One of the Books of the Year 2025 at The Irish Times

Peter Ackroyd's compelling portrait of W. H. Auden, poet of a restless century.

'This is a book about ten women who, over the past three hundred years have found walking essenti...

Illuminated with illustrations, an exploration of medieval manuscript production that offers insi...

A Philosophy of Loneliness explores the different kinds of loneliness, the philosophy of emotions...

Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century and her wor...

A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year

One of the Best Popular Science Books of 2025 at New Scientist

In Ukraine: A Nation on the Borderland, Karl Schlögel presents a picture of a country which lies ...

From celebrated historian and writer Peter Ackroyd, a magisterial portrayal of English Christiani...

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-94) is an ambiguous figure in the history of art. His radically unorthodo...

What do we really know about the food we eat? A firestorm of recent food-fraud cases, from the US...

Now in paperback, this first global history of sports offers all spectators and participants a re...

Spanning myth, history, and contemporary culture, a terrifying and illuminating excavation of the...

This book is a comprehensive investigation of lying in everyday life. What exactly is a lie, and ...

Mushrooms are loved, despised, feared and misunderstood. They have been a familiar part of nature...

Out of the Depths explores all aspects of shipwrecks across 4,000 years, examining their historic...

A provocative reassessment of a popular narrative that connects museums, the antiquities trade, a...

However much his work has been reviled or contested, Sigmund Freud remains one of the most signif...

Virginia Woolfs novel famously beginsMrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Of cour...

A critical biography of the life, work and artistic legacy of the popular artist.

A life of the nineteenth-century German writer and composer most famous for inspiring The Nutcrac...

When people think of Russian food they generally think either of opulent luxury, signified above ...

'Many of us, proponents and critics alike, commonly make assumptions about religion. We may presu...

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497 8 - 1543), one of the most versatile and admired painters of the N...

This second edition of Steven Roger Fischer's fascinating book charts the history of communicatio...

Born in Budapest in 1905, Arthur Koestler was a pivotal European writer and intellectual who insp...

The story of how the movies assumed a gritty facade in the name of authenticity, with working act...

An illuminating history of the forgotten concept of climatic botany that underscores how vital fo...

Laced with illustrations of undergarments both prosaic and exotic, a global exposé of the hidden ...

South Africa's visual history from colonialism to democracy, through iconic photography.

Surveys the realism of planets in sci-fi films like Star Wars and Dune.

'Exhaustively researched. . . . Students of Japanese history and culture owe Cryns a debt of grat...

In Coffee: A Global History, Jonathan Morris explains how the world acquired a taste for coffee, ...

The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or con...

Mapping the acoustic onto the human soul, moving meditations on the power and meaning of sound.

It began with The Beatles Helter Skelter. It was distilled to its dark essence by Black Sabbath. ...

There is more history in a bowl of pasta than in the Colosseum, writes Andreas Viestad in Dinner ...

'Kimono: A Modern History' traces the transformation of the kimono from everyday garment to natio...

Shells have captivated humans from the dawn of time: the earliest known artwork was made on a she...

In this monumental, authoritative new history of Afghanistan, Jonathan L. Lee places the current ...

A fresh look at Confucius through the oldest known record of his life.

An irreverent new account of the life and work of George Orwell, exploring the 'scent narratives'...

Whether they make it themselves or just enjoy it with breakfast, people can be passionate about t...

Dogs are perhaps our most popular pets. This book unravels the debate about whether dogs are desc...

We use salty or artful language to win arguments, slander, cheat and bully, as well as to express...

A critical, comparative history of five notorious women branded icons of evil.

What building today tells us about tomorrow's Earth--and our place on it.