Asian history Books

Book Synopsis** THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER **''A sparkling debut by an outstanding young historian'' PETER FRANKOPAN''Remarkable The prose is vivid, the storytelling cinematic'' GUARDIANThis book is a revelation both original and important'' MISHAL HUSAINA history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it. As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the Indian Empire', or more simply as the Raj.It was the British Empire's crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world's population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped Indian Empire', and were guarded by armies garrisoned in forts from the Bab el-Mandeb to the HimalayasAnd then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.Its legacies include civil war in Burma and ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan and Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.Sam Dalrymple's stunning history is based on deep archival research, previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, Shattered Lands is vivid, compelling, thought-provoking history at its best.A stunning achievement. Shattered Lands reframes the story of South Asia with rare empathy and elegance, breathing life into the legacies of the partitions that shape a quarter of our world today' THANT MYINT-UThis richly researched, vividly written book tells the story of how a colossal and powerful Empire was broken up into many distinct nation-statesAn impressive debut by a gifted and very energetic young writer' RAMACHANDRA GUHA

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Book SynopsisFew gave tiny Singapore much chance of survival when it was granted independence in 1965. How is it, then, that today the former British colonial trading post is a thriving Asian metropolis with not only the world's number one airline, but also the world's fourth-highest per capita real income? This title is the story of that transformation.

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Book SynopsisAccompanying the largest ever display of the British Library's Buddhist treasures, Buddhism introduces the history, philosophy, geographical spread and practices of Buddhism, exploring its relevance in the modern world.

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Book SynopsisThis is a riveting and disturbing account of the medical atrocities performed in and around Japan during WWII.

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Book SynopsisFor two and a half thousand years The Art of War has been the core text of military strategy and planning, providing leaders with enduring insights into tactics, psychology, discipline and the nature of power. Favoured by countless great generals and military tacticians throughout history, over the last century the book has found a new lease of life, inspiring business leaders, politicians and sporting figures, and offering a profound understanding of such diverse topics as managing others and outwitting competitors.Trade ReviewAbsorb this book, and you can throw out all those contemporary books about management leadership. * Newsweek *

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Book SynopsisDiscover the ancient power of Japanese wisdom. A beautiful collection of timeless lessons to live by.

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Book SynopsisThe Holy Cow and Other Indian Stories uses stories to try and explain to the reader what India isits customs, traditions, culture, philosophical ideas, religion, etc.and how different they are from one another. Anyone who wants to comprehend India's intricate, frequently perplexing religious environment better would find this to be an entertaining and educational read. You'll find a potted history and cultural guide between the glossy pages, with two to three pages devoted to each topic.This visual masterpiece is a must-have for all!

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Book SynopsisThe perfect introduction to the world of Japanese myth and legend. This is a smart and succinct guide to the rich tradition of Japanese mythology, from the earliest recorded legends of Izanagi and Izanami, their divine offspring and the creation of Japan, to medieval tales of vengeful ghosts, through to the modern-day reincarnation of ancient deities as the heroes of mecha anime. While many around the world love Japanâs cultural exports, few are familiar with Japanâs unique mythology - enriched by Shinto, Buddhism and regional folklore. Mythology remains a living, evolving part of Japanese society, and the ways in which the people of Japan understand their myths are very different today even from a century ago, let alone over a millennium into the past. Offering much more than any competing overview of Japanese mythology, The Japanese Myths not only retells the ancient stories but also considers their place within the patterns of Japanese religions, culture and history, helTrade Review'Well-written, thought-provoking, and visually engaging … this book is a wonderful guide to an enduring fascination with stories and the supernatural in Japan. Frydman’s explanations prove mythology acts as a compass to guide past, present and future generations' - The Japan Society'Students, travellers, and all readers interested in the history of Japan, Japanese ideology, and the nation's current cultural products will find this authoritative work absorbing' - Library Journal'Eminently readable, interesting and authoritative ... Highly recommended' - Fortean TimesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. What are the Japanese Myths? 2. Age of the Gods 3. The Imperial Mythos 4. Living Kami and Divine Humans 5. Canon Foreigners 6. A World Flush with Spirits 7. Invention and Rediscovery

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewIn Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence, one of the greatest of all printmakers appears at the nucleus of a worldwide cultural transformation, in which art became more urbane and more fleeting, and the observed world got flattened out into signs and symbols. -- Jason Farago * The New York Times: Arts *

