A reassessment of the 20th century exploring topics such as the breakdown of the Old World, the lack of international accord, the failure of the Arts in recent years and the influence of the Third World.

Authentic first-person accounts by beggars, thieves and prostitutes.

Mrs Beeton's Household Management is a reference work.

Looking at urban history, this work balances statistics with the words of historians, diarists and novelists, poets and churchmen such as: Pepys, Boswell, Fielding, Walpole, Blake, Mayhew, Wells, Woolf, and Spark. It is a celebration of the city and also an elegy for its decline, with statistics and anecdote, from Boadicea to Betjeman.

A fascinating study of the spectacular explots if robbers and outlaws from Robin Hood to Jesse James.

Explores high and popular culture; family, race, gender and class relations; sexual attitudes and material conditions; science and technology - the diversity of social developments in Britain from 1945 to 2002. This book moves dexterously through a wide variety of sources, ranging from poetry through film and novels to opinion polls.

This is Engel's best known work, and is still in many ways the best study of the working class in Victorian England. What Cobbett had done for agricultural poverty in his Rural Rides , Engels did in this work on the plight of industrial workers in England in the 1840s.

This is the book that made Simon Schama's reputation when first published in 1987. A historical masterpiece, it is an epic account of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age of Rembrandt and van Diemen.

A brilliantly entertaining and innovative history of the ancient Athenians' consuming passions for food, wine and sex.

Tells an intimate story of hand knitting in America from Colonial times onwards. This title tells how women knit through the hardships of covered wagon travel across the West. It also tells how they knit to save their husbands and sons from freezing to death on battlefields.

In 1919, a generation of young women discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round, and the statistics confirmed it. This book is about those women, and about how they were forced, by a tragedy of historic proportions, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity and their future happiness.

The summer of 1911 was one of the high sunlit meadows of English history but on the horizon lurked a gathering storm. A new king was on the throne and the aristocracy were at play. Yet, as temperatures soared, cracks appeared under the surface with strikes, class divisions and the seeds of war to come.

From rag-gatherers to royalty, from fish knives to Freemasons: everyday life in Victorian London

Scholarly reflections on the social history of the 18th century.

A vivid portrayal of women in the Middle Ages, with an engaging essay on Eileen Power by Maxine Berg.

MEDIEVAL WOMEN looks at a thousand years of English history, as it affected - and was made by - women.

Did you know that one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year? That rats' teeth are harder than steel? Focusing on such questions, this book reveals the many ways rats' lives mirror those of humans. It is an account of a year spent in a garbage-strewn alley in lower Manhattan.