Sub-titled 'True Tales From London's Streets', the book is an x-ray of life and stories in their own words of those who live and work in our capital. On the surface, the streets of London in 1861 and in 2019 are entirely different places, but dig just a little and the similarities are striking and in many cases shocking. Taking Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (available product code 56595 to compare) as inspiration, Jennifer Kavanagh explores the changes and continuities by collecting and mapping stories from today's London. Beggars, street entertainers, stalls selling a variety of food, clothes, second-hand goods, and thieves and the sex trade are all still predominant. The rise of the gig economy has brought a multitude of drivers and cyclists, delivering and moving goods, transporting meals, food and people, all organised through smartphones but using the same streets as Mayhew's informants. The precarity faced by this new workforce would also be familiar to the street sellers of his day in terms of resources; gone are the workhouses, alms-houses, pauper's lunatic asylums, and enter day centres, shelters, hostels and food banks. There are still many kinds of market like the privately run farmer's markets which are doing especially well, typically open once a week with a trend towards healthy and organic food. There is a pair of builders pictured in a line art illustration, street food sellers and in local streets shopkeepers and long term residents know each other and the Big Issue seller around the corner. There is getting around, going out in the fresh air, Fitzrovia (a favourite for film and period dramas), Hassene an Algerian street sweeper, Victorian railway stations and parks. According to the 1861 census, the population of inner London was 2,808,494. In 2011 it was 3,231,901 - not such a great difference. In 1851 over 38% of Londoners were born somewhere else and in 2011 37% is made up of different nationalities and now London is rightly proud of its multiculturalism. The changing city as seen from the end of 2018 to spring 2020 which leads us through the streets of London and to places we would never find for ourselves. 395pp, paperback. Illus.

The highwaymen's 'Lives' in this book were taken from 'A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers etc. to Which is Added, a Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the Most Notorious Pyrates...' published in 1734. Modern styling has been applied but spellings and punctuation generally left as in the original volume for authenticity. Captain Charles Johnson celebrated 'A General History of the Pirates' (1724) is the most famous book about pirates ever written. Buoyed by the volume?s runaway success, he followed up with this book of 1734. Published here for the first time in two centuries, it provides over 50 accounts of the most notorious British criminals of the 17th and 18th centuries including the famous highwayman William Davis, alias The Golden Farmer, the cross-Channel gentleman highwayman Claude du Vall who liked to dance at the roadside with the ladies he robbed, the prolific road adventurer Old Mob who robbed Judge Jeffries, shooting his coachmen, one in the arm and one in the leg, and the Royalist carriage raider James Hind. The volume opens with the life of Sir John Falstaff, as beautifully drawn here as by Shakespeare, plus Robin Hood, Walter Tracey, Thomas Rumbold, Jack Bird, Captain Dudley, Captain Ruatz, Moll Cutpurse, Edward and Joan Bracey, Patrick O-Bryan, Tom Austin, Captain Evan Evans, Avery, Ned Bonnet, Jack Hawkins and George Simpson and others. Here are noted highwaymen, foot-pads, shop-lifts and cheats of both sexes which were amalgamated into one large and expensive extensive volume, a coffee table book of its time for its production value. With a journalistic flair, these wild accounts were a curious blend of fact and fiction that helped ferment the romanticised image of the gentleman highwayman that persists to this day. And while there are tales of gallantry, adventure and seduction, these are more than matched by acts of ruthless brutality, murder and treachery. Many of these criminals were famous in their day, their arrests, trials and hangings were a public sensation. In the introduction to this new edition, Sam Willis delves into the mysterious identities of authors Alexander Smith and Captain Charles Johnson, both of whom remain enigmatic to this day, and explains why these biographies are still so relevant. It has long been suspected that Captain Charles Johnson was a pseudonym for Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe. Glamorous British Library 393 page illustrated edition.