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Book SynopsisThe second installment in ''The People''s Trilogy'', the groundbreaking series from Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author Frank DikötterFor anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading' Anne ApplebaumEssential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world''s most important revolutions' GuardianDikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order' Timothy SnyderIn 1949 Mao Zedong hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City. Instead of liberating the country, the communists destroyed the old order and replaced it with a repressive system that would dominate every aspect of Chinese life.In an epic of revolution and violence which draws on newly opened party archives, interviews and memoirs, Frank Dikötter interweavesTrade ReviewA brilliant and powerful account of the formation of that society ... Nobody who reads about the cost of the establishment of the PRC in Dikotter’s humane and lucid prose will find much sympathy for the authoritarian case. This excellent book is horrific but essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world’s most important revolutions * Guardian *Frank Dikötter, now well into his stride as a meticulous chronicler of China’s greatest miseries ... The Tragedy of Liberation is a tightly-written narrative of the twelve most pivotal years in modern Chinese history ... The book is also a dispassionate study of the way nations can pervert optimism and descend into lunacy by steady increments ... The Tragedy of Liberation is more unsettling. For what it tells us about the foundations of the modern Communist Party, and the backstory to so many decisions and statements made in Beijing today, it is essential reading * The Times *Frank Dikötter’s powerful new book is a bold and startling attempt to rectify this apparent neglect. In a cool, dispassionate narrative, Dikötter recounts the orgy of violence which the communists set loose ... The Tragedy of Liberation demonstrates why he has established himself as a leading historian of modern China. He is a rare scholar, adept in both Russian and Chinese ... Dikötter has a writer’s gift in the use of English ... Dikötter must be admired for the manner in which he puts a human scale on the enormous barbarities of the communist takeover of China. We cannot begin to understand modern China without being aware of the blood-drenched tale Dikötter so ably relates * Kwasi Kwarteng, Evening Standard *A mesmerizing account of the communist revolution in China, and the subsequent transformation of hundreds of millions of lives through violence, coercion and broken promises. The Chinese themselves suppress this history, but for anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading * Anne Applebaum *This follow up to Dikötter’s award-winning Mao’s Great Famine examines the early bloodstained years of Communist China * The Times, Critics’ Choices *One-party states take control of the past as they take control of societies. Usually they must end for serious historical discussion to begin. A great intellectual challenge of our century is to historicize the People’s Republic even as it continues to exist. Dikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order * Tim Snyder *A history of early Maoist China puts paid to any notion of a “golden age” ... In The Tragedy of Liberation ... Frank Dikotter convincingly demolishes this rosy assessment of the early People’s Republic ... The book is a remarkable work of archival research. Dikotter rarely, if ever, allows the story of central government to dominate by merely reporting a top-down directive. Instead, he tracks down the grassroots impact of Communist policies – on farmers, factory workers, industrialists, students, monks – by mining archives and libraries for reports, surveys, speeches and memoirs. In so doing, he uncovers astonishing stories of party-led inhumanity and also popular resistance ... Dikotter sustains a strong human dimension to the story by skilfully weaving individual voices through the length of the book * Financial Times *This groundbreaking book examines the bloodstained reality behind the word and reveals how it brought tragedy to millions. Frank Dikotter is already the author of a revelatory book about China’s great famine of 1958-62, and in this prequel – unsparing in its detail, relentless in its research, unforgiving in its judgments – he deals in the same way with the Chinese revolution from 1945 to 1957 ... This exhaustive trawl through Chinese archives charts the full cost of those early years of change ... Dikotter’s achievement in this book is remarkable. He has mastered a mass of original source material, and has done so by mining local archives in China, which have yielded up a host of treasures. (Significantly, scholars are now reporting the steady closure of official records, as local bureaucrats revert to old habits of secrecy and isolation. This may be the last work of its kind for a while.) ... Staggering amount of detail ... For many years, histories of China have treated the 1950s as if the decade was an interlude of reason. That belief does not survive contact with this book ... It is clear to this reviewer, at least, that mainstream academic scholarship must also be revised in the light of Dikotter’s work. In particular, volume 14 of the Cambridge History of China, which covers the period of this book, will have to be rewritten * Sunday Times *Path-breaking ... Some of what Dikotter describes has been known in general terms, but what he has done here – as when he was writing about the later famine – is take advantage of the opening of archives in which firsthand official reports and accounts of death in all its forms, together with the myriad other forms of Maoist horror, can now be read unedited. It will be increasingly difficult for Western China specialists to write with authority based only on previous Western publications or on Chinese public statements. We remain in Frank Dikotter’s debt * Literary Review *With a mixture of passion and ruthlessness, he marshals the facts, many of them recently unearthed in party archives. Out of these, Mr Dikotter constructs a devastating case for how extreme violence, not a moral mandate, was at the heart of how the party got to power, and of how it then governed ... He was ready to lead the country into the giant experiment of the Great Leap Forward. Mr Dikotter has already written about that in “Mao’s Great Famine”, which this book only betters. The final volume of his planned trilogy will be on the Cultural Revolution, bringing the curtain down on a truly disastrous period * Economist *Frank Dikotter’s powerful new book is a bold and startling attempt to rectify this apparent neglect. In a cool, dispassionate narrative, Dikotter recounts the orgy of violence which the communists set loose ... The Tragedy of Liberation demonstrates why he has established himself as a leading historian of modern China. He is a rare scholar, adept in both Russian and Chinese ... Combined with this linguistic skill, Dikotter has a writer’s gift in the use of English. The narrative of The Tragedy of Liberation is always clear and simple ... Dikotter ... Must be admired for the manner in which he puts a human scale on the enormous barbarities of the communist takeover of China. We cannot begin to understand modern China without being aware of the blood-drenched tale Dikotter so ably relates * Scotsman *Unsparing reappraisal of China’s communist revolution * Sunday Times Must Reads *Frank Dikotter, Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, is establishing himself as the chronicler of what happened to the most populous nation on Earth during Mao’s 27-year reign ... Dikotter’s great achievement is to have melded together the big picture of Mao with the smaller one of what was happening to millions of victims of his policies. In doing so he’s produced a book that’s as authoritative as it is gripping * Mail on Sunday *Much of what Dikötter describes has been known in outline; but Chinese history will have to be revised in light of his detailed revelations * The Week *The historian of China Frank Dikötter has taken a sledgehammer to demolish perhaps the last remaining shibboleth of modern Chinese history ... What emerges from the archives with new clarity is just how ruinous Mao’s policies were * Spectator *A meticulous reappraisal of the formative years of Maoist rule ... This is the first study to make sense in detail of events central to the Mao era, of which only the broad outlines have been known before now. It deserves to become fundamental to a better understanding of the forces that have shaped China today * Sunday Telegraph *Startling ... Dikötter’s work has aimed to demolish almost every claim to truth or virtue the Chinese Communist party ever made. He combines a vivid eye for detail with a historian’s diligence in the archives. Powerful ... Dikötter is unsparing in his account of the effects of the communist rule * Observer *A compelling and devastating account of the Communist involvement in the Civil War and of the first eight years of Communist rule ... This is a gripping and fluidly written account of the first decade of the People’s Republic of China; one that contributes to bringing Chinese history into popular discussions of 20th century international revolutions, utopianism, violence and terror * The Times Higher Education Supplement *Brilliant * The Times *Catalogues in devastating detail the suffering endured from 1949 to 1957, during the installation of the world’s most murderous totalitarian regime … [his portrait of Mao is] both harsher and more convincing than ever * Oldie *By the end of Dikötter’s shocking book, you are in no doubt about the dreadful murderousness of the communist leadership, whose land reforms and modernisation plans exacted a terrible toll on China’s rural population. In this nightmarish world, not even leper colonies were safe * Sunday Times History Books of the Year *The great merit of Dikötter’s book is that it goes beyond the horrific statistics ... He clearly explains the mechanics of the revolutionary state, how mass violence was orchestrated, why people took part in the killing, and what the purposes of the terror were * New York Review of Books *Few other works on the Mao period contain such a quantity and range of archival materials ... Bringing such brutality to light is a valuable contribution * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisJapanese Shinto is the simple belief that the divine dwells in all things around us. Shinto: The Japanese World of Kami Spirits is a concise guide to the fundamental elements of the Shinto religionits rich mythology and symbols, intricate rituals, festivals, ancestral spirits, awe-inspiring architecture and a profound belief in the divine presence in the natural world around us. This modernized classic, with new color and b&w images, and a new foreword by bestselling author Hector Garcia, reminds us of the intrinsic connection between humanity and nature. Shinto's reverence for the divine in all aspects of nature can inspire and guide us to achieve a more harmonious and sustainable future. Readers will discover here the pervasive influence of Shinto on all aspects of contemporary Japanese life and culture. From the hallowed shrines nestled in wooded landscapes to the vibrant tapestry of contemporary Japanese manga, films and video games featuring Kami spirits and charactersShinto

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Book SynopsisWhen the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men, women and children, a new era in human history opened. This book presents an account of six men and women who struggled to cope with catastrophe and with often crippling disease.Table of ContentsA noiseless flash; the fire; details are being investigated; panic grass and feverfew; the aftermath.

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Book SynopsisWinner of the Duke of Westminster Medal for Military Literature Different countries give different opening dates for the period of the Second World War, but perhaps the most compelling is 1937, when the ''Marco Polo Bridge Incident'' plunged China and Japan into a conflict of extraordinary duration and ferocity - a war which would result in many millions of deaths and completely reshape East Asia in ways which we continue to confront today. With great vividness and narrative drive Rana Mitter''s book draws on a huge range of new sources to recreate this terrible conflict. He writes both about the major leaders (Chiang Kaishek, Mao Zedong and Wang Jingwei) and about the ordinary people swept up by terrible times. Mitter puts at the heart of our understanding of the Second World War that it was Japan''s failure to defeat China which was the key dynamic for what happened in Asia.Trade ReviewThe best study of China's war with Japan written in any language ... comprehensive, thoroughly based on research, and totally non-partisan. Above all, the book presents a moving account of the Chinese people's incredible suffering ... A must read for anyone interested in the origins of China's contribution to the making of today's world -- Akira IriyeA major contribution to the one aspect of the Second World War of which we know far too little, and should know much more if we are to understand the new superpower today ... a model of clarity and good writing -- Antony Beevor * The Times *[Mitter] restores a vital part of the wartime narrative to its rightful place. Now, for the first time, it is possible to assess the impact of the war on Chinese society and the many factors that explain the Japanese failure in China and the eventual triumph of Mao Zhedong's communists in 1949, from which the superpower has grown. It is a remarkable story, told with humanity and intelligence; all historians of the second world war will be in Mitter's debt ... [he] explores this complex politics with remarkable clarity and economy ... No one could ask for a better guide than Mitter to how [the rise of modern China] began in the cauldron of the Chinese war -- Richard Overy * Guardian *Illuminating and meticulously researched ... [China's War with Japan] is about the Chinese experience of war, the origins of the modern Chinese identity and the roots of a relationship that will shape Asia in the 21st century. It is about China's existential crisis as it tried to regain its centrality in Asia. It is also a story, pure and simple, of heroic resistance against massive odds * Economist *Mitter deftly sketches the plight of Chinese intellectuals ... This is a many-stranded story and the author keeps his focus on the big picture while including many convincing, often horrific, details ... [this] is the best narrative of that long-ago war, whose effects still linger in China today, with Japan the major hate figure -- Jonathan Mirsky * Spectator *This is a story told mainly from the Chinese perspective, in all its horror. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Mitter pulls together a rich and complex narrative without losing the drama of China's fight for survival and the individuals who played a part in it ... lively [and] comprehensive * Prospect *

