The final chapter in the definitive, three-volume history of the world's first known stateArchaeologist John Romer has spent a lifetime chronicling the history of Ancient Egypt, and here he tells the epic story of an era dominated by titans of the popular imagination: the radical iconoclast Akhenaten, the boy-king Tutankhamun and the all-conquering Ramesses II. But 'heroes' do not forge history by themselves. This was also a time of international trade, cultural ex...

France's greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment...

'In the midst of life we are in death.' London in the early 1850s. The squalid underbelly of the Victorian slums coexist in uneasy partnership with the specious glamour of the privileged, dandified West End, each feeding off the other in an endless circle of vice, exploitation and death. London is the world's capital city of murder, its chief attraction the public execution of killers at Newgate. Edmund Whitty is a correspondent on the Falcon, reporting on the underworld. He is a loser, pu...