The phrase "Cold War" was coined by George Orwell in 1945 to describe the impact of the atomic bomb on world politics: "We may be heading not for a general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity". The Soviet U...

Like a lot of good stories, this one begins with a rumor: in 1239, Pope Gregory IX accused Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, of heresy. Without disclosing evidence of any kind, Gregory announced that Frederick had written a supremely blasphemous...

Drawing on primary source material and interviews with statisticians and other scientists, "The Theory That Would Not Die" is the riveting account of how a seemingly simple theorem ignited one of the greatest scientific controversies of all time. Bay...

Thomas Babington Macaulay's "History of England" was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation's sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire and its claim to be the modern nation, marking t...

In far-flung locations around the globe, an unparalleled sequence of international events took place between December 1 and December 12, 1941. In this riveting book, historian Evan Mawdsley explores how the story unfolded. He demonstrates how these d...

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elites and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavour. But in the second half of the 16th century...

Shepherd Mead, bestselling author of "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying", came to live in England with his family in 1958. Six years later he published a satirical handbook for fellow Americans to guide them through the nuances of Brit...

The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book...

The powerful and innovative King Athelstan reigned only briefly (924-939), yet his achievements during those eventful twelve years changed the course of English history. He won spectacular military victories (most notably at Brunanburh), forged unpre...

Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruth...