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In Shakespeare’s time explorers were adding to European knowledge of distant places and peoples, while advances in cartography allowed for more accurate projections and more detailed mapping. Presenting many contemporary representations of English and European locations, the wider world and the heavens, Jeremy Black examines what such maps reveal about the ways in which playwright and audience understood geography and how they viewed their place in the world and the universe. Slightly off-mint.

The mid-18th century was a testing time for the British government, with a series of military and diplomatic failures abroad and Jacobite rebellion at home. Black charts the period’s significant political changes and their links to foreign policy developments.

After briefly surveying ancient constructions such as Maiden Castle and Gwalior Fort in India, Jeremy Black goes on to present a history of fortifications based on their depiction on maps and plans. From Norman castles – Pontefract is shown in a plan from 1561 – the book shows how buildings as bases for attack or defence changed as ever more powerful armaments were developed, up to the trenches and defences such as the Maginot and Siegfried Lines in the 20th century.

From the bird’s-eye views and flat maps of Renaissance Europe to GPS-derived imagery and digital mapping of the present day, and from Asia to North America, Jeremy Black traces the development of the city and its representation by cartographers over the last 500 years. More than 150 reproductions illustrate the variety of maps and plans and their increasing sophistication through the centuries, ending with past visions of what the future city might look like.

This concise, readable and timely book offers an in-depth treatment of environmental, social and demographic issues, discussing topics such as energy supplies, cross-border crime and immigration.

In a concise reinterpretation of one of history's most argued-over battles, the eminent military historian Jeremy Black uses Waterloo and its aftermath to discuss the changing nature of warfare, the rise and fall of Napoleon's empire, and the effects of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars on Europe and on Britain's role in the world during the 19th century.