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Five giants loomed over the reconstruction of postwar Britain: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The battle against them was fought by five great programmes at the core of the Welfare State: social security, health, education, housing and full employment. Meticulously researched and vividly written, this award-winning history charts the epic struggle to forge a fair and decent society from the ashes of war, and chronicles the highs and lows of the decades that followed.

Despite deer being central to human cultures throughout time, from hunter-gatherers to post-medieval deer hunting, this is the first multi-disciplinary volume dedicated to research into human–cervid relationships. Covering Europe, North America and Asia, the 24 essays range from the archaezoology of deer to the image of the courtly huntress, and include studies of dispersal patterns, exploitation, symbolic significance, and effects on landscape and land management.

‘The Pekingese is a tinkered wolf, not redesigned wholesale from its wolf ancestors.’ This study examines recent developments in evolutionary biology through the lens of domestication. The rapid physical and behavioural changes which, through centuries of breeding, have been wrought on pets and farm animals, allow us to see evolutionary processes accelerated, and therefore, Francis argues, to understand them better; particularly their conservative nature, a notion espoused by the fields of genomics and evolutionary developmental biology, which feature prominently here. Slightly off-mint.

During the 17th century unprecedented numbers of people left England. They were on their way to new lives in the Caribbean and the North American colonies – but what were their motivations for undertaking such a perilous transatlantic voyage? Using contemporary letters, diaries and court records, Evans tells the personal stories of men and women who left their homeland in search of a fortune, for political and religious reasons or because their desperate poverty meant they had little to lose.

Throughout the burgeoning cities of Victorian Britain, lodging houses provided shelter to those who flocked from the countryside in search of work. Crowded, insanitary and often disreputable, they aroused the horror of respectable society, and were viewed as hotbeds of crime and disease. Drawing on contemporary accounts, newspaper reports and court cases, this fascinating social history shines a light into the shadowy world of itinerant labourers, criminals, street entertainers, peddlers, prostitutes, abandoned children, and families fallen on hard times.

On 3 March 2011, a powerful earthquake shook northern Japan, killing more than 15,000 people and triggering a tsunami that sent the Fukushima nuclear plant into meltdown. Five years later, survivors were allowed to revisit the evacuated town of Tomioka. Rebecca Bathory accompanied them into the exclusion zone. Her photographs of abandoned streets and schoolrooms vividly convey the human cost of the disaster, and offer a stark warning for the future.

These photographs from Imperial War Museum collections show a few of the 16 million animals, from ships’ mascots to camels, that served in the First World War.

Telling the story of his own life – in Leeds as a child, living in America and travelling across Europe and Africa – the novelist and playwright Caryl Phillips reflects on shifting notions of race, culture and belonging.

Fiona Shaw reads the unabridged text of Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous argument for the education of women and against a social system that kept them in ‘ignorance and slavish dependence’. First published in 1792.

Ancient Romans often treated animals in ways that we consider cruel, but in many respects their attitudes were similar to our own. Ferris proposes ‘a way to understand Roman culture through analysing the society’s relationship with animals’. Using literary, visual and archaeological evidence, he shows how animals were kept for farm work and as household pets; how they were slaughtered for food, as sacrifices and as public entertainment; and how Romans presented animals in mythology and as attributes of deities.

During the 1980s, Neil Ansell was working at a charity for homeless people, living alongside them in squats across London. Then, as the harsh economic policies of the decade began to bite, the numbers of homeless increased, the streets became awash with heroin, and friends started to disappear and die. In this remarkable memoir, he recounts how, facing a personal crisis, he found solace and healing in the Scottish island of Jura.

There are currently more than 20 billion chickens on the planet, constituting humanity’s most important source of protein. But how did a humble fowl rise from the thickets of South Asian jungles to a position of such global supremacy? Reframing how we think about all domesticated animals, this history of our relationship with chickens ranges over four continents to trace their vital role in human cultures and the spread of civilization, from ancient Egyptian processions to the latest flu vaccines.

Raised amid the grandeur of Knebworth House, Lady Constance Lytton was an unlikely radical. Drawing on unpublished family papers, this biography tells her story for the first time: how, witnessing the trial of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, she became convinced that women must win the right to vote; and how, in jail, she discovered that her status afforded her preferential treatment, and on release disguised herself to discover the horrors that other suffragettes were forced to endure.