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Book SynopsisThe essential guide to the complex, fascinating world of Chinese myths: retelling the stories and exploring their significance in Chinese culture. This is a concise and entertaining guide to the complex tradition of Chinese mythology. While many around the world are familiar with some aspects of Chinese myth â through Chinese New Year festivities or the classic adventures of the Monkey King in Journey to the West â few outside of China understand the richness of Chinese mythology, influenced by Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Offering much more than any competing overview of Chinese mythology, The Chinese Myths not only retells the ancient stories but also considers their place within the patterns of Chinese religions, culture and history. Tao Tao Liu introduces us to an intriguing cast of gods, goddesses, dragons and monks, including: the ancient hero, Yi the Archer, who shot suns out of the sky to save humanity from a drought; Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy and CompassiTrade Review'An absolutely fascinating introduction … accessible and entertaining, it’s an excellent primer in the field' - All About HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction Part I: The Myths of the Classical Era (Ancient) 1. Origin and Creation myths of China – Pangu, and Yin-yang Nuwa 2. The Major Gods: eg Nuwa, Fuxi & Huang Di 3. Mother Goddesses incl. Queen Mother of the West 4. The Heavenly Bodies: the Sun and Moon eg Yi the Archer & Chang’o 5. The Demi-gods: Yao & Shun 6. The Flood – Gun & Yu who tamed the water 7. The Culture Gods, eg Shennong 8. Rivers and Mountains 9. Dragons 10. Myths of the Metalsmiths Part II: Legends of China 1. Buddhism 2. Dunhuang and Pianwen 3. Some Gods of Daoism 4. The Ming Dynasty printed works 5. The Ming dynasty vernacular Short stories Part III: Endmatter 1. Temples in China 2. Festivals in China Afterword

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Book SynopsisChinese New Year is right around the corner and Mai-Anne is so exciting to celebrate with her Grandmother, Nai Nai. Together they retell the story behind the Great Race. A beautifully illustrated introduction to the true meaning of Chinese New Year and family traditions for little ones.

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Book Synopsis‘A monumental yet intimate biography, a vivid portrait of the man, the statesman and the saint’ The TimesMahatma Gandhi became a legend in his own time. A tireless fighter for human rights and for Indian independence, his strategy of satyagraha, or passive resistance, earned him the admiration of millions. Louis Fischer's biography is the definitive account of Ghandi's life; it tells the astonishing story of one man who changed the world forever. This is the perfect read to celebrate and understand Ghandi in the year of the 150th anniversary of his birth.Trade ReviewThe best biography of Gandhi... I was enthralled from the first page...it changed my life * Sir Richard Attenborough *A monumental yet intimate biography, a vivid portrait of the man, the statesman and the saint * The Times *An important work * London Review of Books *Generous and conscientious... You feel Gandhi would have liked it that way * New York Herald Tribune *Equally successful in presenting the world figure with a cure for the world's woes and the plain little man with the kind look and smile * The Times *

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Book Synopsis''A thrilling blow-by-blow account'' The Times''A first-rate popular history of a fascinating and neglected battle... a veritable page-turner'' BBC HistoryIn February 1944, a rag-tag collection of clerks, drivers, doctors, muleteers, and other base troops, stiffened by a few dogged Yorkshiremen and a handful of tank crews managed to hold out against some of the finest infantry in the Japanese Army, and then defeat them in what was one of the most astonishing battles of the Second World War.What became know as The Defence of the Admin Box, fought amongst the paddy fields and jungle of Northern Arakan over a fifteen-day period, turned the battle for Burma. Not only was it the first decisive victory for British troops against the Japanese, more significantly, it demonstrated how the Japanese could be defeated. The lessons learned in this tiny and otherwise insignificant corner of the Far East, set up the campaign in Burma that would folloTrade ReviewHolland is good on the mechanics of warfare and gives a thrilling blow-by-blow account of the fighting, which will please military buffs. There are also crisp vignettes of the commanders . . . But it is the voices of the fighting men that lift this book above the level of a simple battle narrative. Holland has a good ear. * The Times *Up there with Rorke’s Drift . . . in rescuing the Battle of the Admin Box from oblivion, Holland has performed a signal service for all the men who fought – and died – in its defence * Telegraph *In this superb account of an obscure but decisive battle fought in almost indescribably difficult jungle terrain, the always excellent James Holland tells a tale of heroism and grit to match any in the annals of war * The Mail on Sunday *Vivid . . . military historian James Holland conjures the heroism and horror of this gallant stand by a motley force of doctors, clerks and other base troops against highly trained Japanese infantry. * Daily Mail *A gripping account of one of the war’s lesser-known episodes * Soldier *

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Book Synopsis'Difficult to put down ... irresistible' Daily TelegraphTrade Review'Recounted with great skill . . . opens a window onto a fascinating world' * Financial Times *'Highly readable and elegant' * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisReturn to Fukushimacaptures the aftermath of the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima, chronicling the resilience of displaced communities navigating life amidst radioactivity. Thomas Bass explores the transformative journey from desolation to revitalization, offering a survival guide to our atomic future.Fukushima is an ongoing nuclear disaster. The four reactors that melted down and exploded in 2011 are still deadly, even to the robots that get burned up trying to explore them. Over a hundred thousand people remain displaced, their homes frozen in time, eerie ghost towns where slippers sit undisturbed at doorsteps and tables are set for absent guests. Wild animals have moved into the houses. Vines overgrow buildings surrendering to entropy. Visiting these places, we stare at the vacant world remaining after we have ended our brief tenure as overlords of the Anthropocene.The world is dotted with nuclear exclusion zones. Atolls blown to smithereens. Test sites in the Mojave Desert. Disasters at Soviet bomb-making factories. The red forest around Chernobyl. These zones are growing in number and melding one into another. What if our future demands that we learn how to live in nuclear exclusion zones? Learn how to master the risks and develop resistant crops and other survival skills?Nowhere is this future more evident than in Fukushima, where the Japanese government is pushing people to resettle in towns that are supposedly decontaminated. These attempts have largely failed. But what has not failed are the grassroots efforts at reviving Fukushima. This is propelled by the ingenuity of local farmers and entrepreneurs, citizen scientists, artists, and immigrants from around the world who are intrigued by starting new lives in the red zone.In 2018 and again four and a half years later, Thomas Bass travelled to Fukushima. The difference was dramatic The place had been cleaned up and reopened, not fully, but little-by-little people are learning to live with radioactivity, decontaminate their fields, monitor their food, and prepare for the next wave set to wash over this seismically precarious part of the world. After six years of research, including travels to Chernobyl, Bass gives us a remarkable account of how Fukushima's argonauts of the anthropocene are guiding us into our atomic future.

