This book follows the hungry citizens of Georgian London over one day as they navigate culinary pleasures and horrors in the capital's diverse food landscape. Step into the kitchens, streets and chop houses of Georgian London - one day, one city, co...

An extraordinary mix of psychology, science, and cultural history exploring the relationship between humans and their pets. Humans have been domesticating animals for over ten thousand years. Why do we want tame wolves in our homes, subdued wild cat...

The world as we know it would not exist without plants. Have you ever stopped to think about how your morning cappuccino came to be? From the coffee bush that yielded the beans to the grass for the cattle, or perhaps the soya, that produced the milk...

Intimate stories that offer entertaining perspectives on what it was like to engage with radio when it was new. Radio, today, can feel like a faithful old companion, but its early history was sensational. Between 1922 and 1939, British life was tran...

The past, present and future are full of tantalizing mysteries: questions about our own and other people's lives that we long to answer. Across history, human cultures have devised a wide range of methods to discover what might lie ahead or to unders...

A charming guide to potatoes, covering everything from how to grow them to their origins and history. "Everybody who possibly can ought to grow potatoes". First published towards the end of the First World War, this charming little book is a love le...

Medieval England was full of books, many times the number that have survived. The great moment of loss was when the country's religious houses were suppressed by King Henry VIII and their libraries scattered and destroyed. Twentieth-century scholarsh...

How long is an ell? What is the largest size of champagne bottle? How do you measure the heat of a chilli pepper? Why is the depth of water measured in fathoms? And what is a cubit? "The Curious History of Weights & Measures" tells the story of how...

Buy my Dish of great Eeles, Any Old Iron take money for, Twelve Pence a Peck Oysters, Buy my fat Chickens, Fair Lemons & Oranges Marcellus Laroon's "The Cryes of the City of London drawne after the Life" presents, in seventy-four striking portrait...

The punctuation marks, mathematical symbols and glyphs which haunt the edges of our keyboards have evolved over many hundreds of years. They shape our understanding of texts, calculations and online interactions. Without these symbols all texts would...