Our modern world is built on one indispensable form of transport: the railway. Its gifts are everywhere, in the shape of our cities,coal-fired power, and the food we eat. In this captivating book, the author rides from the birthplace of the locomotive in Britain, crosses Russia on the Trans-Siberian, crests the Andes on a rattling coal train and jams with blues musicians across the USA as he explores the history, geography, cultural resonance and sheer romance of the railroad.

John Goodall traces a history of the British parish church and its cultural riches through 178 works of art and architecture, from runic inscriptions in the graveyard of St Cuthbert's, Bewcastle, to the war memorial, finished in 1934, in the former priory church in Wymondham. Goodall and Country Life photographer Paul Barker describe and picture an astonishing range of carvings and sculpture, paintings, decorated roofs, stained glass and spires, as well as oddities such as the golden dragon atop St Mary-le-Bow in London.

Constructed between 447 and 432 BCE, the Parthenon has come to epitomize architectural beauty and proportion as well as the ancient Athenian political and social ideals that underpin Western civilization. Connelly's radical new interpretation of the temple challenges our traditional understanding of the events depicted on its frieze; she uses the evidence of a fragmentary play by Euripides to argue that the temple’s enigmatic imagery represents not a contemporary civic celebration but a human sacrifice in the mythic past. Off-mint.

London has more parks and green spaces than any other capital of a comparable size so a climbable tree is never far away. Extolling the virtues of lifting oneself out of the city bustle and finding new perspectives on the urban scene, this book records the exploits of a committed tree climber seeking out interesting specimens and unusual vantage points, from a tall sweetgum alongside the walls of St Paul's Cathedral to a scruffy willow on the Swiss Cottage roundabout.

During the 1870s the famous Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris had an entire ward dedicated to treating 'hysteria'. This mysterious illness baffled physicians and fascinated the public, who came to witness the spectacle of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot's demonstrations with his hysterical patients. After a profile of Charcot himself, this book tells the stories of Blanche, Augustine and Geneviéve – three of the 'hysterics' under his care and hospitalized during a crucial moment in the history of psychiatry.

Among the most trusted of English dictionaries, Collins is the official Scrabble dictionary and a leading authority on the contemporary use of language. This pocket dictionary and thesaurus is innovatively arranged with entries from both reference works displayed concurrently, so that the synonyms appear on the same page as the definitions. The entries are clearly set out using a two-colour system with the most useful alternative words further highlighted. There is also an appendix with practical writing tips.

The disastrous Gallipoli campaign of the First World War cost Winston Churchill his job as First Lord of the Admiralty and ended the military career of Ian Hamilton, widely blamed for the bungling of the operation on the ground. This study of Hamilton's military career traces his rise to prominence in the British Army of the 19th century and examines his failings, as well as those of his superiors, at Gallipoli, and his prescient military writings after the war.

Along with evocations of British life from writers such as Dickens, George Eliot and Robert Louis Stevenson, many of the excerpts in this Year illustrate the spread and conflict of empire – Florence Nightingale writing from Scutari, Lady Sarah Wilson reporting the Jameson Raid, and Emily Eden, travelling with the army in India.

It's tough being a teenage tiger, a fledgling eagle or a baby meerkat. Every animal must make an extraordinary journey to achieve its life's goal – to continue its bloodline. Packed with dramatic colour photographs and stills from the BBC series Life Story, and covering creatures as diverse as hermit crabs and hyenas, this book charts their journeys from birth, through the learning curves of growing up and the rituals of courtship to parenthood. With a foreword by David Attenborough.

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer whose career did not begin until she was nearly 60; she would go on to write biographies, short stories and nine novels, including The Blue Flower, a fictionalized life of the German poet Novalis, and Offshore, for which she won the Booker Prize in 1979. Here the much-acclaimed biographer of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf presents an intimate portrait of a woman writer 'not quite like anyone else'. American-cut pages.

Our view of George III is coloured by the madness that afflicted him in later life. Yet as this sympathetic biography makes clear, the prince who acceded to the throne at the age of 22 had eminently sane but novel ambitions. He would be a new kind of king, whose authority rested on consent rather than power; and a new kind of man, with a stable, affectionate marriage rather than a string of royal mistresses. (Also published as The Strangest Family.) Slightly off-mint.

