In the summer of 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on one of the Kindertransports and placed with foster parents in Wales. For reasons of their own, the childless Calvinist couple erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity.

How does environment influence history? How are events and personalities, wars and nationalities shaped by their surroundings, by the very rise and fall of earth, water and forest? This work attempts to answer these questions and gives a portrait of the world around us and how it shapes us.

A riveting, original book about the creation of the modern American mind.

In this remarkable study, now an established classic which has remained in print since its first publication in 1971, Charles Rosen surveys the language of the music of the classical period. He concentrates on the three major figures of the time - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - because 'it is in terms of their achievements that the musical vernacular can best be defined'. He follows the ...

At moments when reality shows itself to be unstable or uncanny, we experience a form of vertigo. This experience is further complicated when we try to transform experience into writing, and fact clashes with memory. Sebald's novel, part fiction, part travelogue explores this theme.