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£25.00
We are a nation of villages, from the rural, picturesque hamlets of Castle Combe and Clovelly, to the tight-knit urban communities of Leeds’ terraces and Cricklewood’s backyards. Villages link us with our past and are the stuff of art, poetry, folklore and song – and for many they offer a place of community and sanctuary. And yet Britain today is one of the most centralised political systems in Europe, with decisions on local matters made by national government and local communities feeling increasingly disempowered and disconnected. In ‘The Village in Britain’, Simon Jenkins, author and former chair of the National Trust, delves into the past, present and future of this powerful national symbol, and argues that we need to find a way of embedding the qualities of the village into our modern lives.
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£12.99
This revelatory history explores the ancient roots of Muslim Europe, tracing their journey through the Mediterranean. Our odyssey begins in the little-known Sufi lodges in Cyprus, where Muslims arrived in 647AD. From there, we travel through the continent – visiting places such as Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain – encountering red-haired European Sultans and Arabic-speaking Christian Kings. We meet forgotten Muslim pioneers, such as Abbas Ibn Firnas who gave us flight and Ibn Sina who gave us modern medicine. We see the Islam-inspired mudejar art of fourteenth-century Christians in Spain, and how such cross fertilisation birthed Europe’s ‘Renaissance’. We discover the long-forgotten tombs of European Muslims who knew the Prophet Muhammad, and the author – award-winning writer Tharik Hussain – becomes the first Muslim in over 900 years to pray inside the remains of a nameless Sicilian Mosque.
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£35.00
Will Millard brings the illustrious Ordnance Survey archive to life in a fully-illustrated story of Britain that explores what these maps can tell us about where, why and how we have moved around this island over the centuries. We find disappearing villages, secretive smuggling paths, top-secret military plans and even the detailed maps of Buckingham Palace gifted to Queen Victoria on her 50th jubilee. Rich, rewarding and endlessly fascinating, the book is an unmissable record of how our landscape has changed – and how it might do so in the future.
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£25.00
A fascinating journey through the landscapes and communities of the Domesday Book from the author of King in the North
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£25.00
For over 10,000 years, we humans have been busy altering our environment and embracing ‘progress’, evolving seamlessly from hunter gatherers to the modern urban sophisticates we see ourselves as today. But what are the ideas and inventions that enabled humanity to become, by the early 21st century, a majority urban species for the first time? How did the essential infrastructure of modern life – the innovations that we barely even notice, but without which our world would fall apart – actually come to be? With his characteristic wit and boundless curiosity, Jonn Elledge invites us to join him on a fascinating and often surprising tour of the ideas and technologies that made modernity possible. From elevators to electric lighting, parks to pedestrian crossings, he guides us through the history of civilisation itself.
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£10.99
Bestselling historian and social media sensation Alice Loxton embarks on an epic walk, retracing the funeral route of England's most forgotten Queen and uncovering historical secrets along the way.
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£10.99
People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about human folly. From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.
The whalebone theatre 
