Few would have predicted that Bernard Berenson, from a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family, would rise above poverty. Yet Berenson left his crowded home near Boston's railyards and transformed himself into the world's most renowned expert on Ital...

For sale in CIS only! The most thrilling and controversial cricketer of his generation, Brian Lara is a hero to millions worldwide. A naturally attacking style and limitless scoring arc, allied to phenomenal mental and physical stamina, proved a rec...

Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leona...

"Boots, Bikes, and Bombers" presents an intimate oral history of Ginny Hill Wood, a pioneering Alaska conservationist and outdoorswoman. Born in Washington in 1917, Wood served as a Women's Airforce Service Pilot in World War II, and flew a military...

The life of John Davenport, who co-founded the colony of New Haven, has long been overshadowed by his reputation as the most draconian of all Puritan leaders in New England – a reputation he earned due to his opposition to many of the changes that we...

Bob Dylan is an iconic figure in American music and cultural history, lauded by "Time Magazine" as one of the hundred most important people of the twentieth century. For nearly fifty years the singer-songwriter has crafted his unique brand of music,...

Subversive, funny, and effortlessly droll, Jules Feiffer's cartoons were all over New York in the 1960s and '70s – featured in the "Village Voice", but also cut out and pinned to bulletin boards in offices and on refrigerators at home. Feiffer descri...

Founded in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, the Hasidic movement and its religious thinking have dramatically transformed modern Judaism. The figure of the Ba'al Shem Tov (known in acronym form as the BeSHT) – the purported founder of the Ha...

The extraordinary career of Franz Liszt (1811-1886) as a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist – whose incomparable skill and personal charisma dazzled audiences all over Europe, from London and Paris to Berlin, Moscow, and even Constantinople –...

William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1520-1598) was Elizabeth I's closest adviser and, as this revealing and provocative biography shows, the driving force behind the Queen's reign for four decades. Cecil, the steadfast rock of Elizabeth's government, had a...