Questioning those who view Impressionism solely in terms of artistic technique, T.J. Clark describes the painting of Manet, Degas, Seurat and others as an attempt to give form to France's modernity and seek out its typical representatives, be they barmaids, sightseers or the petits bourgeois.

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For the next four years, he and a team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling. This book tells the story of those four years and paints a picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Even in an age of soaring skyscrapers and cavernous sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, with its immense, terracotta-tiled cupola, retains a rare power to astonish. This book tells the story of how the cupola was raised, from its conception to its consecration.

Robert Hughes first encountered Goya's work while a student in Australia. Looking at his etchings for the first time, he wondered what made it possible for an eighteenth-century Spanish artist to convey the essence of despair, loneliness, anxiety and loss to an adolescent two centuries and half a world away.

Telling the romantic story of Paris through seven ages of turmoil and change, this book covers the Middle Ages, the 100 years war, the Paris of Louis XIV, the age of Napoleon, the Commune, the Empire days of Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie, and the First World War and De Gaulle. It also includes the social and cultural history.

A cryptic summons from Lady Marchamont launches a London bookseller Isaac Inchbold on an odyssey through the back alleys of 17th-century Europe. He suddenly finds himself in a game where forces are anonymous, motives inexplicable but the outcome deadly.