Western Europe

Propelled by a wish to reclaim the varied German civilization that the Nazis ruined, and that many have worked to rebuild, Germania was recorded to enlighten us on serious topics, curiosities, and on the limits of language, the meaning of culture, and the pleasure of townscape....

The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims....

In The Almost Nearly Perfect People, Michael Booth explains who the Scandinavians are, how they differ and why, and what their quirks and foibles are....

Thrust into the unlikely role of professional "literary walking tour" guide, an expat writer provides the most irresistibly witty and revealing tour of Paris in years....

Taught by acclaimed Professor Patrick Allitt, a British-born scholar who teaches at Emory University, these 36 splendid lectures give you an insider’s take on traveling through Great Britain....

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia....

In 1773, 63-year-old literary giant Samuel Johnson joined James Boswell, a 32-year-old Scottish lawyer, on an historic horseback expedition across the Scottish Highlands....

In the second half of the tenth century, Byzantium embarked on a series of spectacular conquests. By the early eleventh century, the empire was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Yet this imperial project came to a crashing collapse fifty years later....

Diaries, memoirs, and other fresh sources illuminate the experiences not only of Bastogne's 3,000 citizens and their American defenders, but also of German soldiers and commanders desperate for victory....

There is a Bronze Age trackway below the Isle of Dogs, Anglo-Saxon graves rest under St. Pauls, and the monastery of Whitefriars lies beneath Fleet Street. To go under London is to penetrate history, and Ackroyd's book is filled with the stories unique to this underworld....

By June 1941, Germany's war machine looked to be unstoppable. The Nazi blitzkrieg had taken Poland, France, and Holland with shocking speed....

Byron and Hitler were equally entranced by Rome's most famous monument, the Colosseum. Mid-Victorians admired the hundreds of varieties of flowers in its crannies and occasionally shuddered at its reputation for contagion, danger, and sexual temptation....

Grape, Olive, Pig reveals hidden gems and enduring delicacies from across this extraordinary country of Spain, contextualizing each meal with the stories behind the food in a cultural narrative....

This is the bella figura, the Italian concept of making every aspect of life as beautiful as it can be, that Kamin Mohammadi discovered when she escaped the London corporate media world for a year in Italy....

There are a lot of different ways to learn a language—studying books, taking a class, or even watching foreign movies. But I’m an auditory learner. I have to hear and repeat the language to make it stick. And that’s what you’ll experience with this audiobook....

"The singular remarkable fact about the Basques is that they still exist," best selling author Mark Kurlansky says...

What is fascism? By focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did rather than what they said, the esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question....

Written in 1831, Irving's dreamlike description of the Alhambra, the beautiful Moorish castle that defined the height of Moorish civilization, and the surrounding territory of Granada....

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted - and beautiful - commodity in Europe....

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them just fine....