Allen Lane

Jerry Brotton is the presenter of the acclaimed BBC4 series "Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession". Here he tells the story of our world through maps. Throughout history, maps have been fundamental in shaping our view of the world, and our place in it. But far from being purely scientific objects, world maps are unavoidably ideological and...

Geza Vermes, translator and editor of "The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls" and worldwide expert on the life and times of Jesus, tells the enthralling story of early Christianity and the origins of a religion. The creation of the Christian Church is one of the most important stories in the development of the world's history, but also one of the most...

The first volume of the definitive biography of Gandhi, one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century, from the great historian Ramachandra Guha. The life of Mohandas Gandhi is one of the most remarkable and potent in the modern era. In this fascinating new biography Ramachandra Guha allows us to understand the personality and politics of...

From historian David Priestland, "Merchant, Soldier, Sage" is a remarkable book that proposes a radical new approach to how we see our world, and who runs it, in the vein of Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History". We live in an age ruled by merchants. Competition, flexibility and profit are still the common currency, even at a time when Western...

After his insider's study of Chicago crack gangs electrified the academy, Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh spent a decade immersed in New York's underbelly, observing the call girls, drug dealers, prostitutes and other strivers that make up this booming underground economy. Amidst the trust-funder cocktail parties, midtown strip...

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most unfathomable composers in the history of music. How can such sublime work have been produced by a man who (when we can discern his personality at all) seems so ordinary, so opaque - and occasionally so intemperate? John Eliot Gardiner grew up passing one of the only two authentic portraits of Bach every...