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION A spectacular, definitive portrait of ordinary life within one of the world's most repressive states - North Korea. 'A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea' Jung Chang North Korea is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four made reality: it is the only country in the world not connected to the internet; where Gone with the Wind is a dangerous, banned book; and where during political rallies, spies study your expression to check your sincerity. Nothing to Envy weaves together the stories of adversity and resilience of six residents of Chongin, North Korea's third-largest city. From extensive interviews and with tenacious investigative work, Barbara Demick has recreated the concerns, culture and lifestyles of North Korean citizens in a gripping narrative, and vividly reconstructed the inner workings of this extraordinary and secretive country. Includes an updated afterword by the author. 'Impossible to put down ... helps restore humanity to some of the world's most oppressed people' ObserverTrade ReviewA rare and valuable insight ... Nothing to Envy is a searchlight shining on a country cloaked in darkness -- Alastair Mabbott * Herald *Barbara Demick's achievement is to restore a measure of humanity to 23 million human beings. Many scholars have pored over North Korea's atrocious history, its fearful politics, abysmal economics and blood-curdling propaganda. No writer I know has done a better job of clothing these academic concerns with the rich detail of the lives of ordinary people - explaining, simply, what it feels like to be a citizen of the cruellest, most repressive and most retrograde country in the world -- Richard Lloyd Parry * The Times *A most perceptive and eye-opening account of everyday life in North Korea -- Jung ChangThis report on the lives of six of the citizens of totalitarian penal colony is unputdownable and deeply affecting, a worthy winner this week of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction -- David Sexton * Evening Standard *Taking the cases of six individuals and their families, Demick constructs a harrowing narrative of the North's slide into famine following the death of the elder Kim in 1994 ... The Kim dynasty, whose Stalinist cruelty Demick graphically chronicles, has shown remarkable staying power -- Simon Scott Plummer * Daily Telegraph *I loved it - I couldn't pull myself away. This is the first book I've read which tells me about the inner lives of individual North Koreans and the universal cruelty of that regime. Reading this book, I've learnt something about how it feels to be North Korean - it's not unimaginable anymore, but it's even more painful than I could have predicted -- Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor, Channel 4 NewsDemick weaves stories derived from interviews and conversations, conducted over a number of years, into a compelling narrative. Her book is a reminder that oral history is one of our greatest resources. Its use in Nothing to Envy makes for a valuable contribution to the literature on North Korea -- Charlotte Middlehurst * New Statesman *A fascinating study in the oral history of Korea in the last decade of the twentieth century ... Nothing to Envy is a fascinating work which highlights in the lives of the individuals concerned the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity -- Oliver Rafferty * Irish Times *The shroud of silence and misinformation surrounding North Korea means these stories of six lives inside the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as told to Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick by "defectors", are a revelation -- Emmanuelle Smith * Financial Times *Barbara Demick, the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, has occasionally been to the north, but on visits so strictly controlled as to be worthless. Talking with émigrés and escapees now living in the south has provided the material for this terrific, often gruelling work of reportage. It gives a harrowing, surreal glimpse of what she calls "this hermit kingdom", which is so secretive and little known that it is the only country on earth not connected to the internet -- Christopher Hart * Sunday Times *A fair, modest and informative book about North Korea, a country little known and less understood ... most of what her informants say is repeated in indirect speech, and I found their testimonies varied and convincing ... There is much to learn form this carefully written book that draws few conclusions beyond well-grounded individual cases. Barbara Demick says that in satellite pictures of the Far East, North Korea is an "area of darkness". She makes this black hole at least medium grey -- Jonathan Mirsky * Literary Review *Beijing-based journalist Demick draws on extensive interviews with North Koreans who have defected to the South, revealing the truth of ordinary life within Kim Jong-Il's bizarre and repressive Stalinist state * New Humanist *A lovely work of narrative non-fiction ... that offers extensive evidence of the author's deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details -- Dwight Garner * Scotland on Sunday *Eye-opening portrait of the downtrodden and monochrome lives of six ordinary citizens of North Korea ... Granta's comparisons with Stasiland are apt and you keep having to remind yourself this isn't fiction -- Caroline Sanderson * Bookseller *Nothing To Envy is based on her in-depth interviews with defectors - and their accounts are as harrowing as you would expect -- Siobhan Murphy * Metro *Writing a properly researched book on North Korea seems next to impossible. But in Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick has done it ... Demick is thorough and fair on the troubled history of Korea -- Roger Hutchinson * Scotsman *In a detailed account of North Korea, Demick looks beyond the country's politics to engage with the human experience and suffering of its residents * Sunday Times *This remarkable book confirms our fears but does much more and is the deserving winner of the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize ... Barbara Demick is a reporter of impressive tenacity and thoroughness ... Many of those who defected have found their freedom hard to handle. Theirs have been lives twice blighted. But Demick does them proud -- Joan Bakewell * The Times *Barbara Demick, who has an easy winning style, introduces us to a county of suppressed impulses and state propaganda ... This compelling book, a worthy winner of the BBC Samuel Johnson prize, details the experiences of six North Koreans who defected to China or South Korea -- Ian Pindar * Guardian *I've never read anything quite like it ... Demick has unearthed some heartbreaking human stories -- William Leith * Evening Standard *Awarded this year's Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, this book by the former Korea correspondent of the Los Angeles Times uses the accounts of six defectors to reconstruct everyday life under the secretive communist regime * New Statesman *A fascinating portrait of a population bred from birth to be state automatons ... Alongside the daring prison breaks and midnight escapes through icy rivers to reach China, the tales of everyday love and loss make Nothing to Envy impossible to put down ... Demick's important book, by illuminating previously hidden aspects of North Korean life, helps restore humanity to some of the world's most oppressed people -- Imogen Carter * Observer *This is an extreme book ... I've never read anything like it ... Demick has unearthed some heartbreaking human stories * Scotsman *This compelling account of life and death in Korea is eye-opening and often heart-rending. Demick's perceptiveness in describing the inner life of individual North Koreans both enthrals and horrifies. One of the most fascinating books of the year * Independent on Sunday *An elegant, honourable and meticulously referenced account of a country the author calls "grimly dysfunctional". It is an inspiring read. -- Celia Brayfield * The Times *Thoroughly deserving winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize. * Independent on Sunday *Much-praised 2010 winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, this is a painstakingly researched and gruelling account of the hardships and cruelties of life in the world's most isolated, eccentric and oppressive state -- Gideon Rachman * Financial Times *A story of epic stoicism and suffering and illuminated by such jaw-dropping details as the doctors who have to donate their own skin to conduct operations -- Brian Schofield * Sunday Times *A brilliant, timely work of very modern history and a deserving winner of the 2010 BBC Samuel Johnson prize -- Rob Attar * BBC History Magazine *Amy Bloom turned her unflinching gaze on the map of the human heart, finding solace in our ability to love no matter what -- Claire Allfree * Metro *gripping, revealing, enraging and unexpectedly inspiring -- Ursula Doyle, editorial director of Virago as the 2010 book she wished she had published * Guardian *A vivid picture of life in the Hermit Kingdom. It deserved the awards it has been winning * The Times *Redolent and disturbing, an account of real lives drawn from interviews with defectors from the shadowy (actually dark) and sinister world of North Korea -- Pete Irvine * Scotland on Sunday *A rare light on so hidden a country, and all the more remarkable for its unfailingly engaging humanity * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisJapanese woodblock printing is a beautiful art that traces its roots back to the eighth century. It uses a unique system of registration, cutting and printing. This practical book explains the process from design drawing to finished print, and then introduces more advanced printing and carving techniques, plus advice on editioning your prints and their aftercare, tool care and sharpening. Supported by nearly 200 colour photographs, this new book advises on how to develop your ideas, turning them into sketches and a finished design drawing, then how to break an image into the various blocks needed to make a print. It also explains how to use a tracing paper transfer method to take your design from drawing to woodblock and, finally, explains the traditional systems of registration, cutting and printing that define an authentic Japanese woodblock.

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Book SynopsisThe third volume of Steven Runciman''s classic, hugely influential trilogy on the history of the Crusades''The whole tale is one of faith and folly, courage and greed, hope and disillusion''Steven Runciman''s triumphant three-volume A History of the Crusades remains an unsurpassed account of the events that changed the world and continue to resonate today. This final volume of the trilogy begins with the glamorous Third Crusade and ends with the ruinous collapse of the crusader states and the degeneration of their ideals, which reached its nadir in the tragic destruction of Byzantium. ''When historical events are written about with this sort of command, they take on not only the universality of a fairy tale but also a certain moral weight. Runciman writes both seductively and instructively about the dignity and beauty of different religious beliefs and about the difficulties of their co-existence'' Independent

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Book SynopsisJohn Man is a historian with a special interest in Mongolia. He has travelled widely across the lands that formed the Mongol Empire, becoming one of the few Western writers to explore the hidden valley where Genghis may have died, climb the sacred mountain on which he is supposedly buried and explore the ruins of Xanadu, the first capital of Genghis's grandson, Kublai Khan. His books, published in over twenty languages, include the bestselling Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection and Kublai Khan.Trade ReviewWonderful... what sets it apart is the way the tale is told. Quirky digressions and fascinating anecdotes pepper a narrative of wonderful dramatic energy. -- Gerard DeGroot * The Times *Excellent and profoundly committed ... Man provides a vivid, lucid and economical picture. A worthy addition to the burgeoning popular literature on the centaurs of the steppes. -- Frank McLynn * Literary Review *[Man] does a splendid job of conveying the sheer opulence and grandeur... [and tells] a rollicking good story, his historical narrative interspersed with high-spirited travel-writerly digressions. Lively and engaging. -- Justin Marozzi * The Spectator *A very lively and enjoyable book. -- Peter Lewis * Daily Mail *One could not wish for a better storyteller or analyst than John Man. * Simon Sebag Montefiore *

