"From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Unlike him, she was a mother of twelve. Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more letters to his sister than he wrote to anyone else, was the original American self-made man;...

The plot could have been inspired by Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, but unlike Waugh's novel — which parodies the era of the 'Bright Young Things' — The Mistress of Mayfair is a real-life story of scandal, greed, corruption and promiscuity at the heart of 1920s and '30s high society, focusing on the wily, willful socialite Doris Delevingne and her doomed relationship with the gossip columnist Valentine Browne, Viscount Castlerosse. Marrying each...

You may not yet have heard of Lee Hoyle. You soon will. This collection of anecdotes, memoirs and general musings will almost certainly have you laughing, and often bring a tear to the eye. Lee's unique style of writing adds to both the humour amd the drama of the chapters of his life and often enhances the emotion of the moment. This is a must-read biography from an interesting new character, with praise heaped on chapters such as 'Breaking into...

"The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its...

The Education of Henry Adams is among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. Henry Adams was the grandson of a President and the great-grandson of another one. He was also the son of the American Ambassador to England, and his secretary. As such he rubbed elbows, literally, with Presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt and with many of the great figures of his time. This book contains thousands of memorable one-liners...

A fascinating biography of one of the heroes of the American Revolution, Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette.

Thomas Glover arrived in Nagasaki in 1859, just as Japan was opening to the West. Within a few years he had played a crucial part in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Shogunate, providing the rebels with war-winning, Scottish-designed warships, and modern arms. Bankruptcy by the age of thirty was barely a setback and he went on to become a pivotal figure in the rapidly expanding Mitsubishi empire, founding shipyards and breweries. As energetic in his...

In this illuminating and brilliantly researched biography, Edward Wilson-Lee tells an enthralling story of the life and times of the first genius of the print age, Hernando Colón, a tale with striking lessons for our own modern experiences of information revolution and globalization. --adapted from Amazon description.

A collection of memoirs about an English woman and her family giving up city life for the Scottish Highlands in the 1950s. Katharine Stewart, who died in 2013, was one of Scotland's best-loved writers on rural life in the Highlands. A Croft in the Hills, her first book, tells the story of how a couple and their young daughter, fresh from city life, took over a remote hill croft near Loch Ness and made a living from it. Full of warm personal insights,...

When Emperor Meiji began his rule in 1867, Japan was a splintered empire dominated by the shogun and the daimyos, cut off from the outside world, staunchly anti-foreign, and committed to the traditions of the past. Before long, the shogun surrendered to the emperor, a new constitution was adopted, and Japan emerged as a modern, industrialized state. Despite the length of his reign, little has been written about the strangely obscured figure of Meiji...