The music writer Rod Chapman takes ‘the scenic route’ in his exploration of the history and cultural impact of LSD in the mid 1960s. Starting with earlier experiments with drugs by poets, painters and musicians, Chapman describes what was really going on, from Haight-Ashbury hippies to Charles Manson in the USA, and from Love Me Do to the trajectory of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones ‘from blues purist to experimentalist to crushed spirit’.

This series introduces the texts that have helped shape Western civilization, every volume providing a detailed examination of the central ideas and arguments of a seminal text and discussion of its lasting significance.

In short essays, each of these volumes focuses on the 50 essential writers, movements, works or themes in disciplines ranging from ancient history to modern media studies.

In short essays, each of these volumes focuses on the 50 essential writers, movements, works or themes in disciplines ranging from ancient history to modern media studies.

In October 1735 two merchant ships and a naval vessel left London, beginning a five-month transatlantic voyage to the new British colony of Georgia. Berry uses logs, letters and diaries from this expedition to describe the passengers’ experience of sea travel and their hopes and fears about a new life in America. He also examines how such voyages shaped American Protestantism, as shipboard life gave a foretaste of the New World’s denominational and ethnic diversity.

Seventy years ago the British Raj was dissolved and the self-governing countries of India and Pakistan were born at midnight on 14–15 August 1947. But in the months surrounding Partition violence broke out between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, resulting in widespread ethnic cleansing that carved a gulf between the two countries with terrible consequences to this day. This book investigates how things went so very wrong, and left a toxic legacy of extremism, terror and nuclear proliferation.

Focusing on environment, forestry and conservation sciences, this study explores the transformation in global science and its contrasting effects in Guinea, one of the world’s poorest countries, and the more prosperous Trinidad.

From the early 19th century, millions of people crossed the seas to escape war, famine or poverty, or were taken against their will as slaves, convicts or indentured labourers. Drawing on original sources and first-hand accounts, this book examines the transition from one life to another: the decision to emigrate, the journey to the port, the perils of the voyage, and the emigrants' reception in the Americas or Australasia.

Ten people died in the Staplehurst train crash of 1865, but accidents were not uncommon at the time and the disaster is now most notable because Dickens was one of the passengers. This history focuses on the most serious accidents on the British network from the beginnings of rail travel to the present day, comparing official reports with contemporary newspaper accounts and examining how attitudes changed as court claims became more common and safety was taken more seriously.

Although central topics of concern in contemporary Europe, migration, integration and multiculturalism have always been part of its history. A scholarly overview of migration within and into Europe since the 17th century, the Encyclopedia comprises 17 survey studies of the various regions and countries of Europe, followed by information on approximately 220 groups, from African slaves in early modern Britain to affluent British migrants to the Costa del Sol in the late 20th century.

A physician, professor of neurology and author, Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) has been described by the New York Times as 'a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine'. His books are made up of case histories of his patients, and explore both their neurological disorders and the strategies they adopted to cope with them. In Seeing Voices, a journey into the world of the profoundly deaf, Sacks examines the consequences of living in silence, including the different ways in which the deaf and the hearing learn to categorize and convey the experience of their respective worlds.

In this lively, well-researched study, Foxhall examines how convicts, emigrants and ships' surgeons created medical knowledge at sea in the first half of the 19th century. Focusing on the route between the ports of Britain and Ireland and the Australian colonies, it makes a significant contribution to the histories of medicine, penal reform, colonialism and immigration.

Katherine Aron-Beller explores the role of the Inquisition in Modena, the status of Jews in the early modern Italian duchy, and the trials of professing Jews between 1598 and 1638, the year of the Jews' enclosure in the ghetto.

Janet Lembke's celebration of the chicken in its every aspect has chapters on classical, medieval, Renaissance and modern chickens, literary and scientific chickens, eggs and urban chicken-keeping. It is also a very practical book, drawing on the author's own experience of building coops, keeping poultry - and eating it. She includes a survey of chicken cuisine and a selection of recipes.

The year 1913 is generally seen as nothing more than the prelude to an apocalypse. That was not how it felt at the time. This majestic account presents that year as it appeared to contemporaries. Through the stories of 28 cities, from London to New York, Vienna to St Petersburg, and Constantinople to Beijing, it presents a panorama of a world alive with potential, wealthy as never before, intoxicated by technological progress, and oblivious to the catastrophe that lay ahead.

Off-mint.