Companion to Roger Crowley’s two previous works of narrative history, Empires of the Sea (Faber. PB. $29.99) and Constantinople (Faber. PB. $26.95), this is a sprawling and captivating account of how Venice grew from a lagoon city built solely on the trade of salt to become the greatest power in the Mediterranean and beyond. Straddling the centuries between 1000 and 1503, this enthralling read focuses on the looting of Constantinople in 1203, the legendary battle with archenemy Genoa in 1378 and the establishment of a trading empire that made Venice the richest city in the world. Cinematic in scale and crammed with historical re-enactments, Crowley’s book concludes with the establishment of Portugal’s trading route to the east that was to spell doom for the Venetian empire’s trade dominance once and for all.

Even under Hitler’s brutal rule, the almost unspeakably gruesome crimes of a serial killer had the power to horrify the Parisian public. In 1944, while the Nazi occupation was casting a pall across the city of light, a mound of bodies was discovered in Dr Marcel Petiot’s fashionable apartment. Petiot, who’d been a well-liked family doctor, was charged with 27 murders, although many more were suspected. The disappearance of countless people under the Nazis made this a particularly difficult case, and the task was further impeded by Petiot’s claim that he was a Resistance hero. With access to the French police file – classified until recently – David King has delved into a dark and nightmarish event, and emerged with a thoroughly engaging book.

Considering the way accounting is viewed in popular culture – as a humdrum profession of bean counting and suit wearing – it might at first seem an odd notion that accountants could rescue the planet. But this is the argument put forward by Jane Gleeson-White in this groundbreaking exploration of the cornerstone of modern accounting. In Double Entry she examines the history of double entry, and looks at how accounting has developed into an essential part of 21st century capitalism. However, as capitalism has flourished, the planet has grown increasingly unhealthy – and maybe double entry holds a solution.

For the first and only time, nuclear war was waged over a few days in August 1945. It levelled two cities, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and helped create the nightmare of the Cold War. Some, including then-US president Harry S. Truman, have justified the dropping of the atomic bombs as the best way to end a protracted war and prevent the loss of even more life. But does this justification hold up to in-depth scrutiny? Paul Ham, acclaimed author of Kokoda (HarperCollins. PB. $35), has written a highly detailed, well-researched and unflinching chronicle of the events leading up to the bombings; those few days in August from multiple points of view (including the perspectives of 80 survivors); the immediate aftermath; and the long-term, far-reaching consequences.

This masterly work uncovers the ways in which Jerusalem has become a transcendent fantasy that ignites religious fervour unlike anywhere else on earth. Writer and academic James Carroll shows how the conflicts within this holiest of cities underscore an important point of history: that religion and violence fuel each other. Tracing the richly intertwined threads of Jewish, Christian and Muslim history, he illuminates the European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem as the spark of both anti-Semitism and racist colonial contempt, and writes about how the city defines the American imagination today. Carroll argues that Jerusalem fever, inextricably tied to Christian fervour, is the deadly third party to the Arab–Israeli wars, and that understanding it offers the best chance to re-imagine peace.

Throughout WWII, Lisbon was at the centre of world attention. The only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis powers openly operated, it was a temporary home to over one million refugees seeking passage to America, as well as to a host of spies, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs and black marketeers. Neill Lochery’s fascinating book draws on records recently uncovered from Portuguese secret-police and banking archives, as well as other unpublished documents, and delivers a gripping portrait of a city where intrigue, betrayal, opportunism and double-dealing were rife.

Catholic plots, internal rebellion, overseas expansion, the threat of invasion – the Elizabethan age was a heady time to be alive, as riddled with secret agents, ciphers and plots as a Cold War thriller. By focusing on the personal story of Elizabeth’s principal secretary and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, John Cooper’s lively history captures the intrigue of this period, analysing the statesman’s role in such issues as Elizabeth’s marriage prospects, the fate of Mary Stuart and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Ranging from the political to the personal, Cooper also teases out the details of Walsingham’s life in Elizabethan England, the books that lined his library shelves, the trees that adorned his Thameside mansion, and the rigorous intricacies of life at court.

In 2001, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen paid $6 million; in 2002, Sir John Getty spent $7 million. These men weren’t the first to lay down massive sums for copies of Shakespeare’s First Folios. Published in 1623, the first editions of the Bard’s works have tempted book collectors for centuries. For more than a decade, Shakespearean scholar Eric Rasmussen and his team of experts have been hunting down the First Folios, of which there are 232 known copies. Each of these books has a unique history – often bizarre, scandalous and peopled with scoundrels – and Rasmussen has compiled the best of these tales into this entertaining book.

The ever-popular and at times controversial historian Geoffrey Blainey builds on his short history series, which includes short histories of the world and of the 20th century, with A Short History of Christianity. Blainey traces the history of Christianity from a historical rather than theological standpoint, starting with an evocative and deceptively simple retelling of the life and death of Jesus Christ, and how he went on to become the figurehead of one of the world’s most universal religions. The book is beautifully researched and economical in its sweeping coverage of 2000 years of Christian life, its twists and turns, and the major religious figures who have influenced and reenergised Christianity through the centuries.

This lavishly illustrated history of the book draws on the rare collections held by the State Library of Victoria for its content. Highlighting the collectability of beautiful and rare books, Cowley and Williamson reflect on the unique place of books in our lives as transmitters of our shared cultural memory and as touchstones on our life journey. Starting with illuminated manuscripts, the book moves on to Gutenberg’s Bible and other early examples of printing. Also included are the scientific and political books that changed the world, from Darwin and Freud to Marx and Greer; works of literature that captured the imagination; the gloriously trashy covers of pulp fiction; and examples of bookbinders’ and book designers’ artistry.

Americans call the Second World War The Good War. But before it even began, Americas wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizensand kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At wars end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history.

From Alexandria to York, this unique illustrated guide allows us to see the great centres of classical civilization afresh.

The key feature of Cities of the Classical World is 120 specially drawn maps tracing each city's thoroughfares and defences, monuments and places of worship. Every map is to the same scale, allowing readers for the first time to appreciate visually the relative sizes of Babylon and Paris, London and Constantinople. There is also a clear, incisive commentary on each city's development, strategic importance, rulers and ordinary inhabitants.

This compelling and elegant atlas opens a new window on to the ancient world, and will transform the way we see it.

Colin McEvedy (1930-2005) was a psychiatrist, historian and demographer. His many acclaimed books included seven earlier Penguin atlases. Cities of the Classical World, the last book he compiled before his death in 2005, is the result of a lifetime's enthusiasm for classical history, and of many years spent travelling to major ancient sites from Babylon to Pompeii.

A fascinating exploration of Jan van Eyck’s much-loved 1434 portrait of the Arnolfinis and the strange, dramatic history of its owners through time.

The Arnolfini portrait, painted by Jan van Eyck in 1434, and now in the National Gallery, London, is one of the world’s most famous paintings. It intrigues all who see it. Scholars and public alike have puzzled over the meaning of this haunting gem of medieval art, a subtleand beautiful double portrait of a wealthy Bruges merchant and his wife. The enigmatic couple seem to be conveying a message to us across the centuries, but what? Is the painting the celebration of marriage or pregnancy, a memorial to a wife who died in childbirth,a fashion statement or a status symbol? Using her acclaimed forensic skills as an art historian, Carola Hicks set out to decode the mystery, uncovering several few surprises along the way. She also tells the fascinating story of the painting’s survival through fires, battles, hazardous sea journeys, and its role as a mirror reflecting the culture and history of the time – from jewel of the Hapsburg empire to Napoleonic war trophy. Uniquely, for a masterpiece this old, it can be tracked through every owner, from the mysterious Mr Arnolfini via various monarchs to a hard-up Waterloo war hero, until it finally came to rest in 1842 as an early star of the National Gallery. These owners all have cameo parts in this enthralling story of how an artwork of genius can speak afresh to each new generation.

In 1933, a year that would prove to be a turning point in history, William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany. He brings his family with him to Berlin, where they experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance, and – ultimately – horror. The ambassador's daughter is at fist entranced by the pomp and parties, and by the young men with their infectious enthusiasm for the 'New Germany'. As evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, however, Dodd telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. He watched with growing alarm as Jews are attached, the press is censored, and a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character.

* If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war.

* Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead.

* In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: 'The price of life is death.' Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but 'a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day'.

* As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

* For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Leningrad is a gripping narrative history interwoven with personal stories - immediate accounts of daily siege life drawn from diarists and memoirists on both sides. These twentieth-century European civilians living through unbearable hardship reveal the terrible details of life in the blockaded city: the all-consuming and daily search for food; crawling up ice-rounded steps on hands and knees, hauling a bucket of water; a woman who has just buried her father noticing how the cemetery guards have used a frozen corpse with outstretched arm and cigarette between its teeth as a signpost to a mass grave; another using a dried pea to make a rattle for her evacuated grandson's first birthday, and putting it away in a drawer when she hears, six months later, that he has died of meningitis. In Leningrad, Anna Reid answers many of the previously unanswered questions about the siege. How good a job did Leningrad's leadership do - would many lives have been saved if it had been better organised? How much was Stalin's and Moscow's wariness of western-leaning Leningrad (formerly the Tsars' capital, St Petersburg) a contributing factor? How close did Leningrad come to falling into German hands? And, above all, how did those who lived through it survive?

In this magisterial history, Robert Hughes identifies seven distinct cultural episodes: the city's Etruscan beginnings, Julius Caesar and the birth of the Imperium, primitive Christianity and the growth of the Church, the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Neo-Classic, the Rome of Fascism and Mussolini and, finally, the Rome of the 1960s - the era of Fellini, la dolce vita and the birth of the paparazzo. The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western world.

From cavemen to the Cold War, from Alexander the Great to global warming, from warfare through the ages to the great voyages of exploration, THE TIMES COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE WORLD is the book that has all the answers, the detail and the authoritative text in one breathtaking single historical source.

With over 600 full-colour maps and charts on a wide range of historical subjects and representing the work of a team of professional historians, this new edition continues a tradition of nearly thirty years of excellence, style, authority and cutting-edge design.

This edition is internet-linked, permitting further in-depth exploration of key subjects.
With fully up-to-date text, including material on Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, Israel and the EU, this book, edited by leading modern historian Professor Richard Overy, is broad-ranging and more visually enticing than ever.

'The past is a foreign country' has become a truism, yet we often forget that the past is different from the present in many unfamiliar ways, and historical memory is extraordinarily imperfect. We habitually think of the European past as the history of countries which exist today - France, Germany, Britain, Russia and so on - but often this actually obstructs our view of the past, and blunts our sensitivity to the ever-changing political landscape.

Europe's history is littered with kingdoms, duchies, empires and republics which have now disappeared but which were once fixtures on the map of their age - 'the Empire of Aragon' which once dominated the western Mediterranean; the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, for a time the largest country in Europe; the successive kingdoms (and one duchy) of Prussia, much of whose history is now half-remembered at best. This book shows the reader how to peer through the cracks of mainstream history writing and listen to the echoes of lost realms across the centuries.

How many British people know that Glasgow was founded by the Welsh in a period when neither England nor Scotland existed? How many of us will remember the former Soviet Union in a few generations' time? Will our own United Kingdom become a distant memory too? As in his earlier celebrated books Europe: a history and The Isles, Norman Davies aims to subvert our established view of what seems familiar, and urges us to look and think again. This stimulating surprising book, full of unexpected stories, observations and connections, gives us a fresh and original perspective on the history of Europe.

Note: December release.