Reaktion Books

Air has always been essential to life, from the atmospheric composition that gave life to the forests and gigantic insects of the Carboniferous age some 300 million years ago to the air that fuels the most important technologies today. We are immersed in a great ocean of air; from internal combustion and jet engines to modern cities with artificial...

Since humans first gazed upward, the moon has hung in the sky virtually unchanged, entrancing generations of poets, artists and scientists. Once worshipped as a deity, often thought to cause madness, now known to manipulate our tides and much else besides, humanity's relationship with the moon has been ever-changing; the one constant has been our...

It is common to think of Jesus of Nazareth's main physical characteristics as including long, wavy, blondish hair and a short beard. Yet the Holy Scriptures are silent about Christ's features, and his representations are hardly consistent in early Christian and medieval arts. The wearing of long hair, moreover, is explicitly condemned by St Paul as...

On 28 June 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg-Lorraine-Este was shot dead. Known as the moment that sparked off the First World War, this incident also initiated another, lesser-known story: the beginning of the end of Habsburg rule, which came four years later. In this comprehensive account of the...

The numbers involved when it comes to discussing stars, galaxies and the inconceivably vast tracts of empty space between them are staggering. With hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe, all of varying shapes, sizes and ages - each containing hundreds of billions of suns - at first glance our Universe appears frustratingly...

For some two millennia the papacy has presided over the governance of the Roman Catholic Church and played a fundamentally important role in European and world affairs. Its impact has long transcended the religious realm and has influenced ideological, philosophic, national, social and political developments as well as international relations. This...