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Book Synopsis'A revolutionary book' Sunday Times 'A pulsating account' Peter Frankopan *A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR* How did the People’s Republic of China transform from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today? Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers alike celebrate as an economic miracle. In a fascinating tale spanning five decades, he examines the country’s economic transformation alongside the regime’s determined suppression of dissent, its increasing hostility towards the West and its development into a thoroughly entrenched dictatorship led by Xi Jinping – one equipped with a sprawling security apparatus and the most sophisticated surveillance system in the world. ‘Essential reading for anyone who wants to know what has shaped today’s China and what the Chinese Communist Party’s choices mean for the rest of the world’ New Statesman ‘A blow-by-blow account of the uneven, reactive and sometimes chaotic course of economic policies . . . An important corrective’ Financial Times ‘Dikötter has been mining Chinese primary sources for decades . . . A clear-eyed and detailed account’ ObserverTrade ReviewPRAISE FOR THE PEOPLE'S TRILOGY: Together, these three books constitute a major contribution to scholarship on modern China, one that is unequalled, certainly in the English language * Literary Review *Harrowing and brilliant ... This is the book that changes your life -- Ben Macintyre * The Times *Dikötter's achievement in this book is remarkable * Sunday Times *A brilliant and powerful account ...This excellent book is horrific but essential reading for all who want to understand the darkness that lies at the heart of one of the world's most important revolutions * Guardian *Powerful ... Bold and startling ... Dikötter must be admired for the manner in which he puts a human scale on the enormous barbarities of the communist takeover of China. We cannot begin to understand modern China without being aware of the blood-drenched tale Dikötter so ably relates -- Kwasi Kwarteng * Evening Standard *A mesmerizing account of the communist revolution in China, and the subsequent transformation of hundreds of millions of lives through violence, coercion and broken promises. The Chinese themselves suppress this history, but for anyone who wants to understand the current Beijing regime, this is essential background reading -- Anne ApplebaumDikötter performs here a tremendous service by making legible the hugely controversial origins of the present Chinese political order -- Tim Snyder A remarkable work of archival research. Dikötter rarely, if ever, allows the story of central government to dominate by merely reporting a top-down directive. Instead, he tracks down the grassroots impact of Communist policies ... In so doing, he uncovers astonishing stories of party-led inhumanity and also popular resistance ... Dikötter sustains a strong human dimension to the story by skillfully weaving individual voices through the length of the book * Financial Times *Startling ... Dikötter's work has aimed to demolish almost every claim to truth or virtue the Chinese Communist party ever made. He combines a vivid eye for detail with a historian's diligence in the archives. Powerful ... Dikötter is unsparing in his account of the effects of the communist rule * Observer *Magnificent ... This brilliant book leaves no doubt that Mao almost ruined China and left a legacy of paranoia that still grips its modern dictatorship under the latest autocrat, Xi Jinping -- Michael Sheridan * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisThe first Westerner to meet Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communist leaders in 1936, Edgar Snow came away with the first authorised account of Mao's life, as well as a history of the famous Long March and the men and women who were responsible for the Chinese revolution. Out of that experience came Red Star Over China, a classic work that remains one of the most important books ever written about the birth of the Communist movement in China.This edition includes extensive notes on the military and political developments in China, further interviews with Mao Tse-tung, a chronology covering 125 years of Chinese revolution and nearly a hundred detailed biographies of the men and women who were instrumental in making China what it is today.Trade ReviewThe remarkable thing about Red Star Over China was that it not only gave the first connected history of Mao and his colleagues and where they had come from, but it also gave a prospect of the future... This book has stood the test of time on both these counts - as a historical record and as an indication of a trend. * From the Introduction by John K. Fairbank *It truly was a book that shook the world. * China Daily *Irreplaceable... by far the most important single source regarding [Mao's] life * Stuart R. Schram *Scoop of the century * Foreign Affairs *

