Polish pilot W³adek Gnyœ was credited with shooting down the first two German aircraft of World War II on September 1, 1939. On 2 September 1939, as Gnys' squadron took off near Krakow to intercept the German invaders, German Stuka pilot Frank Neuber...

Barbra Streisand has been called the "most successful... talented performer of her generation" by Vanity Fair, and her voice, said pianist Glenn Gould, is "one of the natural wonders of the age". Streisand scaled the heights of entertainment-from a p...

The Biographics series presents an entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey all...

"We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind". So begins "A Very Queer Family Indeed", which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Bens...

<p>Henry IV (1399-1413), the son of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, seized the English throne at the age of thirty-two from his cousin Richard II and held it until his death, aged forty-five, when he was succeeded by his son, Henry V. This comprehe...

The Biographics series presents an entirely new way of looking at the lives of the world's greatest thinkers and creatives. It takes the 50 defining facts, dates, thoughts, habits and achievements of each subject, and uses infographics to convey all...

This intellectual biography of Hans Kohn (1891-1971) looks at theories of nationalism in the twentieth century as articulated through the life and work of its leading scholar and activist. Hans Kohn was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his...

The definitive account of Richard Nixon's congressional career, back in print with a new preface. Unsurpassed in the fifteen years since its original publication, Irwin F. Gellman's exhaustively researched work is the definitive account of Richard N...

This is the first modern scholarly biography of Blanche of Castile, whose identity has until now been subsumed in that of her son, the saintly Louis IX. A central figure in the politics of medieval Europe, Blanche was a sophisticated patron of religi...

What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth...