History & Archaeology Books

At last, a soup for every week of the year! Packed full of vegan-friendly recipes, this new edition of Fraser Reid's cult bestseller features everything from winter favourites like Alternative Scotch Broth to such summery delights as Plum Tomato, Orzo...

Nightclub, theatre, creative hub, party place, and one of the most important venues in Scotland, Britain and Europe: for almost 25 years, The Arches was the beating heart of Glasgow.In 1991, former punk-turned-theatre director Andy Arnold walked into the...

Germany did not have professional players or a national league until the 1960s, yet it became one of the most successful football nations in the world.Tor!(Goal!) traces the extraordinary story of Germany's club and international football, from the days...

Aberdeen have competed on the European stage since season 1967/68 and have enjoyed some epic encounters along the way, culminating in the club's greatest ever victory beating Real Madrid 21 in the 1983 Cup Winner's Cup final. Ally Begg charts a...

Featuring the thoughts of more than 180 players who have represented Scotland since the very first Test match in 1871 all the way through to the present day,Behind the Thistlegives a unique insight into the drama and emotion of playing for Scotland in...

Public symbolism and private reflection: writer and urban explorer Attlee reads the signs appearing in windows and interviews a wide spectrum of peopleAs Britain entered lockdown in the spring of 2020, images and signs proliferated in its windows,...

What do you get when dare-devil Jihadists, mad English missionaries and proud, stubborn, warring natives meet in a clash?Nigeria.Formation: From Jihad to Amalgamation tracks the unlikely series of events and characters that turned a collection of...

A new edition in full colour, reproducing the original illustrations from 1946. At last she reached the brow of the hill...now the country opened out below her and she looked down into a wide and lovely valley...Still patched with snow the little fields...

In 1935 Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) was a well-established novelist, reviewer, columnist and feminist wit. She was part of the 'intellectual aristocracy' of England, but was also passionately interested in everyday life and its foolishnesses. Personal...

There's No Story There is about the lives of conscripted workers at Statevale, an enormous rural munitions factory somewhere in England during the Second World War.The workers are making shells and bombs, and no chances can be taken with so much...

The Highland Clearances are a well-documented episode in Scotland's past but they were not unique. The process began in the Scottish Lowlands nearly a century before, when tens of thousands of people significantly more than were later exiled form the...

In this informative and beautifully illustrated book, Carol Foreman traces Glasgow's history through buildings which have been demolished, but which once played a central part in the life of the city. Beginning with the medieval age, she goes on to look...

Some years ago a revolution took place in Early Medieval history in Scotland. The Pictish heartland of Fortriu, previously thought to be centred on Perthshire and the Tay found itself relocated through the forensic work of Alex Woolf to the shores of the...

The creation of large new tracts of forest, together with the development of a modern wood processing sector, was the single biggest transformation to occur in the Scottish countryside during the twentieth century. While the environmental and landscape...

Situated in the middle of the Irish Sea, the Isle of Man is like a stepping-stone between the lands that surround it. In medieval times, it played an important role in the histories of Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales.This book explores the first...

The archipelagic kingdoms of Man and the Isles that flourished from the last quarter of the eleventh century down to the middle of the thirteenth century represent two forgotten kingdoms of the medieval British Isles. They were ruled by powerful...

The Scot who won England the World Cup. Macaroon bars and Bovril. When Dixie Deans met Bob Marley. When Davie Robb met Olivia Newton-John. When George McCluskey met the Stones. When Rick Wakeman filed match reports for Meadowbank Thistle. Triumphs and...

A History of the French in London from William the Conqueror to Charles de Gaulle.'A beautiful and informative book, wonderfully illustrated' -Toute La CultureEver since 1066 there has been a substantial French presence in London. It is now said to be...

The search to create a science of signatures that exceeds the attempts of semiology and hermeneutics to determine pure and unmarked signs.The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben's sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for...

The emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual practices, as seen in religious, literary, and medical texts and images.In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of...

Leo Lyon Zagami uses the internal documents of the Illuminati to reveal confidential and top-secret events. His book contends that the presence of numerous Illuminati brotherhoods and secret societies-just as those inside the most prestigious U.S...

We all know about giving and receiving gifts: they can be touching or puzzling, either strengthening bonds of friendship or becoming a burden. Gifts are an integral part of human societies and this volume explores how, over the centuries, books and...

The Making of Shakespeare's First Folio offers the first comprehensive biography of the earliest collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. In November 1623, the book arrived in the bookshop of the London publisher Edward Blount at the Black Bear. Long in...