For centuries globes have been the most accurate way of representing the world, avoiding the need for projections that distort the curved surface of the planet to present it on a flat sheet of paper. Many are also artefacts of great beauty. Illustrated with 60 examples from collections around the world, this handsome book charts their art and history, from the earliest surviving Chinese globe to the desktop models of Victorian schoolrooms, explaining how they were made and used.

During the golden age of Hollywood the style and elegance of the studios' most famous stars were enhanced by the regular appearance of well-groomed dogs in their promotional photographs. The images collected here feature more than 130 actors posing alongside their canine friends, from the greats of the silent era, such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Mary Pickford, to Joan Collins and Lee Marvin in the 1960s, while Elvis Presley meets a real-life Hound Dog.

Dartmoor is a place where people go to walk, to climb tors, to experience unspoilt wilderness; but in fact the landscape has been shaped by human activities, from its standing stones and clapper bridges to prison buildings and disused railway lines. In this study of the area, Matthew Kelly considers the many different responses to Dartmoor – archaeological, poetic, folkloric, commercial, environmentalist – and explores how 'this unusually distinct landscape has been encountered, imagined and argued over since the late 18th century'.

One of the principal facilitators of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was captured by Mossad in Argentina in 1960 and brought to Jerusalem for trial. This analysis examines his post-war life up to that event, based on newly discovered documentation. The book is in part a response to Hannah Arendt's 1963 volume Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which assessed Eichmann's actions in the light of his court testimony and evidence available at the trial.

Boston and Bridgetown in Barbados, Dublin, Capetown, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi and Liverpool: through studies of these ten cities, from their origins to the present, Tristram Hunt tells the story of the British Empire from the fresh perspective of its legacy of urbanism. The changing character of the Empire is traced through people, architecture and infrastructure, industry and social life, revealing the complexity of exchange, interaction and adaptation in the history and culture of these great cities.

Christina Hardyment's illustrated collection of food writing ranges across the centuries, from Pliny the Elder's report of Cleopatra drinking pearls dissolved in vinegar and Chaucer's Franklin ('Epicurus' very son') to MFK Fisher's cauliflowers in Dijon in 1943. The anthology is arranged by themes such as the art of hospitality, food to impress, love bites, cooks and kitchens and literary recipes, the latter ending with the challenge of the Scripture Cake.

While countless writers have relished the streets of London, others have recoiled: ‘I think the full tide of human existence is at Charing Cross’, wrote Dr Johnson; but for DH Lawrence ‘The traffic flows through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of hell through their banks of dry, rocky ash’. This illustrated companion to the capital presents all kinds of literary reaction – in poetry and prose, Dickens’s Sketches and Lear’s limericks – on London and life in London.

The Retronaut website (www.retronaut.com) unearths quirky archive photography and presents unusual and surprising views of the past. This set of images focuses on pets and other animals in the collection, ranging from a horse playing the tuba in the 1920s and elephants playing cricket in the 1930s to a cow travelling on a Paris bus in the 1960s and a goose riding a bicycle in the 1980s.

At the start of the 1980s it seemed that the Cold War, with its logic of 'mutually assured destruction', was a permanent stand-off between two irreconcilable foes. Yet the years between Mikhail Gorbachev becoming Soviet General Secretary in 1985 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 saw everything change. In this study Service analyses the thaw in US/USSR relations, focusing on the work of the 'big four': Gorbachev, Reagan and their foreign ministers Shevardnadze and Shultz.

South Asians coming to Victorian Britain tended to be soldiers or domestics serving the Empire or the elite seeking education, but later mass migrations from the subcontinent, East Africa and the Caribbean started to forge a uniquely British Asian culture. Mixing images of ordinary people facing the challenges of living and working in their new home with political figures, activists, pioneers and celebrities, this photographic collection charts the experiences of Asians in Britain from the late 19th century to the present day.

A tangled web of international alliances fuelled the politics of 1914 and, when war broke out, confidence in decisive military action soon faded as a stalemate became established on the Western Front. Here bestselling author Max Hastings examines the political and military manoeuvres of 1914, using the accounts of leaders and generals as well as ordinary people, to assess how Europe was drawn into war and review the first few months of action. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge, slightly off-mint and American-cut pages.

This collection of unusual recipes from historical cookery books includes some extraordinary dishes – Artificial Asses' Milk Made with Bruised Snails (1747) and Porpoise with Wheat Porridge (1450) for example. Recipes reveal a lot about contemporary life, and Peter Ross’s commentary explores their social and economic context, while Heston Blumenthal, in his Foreword, discusses how our cuisine is constantly evolving in response to trends and new ingredients.

