History : Great Britain

Think of England, and anger hardly springs to mind as its primary national characteristic. Yet in The Angry Island, A. A. Gill argues that, in fact, it is plain old fury that is the wellspring for England's accomplishments. The default setting of England is anger. The English are naturally, congenitally, collectively and singularly livid much of the time. They're incensed, incandescent, splenetic, prickly, touchy, and fractious. They can be mildly annoyed, really annoyed and, most scarily, not remotely annoyed. They sit apart on their half of a damply disappointing little island, nursing and picking at their irritations. The English itch inside their own skins. They feel foreign in their own country and run naked through their own heads. more...

Price: $17.99

This is the first modern book-length study of the case of Thomas Aikenhead, the sometime University of Edinburgh student who in 1697 earned the unfortunate distinction of being the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain. Taking a micro-historical approach, Michael Graham uses the Aikenhead case to open a window into the world of Edinburgh, Scotland and Britain in its transition from the confessional era of the Reformation and the covenants, which placed high emphasis on the defence of orthodox belief, to the polite, literary world of the Enlightenment, of which Edinburgh would become a major centre. Graham traces the roots of the Aikenhead case in seventeenth-century Scotland and the law of blasphemy which was evolving in response to the new intellectual currents of biblical criticism and deism. He analyzes Aikenhead's trial and the Scottish government's decision to uphold the sentence of hanging. Finally, he details the debate engendered by the execution, carried out in a public sphere of print media encompassing both Scotland and England. Aikenhead's case became a media event which highlighted the intellectual and cultural divisions within Britain at the end of the seventeenth century. more...

Price: $99.99

The first detailed study of what happened in Britain when the East India Company acquired a vast territorial empire in South Asia. It offers a reconstruction of the inner workings of the Company as it made the remarkable transition from business to empire during the late-eighteenth century. more...

Price: $77.00

The Civil Wars offers a powerful new assessment of the conflict that engulfed the kingdoms ruled by Charles I after 1638. Written by an international team of nine distinguished historians, it focuses on the Wars not simply as an English conflict, but as a related series of civil wars fought within and between England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland during the 1940s. It explains why Charles I lost the 'Wars of the Three Kingdoms', and how the English parliament reduced Ireland and Scotland to its authority after 1649. Elegantly written and beautifully illiustrated, this fascinating new work provides an indispensable guide to one of the most defining periods of British history. more...

Price: $50.00

The People of Plato is the first study since 1823 devoted exclusively to the identification of, and relationships among, the individuals represented in the complete Platonic corpus. It provides details of their lives, and it enables one to consider the persons of Plato's works, and those of other Socratics, within a nexus of important political, social, and familial relationships. more...

Price: $24.95