History & Classics

A Brief History of Pasta
Luca Cesari
Filled with mouth-watering recipes and engrossing tales, this is the story of Italy in ten dishes.

Astonish Me!
Dominic Dromgoole
A book about sensation in the arts by the long-term Globe Theatre artistic director

The BBC
David Hendy
A monumental work of popular history, making the case that the Beeb is as much of a National Treasure as the NHS

The Book of Phobias and Manias
Kate Summerscale
A captivating A-Z compendium of our fears and obsessions by the bestselling author of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

The Wordhord
Hana Videen
An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful and downright baffling words from the origins of English

The Library
Arthur der Weduwen
Princes, collectors, bookworms and thieves: the extraordinary story of the library, from Alexandria to the age of Google

The Aeneid
Shadi Bartsch
A fresh new translation of Vergil's Aeneid by a renowned classicist and scholar of Latin literature

Something Out of Place
Eimear McBride
A blistering, galvanising essay from Eimear McBride, award-winning author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

The Rule of Laws
Fernanda Pirie
From ancient Mesopotamia to today, the epic story of how humans have used laws to forge civilizations

Confronting Leviathan
David Runciman
A primer on political theory from bestselling author and host of Talking Politics David Runciman

The Black Book
Sybil Oldfield
For the first time, discover the stories of the heroic men and women the Nazis singled out for death in their plan to invade Britain

All In It Together
Alwyn Turner
A biting and original history which places culture front and centre to explain how our country went to pieces

Between Two Hells
Diarmaid Ferriter
The history of the war that shaped the Irish political landscape across the twentieth century and up to the present day, by Ireland's most promin…

The Confidence Men
Margalit Fox
The astonishing true story of two First World War prisoners who pulled off one of the most ingenious escapes of all time.

Dancing on Ropes
Anna Aslanyan
Horizon-expanding tales of how translators altered the course of world events

The Greywacke
Nick Davidson
The story of three 19th-century geologists whose fraternal rivalry ended up rewriting the history of our planet