When War Report was first broadcast from the beaches of Normandy in June 1944, it was a landmark for the BBC and combat reporting alike. Chester Wilmot, Frank Gillard and Wynford Vaughan Thomas landed side by side with the troops in gliders, by parachute and in assault craft to report directly from the front line. Their broadcasts, collected here, provide a dramatic, blow-by-blow account of the closing months of the Second World War, from D-Day to the German surrender.

Can apples get high on drugs? Are the laws of physics sexist? Was Jesus a giant electron? This book, by a regular contributor to Fortean Times, is an entertaining survey of bizarre experiments and ludicrous theories now abandoned in the dead-ends of scientific history. But, by showing why pseudoscientific fads such as alchemy took hold, it also warns that ‘science sometimes functions as a kind of myth’ when a laudable desire to challenge received thinking meets a faulty belief system.

Countless film and television adaptations have portrayed Defoe's fictional heroine as a 'tart with a heart' on the rowdy streets of Georgian London. This accessible and entertaining study debunks the myth, pointing out that the novel is actually set in the previous, far more troubled 17th century. In search of Moll's real-life prototypes, it takes the reader from Jacobean England to Jamestown, Virginia, and from the English Civil War to the struggles of the Powhatan Indians.

Since photography was invented, weddings have been a favourite subject, their black-and-white ceremonial garb especially suited to the medium. The couples in these touching images, as the curator Giles Waterfield (1949–2016) points out in his introduction, are captured in a moment of happy if nervous anticipation.

As the novelist David Lodge reminds us in his introduction, the 19th century saw a massive expansion in literacy. The featured sepia photographs capture people from all walks of life reading newspapers, books and Bibles by the fireside, in gardens and on the beach.

During the First World War the Daily Telegraph could count among its readers the great and the good of the nation, including leading writers, politicians and royalty, many of whom contacted the paper to share their views and suggestions. This collection of published letters gives an insight into the mood of the nation among a particularly influential group, ranging from pleas for money for supplies and hospital provision to debates over what clergymen should be saying about the conflict.

In 1818 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein horrified readers with the concept of using science to reanimate the dead; yet the idea was almost as old as science itself. This book charts the history of such experiments, from the ancients, through Luigi Galvani's electrification of frogs' legs to the macabre case of the 'Glasgow Frankenstein', in which the brilliant but eccentric scientist Andrew Ure attempted to bring an executed murderer back to life in 1818.

Surveillance of our habits through CCTV and computer spyware has reached epidemic proportions and social media and TV allow us to fully indulge our passion for eavesdropping on other people, an impulse that John Locke argues is hard-wired into our make-up. This study investigates the deep-seated desire to know what's going on in the private lives of others, uncovering the biological drive behind it and its consequences across history and culture, from 16th-century voyeurism to Facebook and Twitter.

Money is more than just coins and banknotes; it is an idea that shapes the way we understand and organize our world. Here bestselling author Kabir Sehgal travels the globe, including the Galápagos – where he explores the origin of currency exchange – and the Federal Reserve in New York, and mixing anecdote with research describes the development of money, its place in our culture, and the death and destruction it can bring about.

In 1937 Americans were devouring pulp fiction, while newspapers claimed that a wave of 'sex fiends' was engulfing the nation. So when three women were killed in a swish New York borough the murders became a tabloid sensation. This much-acclaimed title delves into the background of the perpetrator Robert Irwin, a failing sculptor with a history of precarious mental health, and follows his flight, capture and trial as well as the aftermath of the case.

With short essays by Greg Sullivan and Mark Salber Phillips, an interview with artist Dexter Dalwood and reproductions of 34 paintings, Fighting History explores the enduring significance and emotional power of British history painting. From vast 18th-century allegorical works to artworks reacting to recent political events, it examines how artists have chosen to capture and interpret the past. Accompanied an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2015.

'We should not romanticize our past,' writes Colin Brown, 'but nor should we forget it', and he goes on to describe his book as 'an attempt to show us as we really are'. Revisiting the actual sites of Magna Carta, Agincourt, the Tilbury dock where Elizabeth I gave her Armada speech and other places where British history was made – including Park Hospital in Manchester, birthplace of the NHS – Brown investigates the truth behind ten of our finest hours.