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Book SynopsisTHE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Life-filled and life-affirming history, steeped in romance and written with verve' GUARDIAN'Richly entertaining and impeccably researched' Peter FrankopanIstanbul has always been a place where stories and histories collide and crackle, where the idea is as potent as the historical fact. From the Qu'ran to Shakespeare, this city with three names - Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - resonates as an idea and a place, and overspills its boundaries - real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between the East and West, it has served as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin and Ottoman Empires. For much of its history it was known simply as The City, but, as Bettany Hughes reveals, Istanbul is not just a city, but a story. In this epic new biography, Hughes takes us on a dazzling historical journey through the many incarnations of one of the world's greatest cities. As the longest-lived political entity in Europe, over the last 6,000 years Istanbul has absorbed a mosaic of micro-cities and cultures all gathering around the core. At the latest count archaeologists have measured forty-two human habitation layers. Phoenicians, Genoese, Venetians, Jews, Vikings, Azeris all called a patch of this earth their home. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, this captivating portrait of the momentous life of Istanbul is visceral, immediate and scholarly narrative history at its finest.Trade ReviewThis is historical narrative brimming with brio and incident. Hughes's portraits are written with a zesty flourish ... Istanbul is a visceral, pulsating city. In Bettany Hughes's life-filled and life-affirming history, steeped in romance and written with verve, it has found a sympathetic and engaging champion' -- Justin Marozzi * GUARDIAN *Bettany Hughes' Istanbul is built deliberately on what is passing as well as past. It is a story of numerous overlapping names, changes that often happened more slowly than the guidebooks tell us. Her subject is the city that was Byzantium for some 900 years, Christian Constantinopole for another 1,000, Islamic Islam-bol, then Istanbul - while also being New Rome, a Diamond Between Two Sapphires and The World's Desire...assiduous...passionate...there have beeen swirling tidal shifts around Istanbul since she began this book 10 years or so ago. She is celebrating citizenry of the world at a time when that idea is in retreat, damnming the "otherness" that the west has bestowed upon the east when throughout the world there are more and more "others"...She is a wistul and impassioned cosmopolitan who has produced a challenging story for 2017. -- Peter Stothard * FINANCIAL TIMES *Her latest book, Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, is a particular stroke of genius...Over the years the city has had three names - Byzantium, Contantinople and Istanbul so in a vivid rattle she hurls Xerxes, Alcibiades, Constantine, Justinian, Theodora, Suleyman the Magnificent and a sometimes overwhelming cast of thousands before us...It is a story well worth telling as the region continues to implode, the final or at least latest lashings out of the Ottoman Empire's collapse...The book is littered with historical echoes that...are impossible to ignore...there are wonderful anecdotes...She concludes with an encomium to Istanbul as a world city - literally, a cosmo-polis - where faiths and ethnicities are brought together by learning or trade...not an original thought but one that in this particularly troubled moment, for bomb-hit Istanbul and the rest of us, bears repeating. -- Richard Spencer * THE TIMES *With a broadcaster's delight, Bettany Hughes...throws herself into the gargantuan task of capturing the history of a city that spans 3,000 years, and whose story has been woefully neglected compared with other great urban centres...Hughes reconstructs Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul as living, breathing landscapes...her scholarship is impressive...her enthusiasm radiates...Her subject...is irresistibly rich. The place known simply as "The City", Hughes notes, has long lived a "double life - as a real place and as a story"...The tale she tells of the metropolis at the crossroads of the Earth is textured, readable and often compelling. -- Louise Callaghan * SUNDAY TIMES *A magisterial new biography...Bettany Hughes transports the reader on a magic-carpet-like journey through 8,000 years of history...in a vivid narrative dotted with colourful characters and fascinating tangents...the quintessential historical overview of a city racing up the modern political agenda. -- Richard Turner * THE LADY *Fiery and magnificent new biography of Istanbul...Hughes does a fantastic job of cramming all this history into a fluid and engaging narrative. She also possesses a great turn of phrase, such as when she describes Haghia Sophia as seeming "to be suspended by a golden chain from heaven"...A gripping and erudite book. -- Stav Sherez * CATHOLIC HERALD *Award-winning historian Bettany Hughes pieces together the history of Istanbul in a riveting biography of a brilliant, bloodied city. -- Madeleine Keane * SUNDAY INDEPENDENT (IRELAND) *Ten years in the researching and writing, it's a glittering mosaic of a history, packing the stories of three cities - Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul - into one volume, from their earliest settlement in 6000BC, to the 20th Century. -- Caroline Sanderson * THE BOOKSELLER *Over its 6,000 year history, Istanbul has been home to Phoenicians, Genoese, Venetians, Jews, Vikings and Azeris, and been the cornerstone of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires...Hughes traces the history of one of the world's greatest cities. * GUARDIAN *Sweeping across eight millennia in its 800 pages, this glinting mosaic of a book is divided into short, vivid, episodic chapters...With 2017 marking the 500th anniversary of the Ottoman caliphate in Istanbul, this sumptuously produced history book is as timely as it is enthralling. -- Caroline Sanderson * SUNDAY EXPRESS *A scholarly narrative, but Hughes isn't averse to heating it up with the salacious stories that dot the city's past -- Sameer Rahim * SUNDAY TELEGRAPH *For all its colourful drama, the city's history can be hard to narrate in a way that is coherent and gripping...Bettany Hughes [takes] up that challenge and...the result is impressive. In 'Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities' Ms Hughes plays intriguing, sophisticated games with time and space...by making unlikely connections between well-described locations and events separated by aeons, she gives voice to those witchy, diachronic feelings in a spectacular fashion. * ECONOMIST *One of the pleasures of wandering the city today - whatever you call it - is in recognising that its layers of history are so enfolded with one another that they are impossible to separate. This is also the pleasure of Bettany Hughes' highly readable jaunt through its past 2,500 years..Istanbul is still living history. Perhaps the most moving moment in the book comes when Hughes goes looking for the song of hte Janissaries...Hughes tracked down one of their descendants...Could he remember one of the Janissaries' famous old songs? "Yes he could - and out came a fluid, mellifluous prayer, a song from the religion of the road, a song of hope and revolution, of piety and of cosmopolitan human heartedness. It could be the city's anthem. -- Sameer Rahim * DAILY TELEGRAPH *Bettany Hughes' history of Istanbul through the ages is richly entertaining and impeccably researched. Hughes' ebullient book is an ode to three incarnations of the city...[she] guides us round a city that is magestic, magical and mystical, leaving few stones unturned. It is a loving biography of a city that never stands still, never mind never sleeps...Hughes has written an important book that brings the past of this glorious city to life. It is filled with charming vignettes...snappily written...plenty here to entertain those who know something about the ciy and to enthrall those who don't. -- Peter Frankopan * THE OBSERVER *The research is immaculate, as is the telling of it. * CHOICE *Bettany Hughes transports the reader on a magic-carpet-like journey through 8,000 years of history...[this is] the quintessential historical overview of a city racing up the modern politcal agenda. -- Richard Tarrant * THE LADY *Istanbul's newly revived status as perhaps the major centre of Sunni Islam in the non-Arab world, and a pivot to the current Middle East imbroglio, is underlined by Bettany Hughes in the introduction to her sumptuous urban biography. -- Robert Fox * EVENING STANDARD *Hughes...wishes to show how the city's topography shaped the civilisations that grew from it - and how the many peoples that have passed through its walls went on to shape the lands and seas and trade routes of their known world...The thrill the author takes in her discoveries is infectious...Keen as she is to identify a past that is still omnipresent, she does not just like the city to a "historic millefeuille": time and again she proves it...this heroic work...is the perfect read if - having noticed that Istanbul is increasingly in the news these days - you wish to know its place in the scheme of things, and what light it may case on the uncertain future we shall most certainly share. -- Maureen Freely * NEW STATESMAN *Hughes suceeds triumphantly...and produces a cogent, passionate survey...bolstered by staggeringly wide-ranging research...[a] captivating book...Istanbul, a place where the past is impossible to miss...and few have told its enchanting story with Hughes's blend of precision and panache. -- Jon Wright * GEOGRAPHICAL, The Royal Geographical Society magazine *It is a delightful book for those who know Istanbul, but what a treat for those who do not, and are considering a visit. [Hughes] is an excellent, informed and good natured guide...she gets under the skin of the great city. -- Adrian Spooner * CLASSICS FOR ALL *Undoubtedly timely, because, as Hughes argues, Istanbul is once again central to the European narrative, as a postreligious secularism confront a resurgent religious movement. -- Michael McLouglin * IRISH TIMES *The complexity of the city's story is revealed in mesmerising detail in Bettany Hughes's new book. At times her writing feels like a love letter, or a eulogy to what has been lost. Her compassion for the city and its millions of inhabitants, past and present, comes across from the very first pages. It is quite rare to read a historical book that weaves research and insight with understanding and love: here is a book written as much with the heart as the mind...Here is an important book that must be translated into many languages - and especially into Turkish. -- Elif Shafak * THE SPECTATOR *Ground-breaking...There has been no recent large-scale history of the city with many names (Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul), which makes this colossal undertaking a notable achievement, coming at yet another turbulent moment in its long existence. -- Roger Crowley * LITERARY REVIEW *Istanbul has many inhabitants yearning to nurture their grand but asphyxiated city. In this tome - which begs a Turkish translation - Hughes gives them the time that Istanbul's pace, developers and officials do not. Her quiet confidence in the city's hard-earned cosmopolitanism soothes this concerned Istanbullu -- Sarah Jilani * ART REVIEW ASIA *A witty and lavish account of a shimmering city caught between heaven and hell -- Noonie Minogue * THE TABLET *Bettany Hughes's sprawling, 600-page love letter to one of the most inspiring cities on earth was a decadein the making, as befits a book covering millennia's worth of history in impressive detail. -- Alev Scott * PROSPECT *Historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes has pulled off the feat of wrting about three empires in one book: the Roman empire of Constantine, the Byzantine empire which ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the Ottoman empire which lasted into the 1920s * THE OLDIE *Istanbul has endured an awful run of terrorist attacks and political disorder over the past few years so Bettany Hughes' ebullient homage to the city is a welcome reminder of its long and fascinating history. * i NEWSPAPER *Majestic and immensely enriching...It's a journey through conquest and greatness from Roman to Ottoman times and it reminded me of why I love the city. -- Roula Khalaf * FINANCIAL TIMES *This scholarly work by television historian Bettany Hughes tells the city's story in rich and compelling detail * SUNDAY BUSINESS POST *I can't think of a city with a more extraordinary history than Istanbul, and in Bettany Hughes it has its ideal biographer. -- Simon Shaw * MAIL ON SUNDAY *She deserves enormous credit for managing to traverse swathes of time (right down to the present day) with such aplomb. Rarely have I read a book in which I learnt more things that I really should have already known. -- Jonathan Wright * CATHOLIC HERALD *She populates her three cities of Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul with a rich cast, in a book that brims with brio and incident. -- Justin Marozzi * THE GUARDIAN *Hughes guides us round a city that is majestic, magical and mystical, leaving few stones unturned. It is a loving biography of a city that never stands still, never mind sleeps. Hughes has written an important book that brings the past of this glorious city to life. It is filled with charming vignettes and is snappily written. -- Peter Frankopan * THE OBSERVER Paperback of the Week *With a broadcaster's delight, the historian Bettany Hughes throws herself into the gargantuan task of capturing the history of a city that spans 3,000 years, and whose story has been woefully neglected compared with other great urban centres...Impressive -- Louise Callaghan * SUNDAY TIMES *The English historian's spawling study of one of the world's great capitals covers 3,000 years. It has witnessed enormous flux in that time - not all of it for the better - but Hughes' biography will likely make those who've never visited want to book a plane ticket. * IRISH INDEPENDENT *