Succulents, especially cacti, are the current focus of serious ecological studies but also the darlings of designers and style influencers. Their endearing, characterful looks have given them the status of trendy 'plant pets'.But succulentomania is not...

Tutankhamun offers an intimate insight into the records of one of the world's most famous archaeological discoveries. In 1922, as Egypt became an independent nation, the tomb of the young king Tutankhamun was discovered. It was the first known intact...

'Long Live Freedom!'-Hans Scholl's last words before his executionThe White Rose (die Weie Rose) resistance circle was a group of students and a professor at the University of Munich who in the early 1940s secretly wrote and...

How long is an ell? What is the largest size of champagne bottle?How do you measure the heat of a chilli pepper? Why is the depth of water measured in fathoms? And what is a cubit?The Curious History of Weights & Measures tells the story of how we...

The University Archives was established in 1634. Based in the Bodleian Library, it is the institutional archive of Oxford University, holding records which span just over 800 years, documenting the University's activities and decisions throughout that...

What is life? This was a question of particular concern for Mary Shelley and her contemporaries. But how did she, and her fellow Romantic writers, incorporate this debate into their work, and how much were they influenced by contemporary science,...

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class...

'Buy my Dish of great Eeles, Any Old Iron take money for, Twelve Pence a Peck Oysters, Buy my fat Chickens, Fair Lemons & Oranges'Marcellus Laroon's The Cryes of the City of London drawne after the Life presents, in...

How did a library founded over 400 years ago grow to become the world-renowned institution it is today, home to over thirteen million items? From its foundation by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 to the opening of the Weston Library in 2015, this...

The Merton library is rightly known for its antiquity, its beautiful medieval and early modern architecture and fittings and for its remarkable and important collection of manuscripts and rare books, yet a nineteenth-century plan to tear the medieval...

In our digital world, we owe much of our ability to communicate to the punctuation marks, mathematical symbols, and other glyphs that hover on the edges of our keyboard. Without these symbols, it would be impossible to convey meaning - our words would...

At first sight, this intriguing map appears to offer a guide to the pubs of Victorian Oxford, designed in a similar way to tourist maps today. Beerhouses, breweries and other licensed premises are all shown, clustered around a specific part of the city...

This book is a treasure-trove of cartographical delights spanning over a thousand years. Each map is accompanied by a narrative revealing the story behind how it came to be made and the significance of what it shows. The chronological arrangement...

Every map tells a story. Some provide a narrative for travellers, explorers and surveyors or offer a visual account of changes to people's lives, places and spaces, while others tell imaginary tales, transporting us to fictional worlds created by writers...

In the seventeenth century most English households had gardens. These gardens were not merely ornamental, even the most elaborate and fashionable gardens had areas set aside for growing herbs, fruit, vegetables, and flowers for domestic...

Since this handbook was first published in 1994, interest in the book as a material object, and in the ways in which books have been owned, read and used, has burgeoned. Now established as a standard reference work, this book has been revised and...

Spanning the Islamic world, from ninth-century Baghdad to nineteenth-century Iran, this book tells the story of the key Muslim map-makers and the art of Islamic cartography. Muslims were uniquely placed to explore the edges of the inhabited world and...

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs.Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna...

Pronunciation governs our regional and social identity more powerfully than any other aspect of spoken language. No wonder, then, that it has attracted most attention from satirists. In this intriguing book, David Crystal shows how our feelings about...

In late medieval England, ordinary people, apothecaries and physicians gathered up practical medical tips for everyday use. While some were sensible herbal cures, many were weird and wonderful. This book selects some of the most revolting or remarkable...

Early manuscripts in the English language include religious works, plays, romances, poetry and songs, as well as charms, notebooks, science and medieval medicine. How did scribes choose to arrange the words and images on the page in each manuscript? How...

Based mainly on examples in the Bodleian Library, this lavishly illustrated account tells the story of manuscript production from the early Middle Ages to the high Renaissance. Each stage of production is described, from the preparation of the parchment,...

Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest surviving botanic garden in Britain and has occupied its site in central Oxford since 1621. Conceived as a place to grow medicinal plants, born in the turmoil of civil war and nurtured during the restoration of the...

The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution irrevocably changed the course of history, with consequences still being felt a century later. This book offers a dramatic depiction of the chaotic events of the revolution, drawn from selected firsthand accounts. Assembling...

English spas have a long and steamy history, from the thermal baths of Aquae Sulis in Bath to the stews of Southwark, the elegant pump rooms of Cheltenham and Buxton to the Victorian mania for hydrotherapy and Turkish hammams.The Secret History of...