69 Products

Between 1938 and 1974, thousands of British children were sent to Australia for a better life. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies, this exposé uncovers the grim reality that met them: inadequate education, poor quality food, and physical and sexual abuse.

Colin Fisher tells the story of Stefan Vallerio Pieroni (1819–1900), a seller of plaster figurines who came to England from Tuscany in 1837. Eventually, he settled in Bath, where he became prominent in the city’s social, cultural and political life.

For some, the fox is a beautiful, intelligent creature; for others, a ravager of henhouses. Lucy Jones probes these conflicted attitudes, and examines her own family history of foxhunting. She investigates the animal’s behaviour and reputation for cunning, charts attempts to exterminate it from the Tudor ‘Vermin Acts’ onwards, and traces the fox through folklore and literature from Aesop’s fables to Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.

Muriel Matters (1877–1969) is remembered as ‘that daring Australian girl’ who chained herself to a grille in Parliament demanding votes for women. This biography reveals the many causes – prison reform, Montessori schools, socialism – that occupied her long, active life.

First published in 2003, this oral history used interviews with 100 people, then in their late nineties, who had lived through the First World War, not as combatants, but as children and young adults on the home front. Their words, along with letters, diary entries and the authors’ linking narrative, offer an unusual view of the war, from fears of the Kaiser’s ambition in the years before its outbreak, to the jubilation, readjustment and mourning following the Armistice.

Arguing that public policy failures result from a simplistic model of human behaviour, Brooks explains what brain research has revealed about the influence of the unconscious mind on our actions. He illustrates these ideas through a fictional story of two ordinary people who led lives fulfilled, not by intelligence, wealth or prestige but through the character and ‘street smarts’ developed in the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions and social norms.

The influenza pandemic of 1918–20, which infected a third of the global population, killed 50–100 million people (probably more than the First and Second World Wars combined), yet it barely figures in the collective memory. This story of how the virus ‘emerged, swept the planet and receded’ also investigates human coexistence with flu viruses over the past 12,000 years, and looks at how societies might best combat another pandemic. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

A visual and narrative ‘celebration of the political, strategic, and cultural diversity of the women’s liberation movement’, this book brings together a vast range of posters, press cuttings and photographs with histories of feminist movements, campaigns and activists between the 1960s and 1980s, covering topics including feminist writers, civil rights, women’s bodies, and women in publishing, music and the arts, with a final chapter on feminism in the 21st century and ‘educating the next generation’.

First published in 1983, this landmark history shed new light on the struggle for social justice and drew attention to the achievements of many forgotten women activists. Reissued with a new introduction, it remains as relevant as ever today.

With retrievers suffering hip dysplasia and some pugs unable to breathe properly, Brandow argues that there is something wrong in the world of pedigree dogs. Having walked, owned, studied and performed with dogs, he combines personal knowledge with social history and research in this exposé of the dog industry and encourages a trip to the local animal shelter to take home a friendly mongrel.

In her accounts of nine 20th-century women and their literary partnerships, Lesley McDowell gives each a role – Hilda Dolittle is the ‘Novice’ in her affair with Ezra Pound, Anaïs Nin the ‘Mistress’ of Henry Miller, Rebecca West ‘Mother’ of HG Wells’s child – but none of them is labelled ‘victim’. These women writers, McDowell argues, ‘chose their own fates knowingly’ to further their own literary ambitions and poetic consciousness.

Following the success of her ‘Vintage Years’ column in the Guardian, Walmsley-Johnson bases this humorous guide around her own roller-coaster life. She tackles topics such as shopping, sex and finances, describes the difficulties of finding work at the age of 45 and discusses how lack of opportunities and the media’s negative attitude can combine to make middle-aged women feel invisible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.