a major website housing freely available digitised archival films and materials relating to British colonial cinema, www.colonialfilm.org.uk, and a companion volume entitled Film and the End of Empire.

Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. These were the words uttered by the seventeen-year-old Lady Jane Grey as she stood on the scaffold awaiting death on a cold February morning in 1554. Forced onto the throne by the great power players at court, Queen Jane reigned for just thirteen tumultuous days before being imprisoned in the Tower, condemned for high treason and executed. In this dramatic retelling of an often misread tale, historian and researcher Nicola Tallis explores a range of evidence that has never before been used in a biography to sweep away the many myths and reveal the moving, human story of an extraordinarily intelligent, independent and courageous young woman.

The publication of this collection of essays on the current crisis concerning Iraq will not be welcomed by the United States government. Although the authors - a group of German and American scholars, who are moral theologicans, policy analysts, political scientists, and a Middle East historian - write from divergent backgrounds and perspectives, all finally concur, sometimes for different reasons, in rejecting the arguments of the Bush administration in favor of unilateral U.S. military action against Iraq. These essays are uniformly free of the intemperate language and careless argumentation that characterizes some of the opposition to American policy inside and outside the United States, and is therefore easy to dismiss. Whether the authors address either the threat Saddam Hussein represents to his reagon and the world or the prospects for alternative strategies, the reasoning is generally wellinformed, sensitive to complexity, and attentive to detail. The book will help to confirm and strengthen the growing 'thoughful opposition' in the United States and abroad to the Bush policies, and as such deserves to be taken very seriously.

The events of 1939-1945 had such a dramatic impact on the world that it is easy to forget that Allied victory was far from certain, especially in the early part of the war when both the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific were sweeping all before them. History of World War II chronicles the war as it happened, focusing on key battles and events that act as signposts in the slow change of fortunes of either side. Divided into two sections, one on each major theatre, the book describes such famous events as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the battle of Stalingrad, the Normandy landings, the fall of Berlin, and the struggle for Iwo Jima. Linking each famous event is an in-depth chronology detailing other events happening elsewhere, building into a snapshot of the war at that point. In each section are spreads comparing and contrasting the strengths of essential weapons in that battle: fighter aircraft in the Battle of Britain, tanks at Kursk, landing aircraft at D- Day and in the Pacific. Each of these spreads is packed with colourful diagrams, graphs and charts to help you grasp the relative strengths of, for example, different aircraft carriers at the Battle of Midway, US versus Japanese small arms at Okinawa and anti- tank guns in the Normandy campaign, among many other engagements. The final part of the book provides a chronology of the war. Highly illustrated with colour maps and both colour and black-and-white photographs and colour artworks, History of World War II is a both a handy reference volume on the progress of the conflict and the weapons used to fight it.

This compendium of primary sources examines British architectural history from the accession of King George III in 1760 to the outbreak if the First World War in 1914. The collection of two volumes contains a mixture of architectural treatises, biographical material on architects, works on different types of building, and contemporary descriptions of individual buildings. This title will be of great interest to students of Art History and Architecture.

Many of us assume Western Civilization derives from a cultural inheritance that stretches back to classical antiquity, a golden thread that binds us from Plato to NATO. But what if all this is wrong? What if the Western world does not have its ultimate origins in a single cultural bloodline but rather a messy bramble of ancestors and influences? What if The West is just an idea that has been invented, co-opted, and mythologised to serve different purposes through history? As battles over privilege, identity and prejudice rock the cultural wars, it's never been more important to understand how the concept of The West came to be. This book tells a bold, empowering new story of how the idea of the West was created, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and also why it's still a powerful ideological tool to understand our world. Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures -- from a powerful Roman matriarch to an Islamic scholar, from a crusading Greek soldier to a founding father of the United States, from a slave girl in the new Americas to a British prime minister -- it casts a new light on how the West was invented, embraced, rejected and re-imagined to shape our world today.

A masterful history of the great dynasty of the Netherlands' Middle Ages. 'A sumptuous feast of a book' The Times, Books of the Year 'Thrillingly colourful and entertaining' Sunday Times 'A thrilling narrative of the brutal dazzlingly rich wildly ambitious duchy' Simon Sebag Montefiore 5 stars! Daily Telegraph 'A masterpiece' De Morgen 'A history book that reads like a thriller' Le Soir At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a compulsively readable narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury and madness. It is about the decline of knightly ideals and the awakening of individualism and of cities, the struggle for dominance in the heart of northern Europe, bloody military campaigns and fatally bad marriages. It is also a remarkable cultural history, of great art and architecture and music emerging despite the violence and the chaos of the tension between rival dynasties.

Exam board: Pearson Edexcel; OCR Level: AS/A-level Subject: History First teaching: September 2015 First exams: Summer 2016 (AS); Summer 2017 (A-level) Put your trust in the textbook series that has given thousands of A-level History students deeper knowledge and better grades for over 30 years. Updated to meet the demands of today's A-level specifications, this new generation of Access to History titles includes accurate exam guidance based on examiners' reports, free online activity worksheets and contextual information that underpins students' understanding of the period. > Develop strong historical knowledge: In-depth analysis of each topic is both authoritative and accessible > Build historical skills and understanding: Downloadable activity worksheets can be used independently by students or edited by teachers for classwork and homework > Learn, remember and connect important events and people: An introduction to the period, summary diagrams, timelines and links to additional online resources support lessons, revision and coursework > Achieve exam success: Practical advice matched to the requirements of your A-level specification incorporates the lessons learnt from previous exams > Engage with sources, interpretations and the latest historical research: Students will evaluate a rich collection of visual and written materials, plus key debates that examine the views of different historians

This four-volume collection explores the idea that, for Victorians and Edwardians, the meanings attached to work and the meanings attached to being without work were always dependent upon each other, knotted together by the imperative for a man to desire employment and be willing to work. Mechanization and the decline of old trades, the creation of single-industry cities and towns, the migration of agricultural labourers from the countryside to these cities and to London, the intensification of the sweated industries, and the displacement of the labour of adult men by the labour of women and adolescent boys all contributed to urgent conversations about the relationships between work and unemployment and are examined through primary sources. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students of British History.

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022 Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense - economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and stresses the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic. How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian scepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of 'freedom' applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt's Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the post-war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism. He also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and thought, revealing how America's once neglected culture became respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book offers a masterly account of the main characters and minor figures who played part in shaping the post-war world of art and thought.

The urge to censor is as old as the urge to speak. From the first Chinese emperor's wholesale elimination of books to the Vatican's suppression of pornography from its own collection, and on to the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the advent of Internet troll armies, words, images and ideas have always been hunted down by those trying to suppress them. In this compelling account, Eric Berkowitz reveals why and how humanity has, from the beginning, sought to silence itself. Ranging from the absurd - such as Henry VIII's decree of death for anyone who 'imagined' his demise - to claims by American slave owners that abolitionist literature should be supressed because it hurt their feelings, Berkowitz takes the reader on an unruly ride through history, highlighting the use of censorship to reinforce class, race and gender privilege and guard against offence. Elucidating phrases like 'fake news' and 'hate speech', Dangerous Ideas exposes the dangers of erasing history, how censorship has shaped our modern society and what forms it is taking today - and to what disturbing effects.