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Book SynopsisTrade ReviewTharoor convincingly demolishes some of the more persistent myths about Britain's supposedly civilising mission in India ... [he] charts the destruction of pre-colonial systems of government by the British and their ubiquitous ledgers and rule books ... The statistics are worth repeating. -- Victor Mallet * Financial Times *Inglorious Empire is a timely reminder of the need to start teaching unromanticised colonial history in British schools. A welcome antidote to the nauseating righteousness and condescension pedalled by Niall Ferguson in his 2003 book Empire * Irish Times *His writing is a delight and he seldom misses his target ... Tharoor should be applauded for tackling an impossibly contentious subject ... he deserves to be read. Indians are not the only ones who need reminding that empire has a lot to answer for. * Literary Review *Remarkable ... The book is savagely critical of 200 years of the British in India. It makes very uncomfortable reading for Brits -- Matt Ridley * The Times *Tharoor's impassioned polemic slices straight to the heart of the darkness that drives all empires. Forceful, persuasive and blunt, he demolishes Raj nostalgia, laying bare the grim, and high, cost of the British Empire for its former subjects. An essential read -- Niljana Roy * Financial Times *Ferocious and astonishing. Essential for a Britain lost in sepia fantasies about its past, Inglorious Empire is history at its clearest and cutting best -- Ben JudahThose Brits who speak confidently about how Britain's "historical and cultural ties" to India will make it easy to strike a great new trade deal should read Mr Tharoor's book. It would help them to see the world through the eyes of the ... countries once colonised or defeated by Britain -- Gideon Rachman * Financial Times *Rare indeed is it to come across history that is so readable and so persuasive -- Amitav GhoshEloquent ... a well-written riposte to those texts that celebrate empire as a supposed "force for good" * BBC World Histories *Tharoor's book - arising from a contentious Oxford Union debate in 2015 where he proposed the motion "Britain owes reparations to her former colonies" - should keep the home fires burning, so to speak, both in India and in Britain. ... He makes a persuasive case, with telling examples * History Today *Brilliant ... A searing indictment of the Raj and its impact on India. ... Required reading for all Anglophiles in former British colonies, and needs to be a textbook in Britain -- Salil Tripathi, Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee, PEN International, and author of The Colonel Who Would Not RepentPersuasive and well-founded ... the book convincingly demolishes the nostalgic, self-serving arguments voiced by imperial apologists * Time Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisChina is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even the European colonial powers at the height of their power could not move past coastal enclaves. Thus, China remained China through the Ming, the Qing, the Republic, the Occupation, and Communism. But, despite the desires of some of the most powerful people in the Great State through the ages, China has never been alone in the world. It has had to contend with invaders from the steppe and the challenges posed by foreign traders and imperialists. Indeed, its rulers for the majority of the last eight centuries have not been Chinese. Timothy Brook examines China's relationship with the world from the Yuan through to the present by following the stories of ordinary and extraordinary people navigating the spaces where China met and meets the world. Bureaucrats, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, invaders, migrant workers, traitors, and visionaries: this is a history of China as no one has told it before.Trade ReviewImpressive ... [Timothy Brook] at his best * TLS *Excellent ... The power of this book lies partly in the fact that Brook does not overstate his case. While he does not seek to claim that China's current actions are prefigured by the past, an attentive reader cannot fail to notice extraordinary parallels -- James Kynge * Financial Times *Timothy Brook's Great State puts forward an elegant and compelling argument for why we should look at the cosmopolitan part of the Chinese mind-set as well * Literary Review *Some of Mr. Brook's subjects are ethnically Chinese, but many are not - Mongols and Manchus figure prominently, as do Tibetans, Englishmen, Portuguese, Koreans and a host of others ... [It is] a wondrous range * Wall Street Journal *What a pleasure to read a significant, original book that covers millennia of Chinese history in an informal, often chatty, but always learned style * Times Higher Education *[A] vigorous account ... Scattered across the maps and paintings that Brook invokes, his thirteen encounters take in pirates, merchants, soldiers, traders, explorers, emperors and spiritual leaders - characters in China's complex trade, military, spiritual and political relationships down the centuries. Brook unravels the threads of these relationships across a canvas of war, friendship, savage struggles for power, lethal epidemic disease, triumph and calamity. It is a dizzying and exhilarating journey ... Great State offers some compelling lessons for today, and for all our futures -- Isabel Hilton * New Statesman *A fresh look at China's engagement with the outside world over centuries ... With useful maps and stories within stories, this is an ingenious look at an often misunderstood country * Kirkus Reviews *Praise for Vermeer's Hat: Spell-binding ... as a guide to the world behind the pictures Vermeer's Hat is mind-expanding * Sunday Times *A brilliant attempt to make us understand the reach and breadth of the first global age * Guardian *Brook takes you into the paintings in a way that can be spookily intimate * Evening Standard *An erudite, surprising book that finds traces of swashbuckling where you'd least expect * Daily Telegraph *Truly mesmerising. In this accessible but authoritative study, he... shows better than anyone I've read so far, the truly subversive power of detail * Independent *Praise for Mr Selden's Map of China: The great charm of this book lies not only in its illustrative, erudite detail but in the serendipity that regularly seizes Brook and adds spice to a spellbinding story * Times *The quest is fascinating and picaresque, a sort of cartographical Tristram Shandy with a sure-handed narrator steering us from Ming dynasty China to pre-Civil War Oxford to the Spice Islands of South-East Asia * Sunday Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisThis is a fresh and surprising account of Japan''s culture from the ''opening up'' of the country in the mid-nineteenth century to the present.''How much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it ... Masterly.'' Neil MacGregorIt is told through the eyes of people who greeted this change not with the confidence and grasping ambition of Japan''s modernizers and nationalists, but with resistance, conflict, distress. We encounter writers of dramas, ghost stories and crime novels where modernity itself is the tragedy, the ghoul and the bad guy; surrealist and avant-garde artists sketching their escape; rebel kamikaze pilots and the put-upon urban poor; hypnotists and gangsters; men in desperate search of the eternal feminine and feminists in search of something more than state-sanctioned subservience; Buddhists without morals; Marxist terror groups; couches full to bursting with the psychologiTrade ReviewHow much I admired it, what a lot I learned from it and, above all, how very much I enjoyed it. Although the broad outlines of the story were familiar (as they will be to every reader) almost all the more detailed information was new to me. I thought the book was masterly in the intermeshing of the personal and the political, the quotidian and the spiritual, the psycho-analytic with the journalistic, the long-historical with the contemporary, and everywhere finding and highlighting the poetic and the aesthetic. -- Neil MacGregorElegantly written and compelling history of Japan's past century and a half -- Bill Emmott * Spectator *Lucid and lyrical ... delivered with his flair for storytelling ... one of the best accounts I'veever read of what happens - for better and worse - when a country's relationship with the world is abruptly renegotiated. -- Alex Dudok de Wit * Telegraph *Richly embroidered, well-written text ... you will profit considerably from reading Japan Story. -- Christopher Ross * Literary Review *A fresh, detailed, intimate, witty, and captivating tour across the evolving landscape of Japan over the past hundred and fifty years ... told with compassion and with a storyteller's wit and wisdom. -- Will Harris * Books and Bao *Magisterial -- Best New Books to Read Christmas 2018 * Tatler *

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*SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA NON-FICTION CROWN 2020*Meet the three women who helped shape the course of modern Chinese history; a gripping story of sisterhood and betrayal from the bestselling author of Wild Swans.They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled seismic transformations these three women left an indelible mark on history. Red Sister rose to be Mao's vice-chair. Little Sister became first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China. Big Sister made herself one of country's richest women. Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister takes us on a sweeping journey from exiles' quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. By turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape twentieth-century China.

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Book Synopsis'A learned, wise, wonderfully written single volume history of a civilisation that I knew I should know more about' Tom Holland'Masterful and engrossing...well-paced, eminently readable and well-timed. A must-read for those who want – and need – to know about the China of yesterday, today and tomorrow' Peter FrankopanChina’s story is extraordinarily rich and dramatic. Now Michael Wood, one of the UK's pre-eminent historians, brings it all together in a major new one-volume history of China that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand its burgeoning role in our world today.China is the oldest living civilisation on earth, but its history is still surprisingly little known in the wider world. Michael Wood's sparkling narrative, which mingles the grand sweep with local and personal stories, woven together with the author’s own travel journals, is an enthralling account of China&rsqu

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Book SynopsisSHORTLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 2013''As taut and richly embroidered as a great novel . . . a masterpiece'' Sunday Telegraph''Dazzling'' Sunday Times ''Magnificent'' Guardian ''Sparkling'' Daily TelegraphA towering history of the first Afghan War by bestselling historian William Dalrymple.In the spring of 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk.On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain''s greatest military humiliation of the nineteenth century: an entire army of the then most powerful nation in the world ambushed in retreat and utterly routed byTrade ReviewThis sorry saga has been recounted many times, but never that I can recall as well as by Dalrymple. He is a master story-teller, whose special gift lies in the use of indigenous sources, so often neglected by imperial chroniclers -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times *Enchantingly written . . . In Dalrymple’s usual happy style of historical narrative, applied to a fascinating, neat and highly suggestive series of events, this long and involved book will be a great success, and bring the famous story to a large new audience -- Philip Hensher * Spectator *Of the books swooped into being by his scholarship (to which he himself has applied the adjective “obsessive”), this one is the most magnificent . . . His account is so perceptive and so warmly humane that one is never tempted to break away . . . This book would be compulsive reading even if it were not a uniquely valuable history, which it is, because Dalrymple has uncovered sources never used before -- Diana Athill * Guardian *Brilliant . . . Those who have read his White Mughals and The Last Mughal will know what to expect: a readable style, a deep humanity and, above all, an extraordinary skill in evoking the lost worlds of Mughals and Afghans . . . His pen-portraits are a masterpiece . . . Return of a King is much the fullest and most powerful description of the West's first encounter with Afghan society -- John Darwin * New York Times *A major contribution to the historiography of south-west Asia and of the British empire . . . Return of a King will come to be seen as the definitive account of the first and most disastrous western attempt to invade Afghanistan. Dalrymple's afterword should be put on college syllabuses on both sides of the Atlantic -- Sherard Cowper-Coles * New Statesman *Splendid and absorbing . . . William Dalrymple tells this tragic story with verve, skill, and - unexpectedly in the circumstances - some humor. Using unknown or underused sources from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, he recounts the tale from both sides, shifting the scenes, using eyewitness accounts, quoting at length heroic epic poems . . . A fine book -- David Gilmour * New York Review of Books *William Dalrymple is a master storyteller, who breathes such passion, vivacity and animation into the historical characters of the First Anglo-Afghan war of 1839-42 that at the end of this 567-page book you feel you have marched, fought, dined and plotted with them all: once I had finished I turned straight back to the beginning * Independent *Brilliant . . . even 170 years later, the events described in Return of a King still have the power to shock - and so they should. It is to be hoped that any future British leader contemplating intervention in Afghanistan, or any other part of the Muslim world, will read Dalrymple's book * Financial Times *Mr. Dalrymple's writing is sly, charming and clever. His histories read like novels . . . This latest book delights and shocks as he points the finger at both sides for their deceit treachery and cruelty . . . Magnificent * Wall Street Journal *Definitive . . . Return of a King, like a great classical tragedy, grips the reader's attention from start to finish . . . not just a riveting account of one imperial disaster on the roof of the world; it teaches unforgettable lessons about the perils of neocolonial adventures everywhere -- Piers Brendan * Literary Review *By turns epic, thrilling, suspenseful, and utterly appalling, at once deeply researched and beautifully paced, Return of a King should win every prize for which it's eligible * Bookforum *Dazzling . . . Dalrymple is a master storyteller, whose special gift lies in the use of indigenous sources, so often neglected by imperial chroniclers . . . Almost every page of Dalrymple's splendid narrative echoes with latter-day reverberations -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times *Outstanding . . . Dalrymple has emerged as a superb historian of the British Raj . . . He excels at character, scene setting, and shifting between multiple points of view . . . His use of sources is stunning, particularly the trove of Persian-language material - epic poems, court histories and other accounts - he found in Kabul. No other western historian has given such a complete account of the other side * National *William Dalrymple's phenomenal achievement is to combine a steady overview of his broad canvas with a magpie's eye for detail and a film-maker's sense of when to shift the mood and focus. His writing is ebullient, but his conclusion is timely and grave. Any attempt to subjugate Afghanistan must, as one witness of that first invasion noted, be 'temporary and transient and terminate in catastrophe' * Intelligent Life *A powerful account of Britain's deluded occupation . . . A superlative achievement * Scotland on Sunday *Dalrymple is something of a secret national treasure; a travel writer and narrative historian of Britain's relations with India . . . an enthralling, definitive account * The Lady *Masterful . . . Dalrymple makes an important contribution by including recently discovered Afghan accounts of the war * Washington Post *This hefty and extraordinary book may be [Dalrymple's] masterwork . . . Dalrymple's assiduous scholarship and travel-writer's ease with language makes this not only an incredibly well-researched book, but something of a page-turner * Big Issue *This is vintage Dalrymple: warp-speed historical narrative, meticulously researched . . . My only regret reading this wonderful history is that it was not published a decade earlier * Evening Standard *Dalrymple is a writer who can make the most recondite historical issues come alive and with each successive book he becomes a more entertaining and enlightening companion . . . Return of a King is simply quite brilliant -- Alexander McCall Smith * New Statesman, Books of the Year *Probably the best known British historian of India . . . this is the book he was born to write * Economist *Sensationally good . . . Dalrymple writes the kind of history few historians can match . . . Drawing on Afghan, Russian, and Indian sources, [Dalrymple] tells a truly epic story of imperial ambition and hubris with profound lessons for our own times . . . I doubt that I'll read a better written or more important history book all year * Scotsman *

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE ''A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve'' Simon Sebag Montefiore''Harrowing and brilliant'' Ben Macintyre''A critical contribution to Chinese history'' Wall Street JournalBetween 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known. Dikotter''s extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People''s RepuTrade Review'A masterpiece of historical investigation into one of the world's greatest crimes' * New Statesman *‘It is hard to exaggerate the achievement of this book in proving that Mao caused the famine ... only thanks to brilliant scholarship such as this will the heirs of the vanished millions finally learn what happened to their ancestors' * Sunday Times *‘The most authoritative and comprehensive study of the biggest and most lethal famine in history. A must-read' * Jung Chang *‘Gripping ... Prof Dikötter's painstaking analysis of the archives shows Mao's regime resulted in the greatest "man-made famine" the world has ever seen' * Daily Express *

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Book SynopsisThe original readymade: a pioneering volume on the ancient tradition of the scholar’s rock Lose yourself in the endlessly rich variety of Chinese scholars’ rocks, or gongshi, in this catalog featuring a major gift of Chinese stones to the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum. This gift from recognized authority on scholars’ rocks Kemin Hu includes 50 types of stones, ranging from the traditional to the modern. Lingbi, taihu, ying and other stones have been collected from all over China and are presented here in nine thematic groupings. One hundred and seven stunning photographs allow readers to plumb the depths of this ancient yet dynamic art form. Phillip E. Bloom, curator of the Chinese Garden and director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, guides readers through gongshi’s 2,000-year history and introduces them to some of China’s most passionate “lithomaniacs.” Featuring numerous illustrations and historical aficionados’ own musings in both translation and the original Chinese, Bloom’s essay cracks open gongshi’s history for a Western audience. A collector’s preface by Hu, as well as reflections on stone collecting by American enthusiasts, complete the catalog. Stone appreciation is on the rise in the United States, although the English-language literature remains slim. Cultivated Stones is a valuable contribution to this growing field, not just an introduction for the interested novice but a scholarly advancement in its own right.Trade ReviewCultivated Stones is a beautifully designed volume with a sharp layout and stunning and evocative photographs of the one-hundred-plus stones Illustrated. It is a quality publication from all aspects of production—paper quality, binding, and binding. Rating: Excellent; a must-have volume for all students of Chinese stone appreciation. * VSANA (Viewing Stone Association of North America) *The best way to enjoy this book is in a serial manner. Choose a stone that appeals to your curiosity and mood at any moment and take at least five minutes to took at the image of the stone and allow your mind to wander. You will be rewarded by a deeper reverence for nature and connection with things in the ground we tread upon every day. -- Scott Aker * CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) *

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Book SynopsisA detailed look at Admiral Yi''s four 1592 sorties that defeated the Japanese navy and established him as a national hero.In 1592, Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin planned a series of attacks against the Japanese navy. His first two campaigns saw him destroy several isolated Japanese squadrons engaged in coastal raiding activities. Once informed of these attacks, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered his daimyos to assemble their ships in a dedicated task force to meet Yi in battle. In his third campaign, Yi was able to successfully lure out a Japanese fleet and destroy it in August at the Battle of Hansando. Yi and his ships then sunk fleets at Angolpo. To capitalize on this victory, the Koreans then bombarded the Japanese fleet at Busan in September.With period images, colourful artwork and detailed maps, this book delves into Admiral Yi''s tactics, which were decisive to stopping the momentum of the Japanese advance into Korea. These naval engagements destabilized the Japanese grip on the southern coast and ended hopes of sustaining their armies by sea. Historian Yuhan Kim brings to life the actions of one of the greatest naval commanders in the world and explores why Admiral Yi was so successful.

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Book SynopsisThis absorbing study describes and illustrates the Indian Army forces that fought in five wars during the second half of the 20th century.The Indian Army is the world's largest volunteer army, with an enviable history and tradition of valour and gallantry. It was involved in warfare soon after India's independence and has fought five wars between 1947 and 1999, notably against Pakistan (194748, 1965, 1971 and 1999) but also against China (1962). Besides these, the Indian Army has been involved in smaller internal conflicts and counter-insurgency operations, some of which continue. The Indian Army has also carried out two military interventions overseas, namely in the Maldives (1988) and in Sri Lanka (198790).The troops who fought in these operations, culminating in 1999's Kargil War against Pakistan, are described and illustrated in this book, written by an Indian Army veteran. The Indian Army's evolving uniforms, insignia and personal equipment are depicted in photographs, some previously unpublished, and eight plates of original colour artwork. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of the Indian Army's contribution to global military history since Independence in 1947.

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