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The history of humanity is one of devastating, once-in-a-thousand-year events: rising seas that make land uninhabitable, decades-long droughts, civilisational collapse, epidemics like the Black Death and the Spanish Flu that reduce a city’s population by fifty percent. And yet, despite enormous destruction and very real tragedy, these catastrophes all share one common denominator: we survived. In APOCALYPSE, Lizzie Wade reframes the story of human history to show how we can learn from these apocalyptic moments, seeing them not just as violent, world-ending events but as moments of progress.

In its final decades, the Roman Republic was engulfed by a crime wave. An epidemic of extortions, murders, and acts of insurrection tested the court system's capacity to maintain order. As case after case filled the docket, an ambitious young lawyer named Cicero seized every opportunity to litigate, forging a reputation as a master debater with a bright future in politics. In Lawless Republic, historian Josiah Osgood recounts the legendary orator's ascent and fall, and his pivotal role in the republic's lurch toward autocracy.

The great series The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant is one of the most monumental achievements in historical writing. In its eleven massive volumes, it tells the story of Western civilization from its origins to the age of Napoleon. This volume, The Climax of Christianity, is taken from The Age of Faith, the fourth in the series. It covers the years between 1095—the launching of the First Crusade—and 1300: the age of Dante Alighieri, whose epic poem Divine Comedy is one of the greatest treasures of our civilization.

In recent years, as companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com have made genetic testing available across the globe, it has become relatively simple to find out where your ancestors came from. But acclaimed geneticist Pierre Zalloua believes that these test results have led to a dangerous oversimplification of what one’s genetic heritage means. People have conflated genetic ancestry with other ways of defining themselves such as “origin,” “ethnicity,” and even “race” but give no attention to the complexities that underlie these concepts.

In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with plane hijackings and hostage-takings. Among them were the beautiful young Leila Khaled with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking philanderer Carlos the Jackal sporting shades and open-neck shirts, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. They sought to liberate the Palestinians and overthrow western imperialism, orchestrating spectacularly violent attacks that held governments to ransom and the world gripped to their television screens.

It’s harder than it seems – after all, it’s only human to thirst after the juicy updates, jaw-dropping stories, and idle chatter that we typically collect over drinks with friends. No one knows this better than journalist Kelsey McKinney, whose Normal Gossip podcast has accrued a listenership of millions. In YOU DIDN'T HEAR THIS FROM ME, McKinney explores the murkiness of everyday storytelling.

Du Big Bang à nos jours, notre Terre n’a cessé de se transformer sous les effets des mouvements tectoniques, des variations climatiques, de l’activité du Soleil ou encore des éruptions volcaniques. Comment ces changements ont-ils affecté l’histoire humaine ? Comment notre espèce s’est-elle adaptée à un environnement profondément modifié par les glaciations ou les périodes de réchauffement ? Pour répondre à ces interrogations, Peter Frankopan s’est engagé dans une entreprise majeure et inédite.

Arctic explorer and American visionary Walter Wellman pioneered both polar and trans-Atlantic airship aviation, making history’s first attempts at each. Wellman has been cast as a self-promoting egomaniac known mostly for his catastrophic failures. Instead he was a courageous innovator who pushed the boundaries of polar exploration and paved the way for the ultimate conquest of the North Pole—which would be achieved not by dogsled or airplane, but by airship.

In fifty bite-sized chapters spanning thousands of years, A Short History of the World in 50 Failures details how the world as we know it has been defined by plans gone awry, opportunities not seized upon and schemes that were always fated to end in catastrophe.

During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.

Born in 1781 in a small impoverished duchy of Germany, Julie's quiet life took a fairy-tale turn when she married into the Russian Imperial Family - the Romanovs. But this world of baroque splendour, of opulent palaces and grandeur, was no happily ever after. Taken to Russia at just fourteen, her marriage was hastily brokered to save the Saxe-Coburg duchy from financial ruin. Her husband, Grand Duke Konstantin, was cruel and abusive, Julie was uprooted from her home, family, language and culture.

As an author himself, Guy Stagg has long been fascinated by the role that retreat plays in the lives of writers and artists. Determined to see if seclusion could help his own work, he decided to follow in the footsteps of three seminal figures of the twentieth century: Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Jones and Simone Weil. Beautifully written and researched, THE WORLD WITHIN sees Stagg trace each of their journeys to isolation, hoping to see what they saw.

In late 31 AD, after the Roman senators murdered Lucius Sejanus, the Roman Emperor Tiberius's closest confidant, the Empire was forever changed. If Sejanus had not been murdered, Jesus would never have been crucified. This profound connection between the lives of Sejanus and Jesus is the first of many revelations in this startling reexamination of the Roman world in which Jesus walked. With new evidence and meticulous research, Dr. James Lacey weaves a majestic and accurate description of who Jesus was.

The Sea War is a wonderful, accessible history rooted in the Second World War. As the Soviet Union played its role in the fracas, Ally convoys from the UK, the United States and Iceland fought to deliver essential supplies to Russia. In a clash of extreme elements and fierce Axis opposition, the effort demonstrated like no other the commitment from other nations to supporting the Soviet Union.

Only a few hundred vessels have ever transited the Northwest Passage, stretching through Canada’s north from Maine to Alaska—and substantially fewer have completed the treacherous journey in a fiberglass-hulled boat like Polar Sun. But Mark Synnott was determined to add his name to the list, and in doing so, also investigate a 175-year-old mystery, that of what happened to the legendary captain Sir John Franklin and his crew aboard the legendary HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.

From ancient civilization to modern times, history is full of mysterious and downright bizarre circumstances. With these crazy and compelling facts, Hidden Histories will change your view of history

Combining the scope of Yuval Noah Harari with the political savvy of Francis Fukuyama, The Origin of Politics, Wade’s work draws from anthropology, evolutionary biology, and historical analysis to explore how human nature shapes the direction of society—and how policies which ignore human nature risk chaos and even extinction. Political scientists agree that the roots of politics must lie in human nature, but then assume that human behavior is infinitely flexible. The Origin of Politics shows that limits set by human evolution cannot be ignored without penalty.

地中海を中心に興亡を繰り返したさまざまな古代文明の世界、すなわち「地中海世界」の歴史を、古代ローマ史研究の第一人者、本村凌二氏が描きつくす。

メソポタミアからローマ帝国まで、「地中海世界」4000年の歴史を、古代ローマ史研究の第一人者が描きつくす全８巻シリーズ。講談社選書メチエ創刊30周年特別企画。 第１巻と同時発売の第２巻は、ローマ帝国に先立つふたつの大帝国、アッシリアとペルシアの登場を、大胆な仮説と人類史の大きな構想のなかで描く。

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Drawing on years of research and informed by Zubok’s three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, The Cold War paints a striking portrait of a world on the brink.