This work abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. Diamond focuses on what ancient people were endowed with in the way of land, animals and plants, and on the confrontations between less and more advanced people to see how this led to today's inequalities.

This history of reading goes from the earliest examples of the clay tablets and cuneiform of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt to today's digital revolution. It argues that it is the demands of the reader, acting alongside the will of the writer, that is the evolutionary motor of literary genres.

'Rubicon' is a narrative history which provides bloody and labyrinthine political intrigue and struggle, oratory and amazing feats of conquest and cruelty.

The theatre for which Shakespeare wrote and acted was a cut-throat commercial entertainment industry. Yet his plays were also intensely alert to the social and political realities of their times.

From the foundation of the world's first democracy in Athens to the Roman Republic and the Empire under Hadrian, this title presents the turbulent histories of Greece and Rome together. Discussing figures such as Homer, Socrates, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Augustus and the first Christian martyrs, it explores freedom, justice, and luxury.

The 16th revised and updated edition of this introduction to art, from the earliest cave paintings to experimental art. New artists have been incorporated such as Corot, Kollwitz and Nolde, and six fold-outs present large-scale works such as Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece.