Essais et livres en anglais sur l'histoire des pays (USA/UK/Europe...)
''Fascinating... One of the most astute political commentators on Putin and modern Russia'' Financial Times ''An amazing achievement'' Peter Frankopan Can anyone truly understand Russia? Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone''s ''other''. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war and peace, poets and revolutionaries. In this essential whistle-stop tour of the world''s most complex nation, Mark Galeotti takes us behind the myths to the heart of the Russian story: from the formation of a nation to its early legends - including Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great - to the rise and fall of the Romanovs, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, Chernobyl and the end of the Soviet Union - plus the rise of a politician named Vladimir Putin, and the events leading to the Ukrainian war.
''Marvellous . . . I read it with astonished delight..It is equally scholarly and entertaining.'' Jan Morris ''Delightfully quirky and compelling'' The Times One we''ve learned it as children few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order if the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organisation gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need. Acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organising things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful. In A Place for Everything , Judith Flanders fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its possible earliest days as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, to its current decline in prominence in our digital age of Wikipedia and Google. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth-century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by ''sirname'' first.
A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Waterstones Nonfiction Book of the Month (June) ''THE POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR'' Sunday Times ''You will not read a more important book about America this year'' Economist ''A memoir of life in the Trump-voting white working class is the political book of the year'' Sunday Times ''Hillbilly Elegy'' is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in post-war America. J. D.''s grandparents were ''dirt poor and in love,'' and moved north from Kentucky''s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance''s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humour and vividly colourful figures, ''Hillbilly Elegy'' is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
From the founding of ancient capitals to buzzing modern megacities , this history of ten cities explores how urban centres have led civilisation forward.
In 1922, three men - only one of whom had previously heard of ''broadcasting'' - founded the BBC. In doing so, Arthur Burrows, Cecil Lewis, and John Reith set out to accomplish something utterly bold: using what had been a weapon of war - Marconi''s wireless - to remake culture for the good of humanity. From Hollywood stars fainting at the microphone and fibreglass Daleks, to world-altering speeches and history being made on film, the BBC has evolved through massive technological and cultural change while always staying true to its vision of public service. In The BBC: A People''s History , the first one-volume history of the Corporation, professor and historian David Hendy traces the project through one hundred years of its extraordinary history.
When did globalization begin? Most observers have settled on 1492, the year Columbus discovered America. But as celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen shows, it was the year 1000, when for the first time new trade routes linked the entire globe, so an object could in theory circumnavigate the world. This was the 'big bang' of globalization, which ushered in a new era of exploration and trade, and which paved the way for Europeans to dominate after Columbus reached America. Drawing on a wide range of new historical sources and cutting-edge archaeology, Hansen shows, for example, that the Maya began to trade with the native peoples of modern New Mexico from traces of theobromine - the chemical signature of chocolate - and that frozen textiles found in Greenland contain hairs from animals that could only have come from North America. Moreover, Hansen turns accepted wisdom on its head, revealing not only that globalization began much earlier than previously thought, but also that the world's first anti-globalization riots did too, in cities such as Cairo, Constantinople, and Guangzhou. Introducing players from Europe, the Islamic world, Asia, the Indian Ocean maritime world, the Pacific and the Mayan world who were connecting the major landmasses for the first time, this compelling revisionist argument shows how these encounters set the stage for the globalization that would dominate the world for centuries to come.