History does not turn on politics and battles alone; from Cleopatra to Evita Peron, sex appeal has made the world go round. This light-hearted book recounts the lives and liaisons of 50 of the sexiest men and women in history, including Lord Byron, Mata Hari and Lawrence of Arabia. Each entry includes a full-page portrait, quotes, and an explanation of who they were, why they mattered – and how they managed to be so seductive.

The art produced in the male-dominated society of ancient Rome abounds in images of imperial wives, working women and female mythological characters such as the Amazons. This broad thematic survey of such representations from across the empire interprets them in the light of political, religious and cultural contexts to show how much they reflect an ideological stereotype of the Roman matron, and how they were used to convey moral and political messages to women.

Covering the period from the death of William I in 1087 to the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), this volume examines alternative outcomes of the civil war of Stephen and Matilda; Richard I and the collapse of the Angevin Empire; the clash between Henry III and Simon de Montfort; and Edward I's involvement with the Crusade of Louis IX in 1270.

With hindsight, the Parliamentarian victory over the Royalists in the English Civil War may seem inevitable, but it was never a foregone conclusion. Venning examines the turning points at which things might have gone differently – the countdown to war between December 1641 and the spring of 1642; Edgehill; the creation of the New Model Army in 1644; and the 1645 campaign.

Among the crucial moments in Tudor history that could have had very different outcomes with far-reaching consequences, Venning focuses on Henry VIII's near-fatal tiltyard accident in 1536 and Edward VI's early death in 1553, and he poses the question: if the Spanish Armada had landed successfully – what then?

Amalarius of Metz (c.775–c.850) has borne much of the credit – and the blame – for establishing the ‘allegorical’ interpretation of the liturgy as an exercise unto itself. This volume presents a full study of a long neglected manuscript: Salisbury, Cathedral Library MS.154 contains a version of Amalarius’ Liber officialis that differs significantly from the accepted Hanssens edition. The text of the MS is given in full in Latin and an English translation. No jacket.

The centuries between the departure of the Romans and the Norman Conquest in 1066 – the so-called 'Dark Ages' – represent one of the most exciting periods of British history. In 35 walks, this book explores some of Britain and Ireland's most important and impressive Dark Age sites and monuments, from the Iron Age Broch of Mousa on Shetland to the Norman motte and bailey at Painscastle, Powys. With a route map and details of distance and difficulty for each walk.

Among the momentous events described in the Stuart year are the Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, the Union of Scotland and England and the publication of Newton’s Principia; and the witnesses to this 17th-century Britain include Pepys, Evelyn, Defoe and John Bunyan.

This study of public administration at the county level in Wales during the ‘long’ 19th century couples a detailed examination of what happened in one county – Anglesey – with overviews of events in other parts of Wales. Griffith explores the social and cultural contexts of county government in Wales, and assesses the shifts in the character and efficacy of local government, initially under a landed magistracy and later under a democratically elected council.

This volume is part of a series that examines the 'shifting boundaries' between Britain and Europe over time. For the period 1500 to 1780, Houlbrooke focuses on their complex and variegated diplomatic and commercial links, while keeping in mind political, religious, economic and cultural forces which shaped developments on both sides of the Channel. The study also covers relations between England, Wales and Scotland, the creation of the United Kingdom and the early challenges it faced.

Beginning in the 14th century with the continent-wide disaster of the Black Death, Cahill traces the development of European thought during that age when Renaissance humanism and the Reformation's radical changes brought the innovation and individuality that still contribute to 'the mechanism of our functioning contemporary selves'. He focuses on the history of the visual arts (with 62 colour plates); the sense of adventure in the period's revolutionary science; and the newly found courage to challenge religious ideas. Felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge, off-mint and American-cut pages.

In March 1578 cavalier Fabrizio Bracciolini alleged that he had been beaten up in a street in Pistoia by Mariotto Cellesi and four accomplices. At the trial that followed it emerged that Fabrizio was the lover of Mariotto's father's concubine. This dramatic history brings this long-forgotten incident to life, probing contemporary notions of honour, family and religion. Peopled by a rich cast of patricians, merchants, shopkeepers, weavers, priests and prostitutes, it presents a cross-section of society in Renaissance Italy.

Within two decades China is likely to have become the world's largest economy and its technological powerhouse. But how will this affect its foreign relations? Will the country strengthen its military might or pursue more diplomatic engagement with the rest of the world? To answer these questions the author considers the new form of Chinese nationalism and asks what we can learn about Chinese attitudes by looking back over the past 250 years of receptiveness and resistance to outside influence.