Does size matter? This ground-breaking book explores human size difference, specifically unusual bodies big and small, as a cultural marker in western scholarship, exploring miniaturism, giganticism, obesity, and the lived experiences of actual big and small people. The work addresses the use of physical measures to judge normalcy, goodness, gender identity and beauty while examining art, literature, folklore, social practices and scientific discourse ranging from the 17th century to the present. The book begins looking at the 'little man' (how Edmund Burke believed the miniature man inspired wonder) and small bodies, before moving on to big bodies and the concept of the "monstrous giant". Discover that the much loved fairy tale character Tom Thumb aligns with three characters in legend, a miniature valiant knight in King Arthur's court, a lustful and over-confident person who attempted to ravish a Queen and someone of similar stature who found success as an instructor, teaching children their letters and moral lessons in words of few syllables. One section of the book looks at the figure of the pygmy in postcolonial revision and brings Roald Dahl's 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory under the lens, critiquing the Oompa-Loompa characters who are 'clearly constructed as African pygmies' as they are described as 'pure black' with 'fuzzy heads' and are no taller than Wonka's knee. While considering larger bodies, the author considers how giants have historically been thought of as not smart, whether that is Homer's Polyphemus tricked by Odysseus or an early edition of Jack the Giant Killer in which the young boy outsmarts the two-headed Welsh giant through clever sleights and illusions. The study also considers Ted Hughes' fable The Iron Giant and the modern idea of a friendship between boy and giant or boy and technology as the iron man (who also happens to be an enormous sentient machine) consumes metal in order to survive but handles the human boy sensitively. To bring the ideas and theories to life, the book also includes fantastic images such as the cover design for Tom Swift and His Giant Robot in 1954, Louise Lentz Woodruff's sculpture featuring an enormous robot guiding a young male and female figures, and a painting by Anthony van Dyck of Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson in 1633 which portrays the monarch with a favoured member of her household, the 'court dwarf' Jeffrey Hudson. Colour images, 346pp.

The growth of the scientific study of earthquakes is woven into this far-reaching history. The story begins with a series of earthquakes in England in 1750. Today seismologists can monitor the vibrations of the planet second by second, and the movement of tectonic plates millimetre by millimetre, yet even in the 21st century great earthquakes are still essentially 'acts of god', striking with much less warning than volcanoes, floods, hurricanes and even tornadoes and tsunamis. Since antiquity on every continent human beings in search of attractive landscapes and economic prosperity have made a Faustian bargain with the risk of devastation by an earthquake. Today around half of the world's largest cities, as many as 60, lie in areas of major seismic activity. Many such as Lisbon, Naples, San Francisco, Teheran and Tokyo have been severely damaged or destroyed by earthquakes in the past. Throughout history starting with ancient Jericho, Rome and Sparta, cities have proved to be extraordinarily resilient. Only one, Port Royal in the Caribbean, was abandoned after an earthquake. The book seeks to understand exactly how humans and earthquakes have interacted. In some cases, physical devastation has been followed by decline but in others, the political and economic reverberations of earthquake disasters have presented opportunities for renewal. After its wholesale destruction in 1906, San Francisco went on to flourish, eventually giving birth to the high-tech industrial area on the San Andreas fault known as Silicon Valley. An earthquake in Caracas in 1812 triggered the creation of new nations in the liberation of South America from Spanish rule. Another in Tang Shan in 1976 catalysed the transformation of China into the world's second largest economy. Other chapters look at grief and growth in the land of Gandhi, Gujarat 2001, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean 2004, and meltdown and after in Fukushima 2011. With chronology of earthquakes, maps and references, a very well illustrated 256 page Thames & Hudson 2016 first edition.

Published in a paperback edition under the title 'Resistance, Rebellion and Revolt', Professor Walvin looks at the Atlantic world as a whole including the French and Spanish empires and Brazil as well as Britain's colonies. He casts new light on one of the major shifts in Western history - in the 300 years following Columbus's landfall in the Americas, slavery had become a widespread and critical institution. It had seen 12 million Africans forced onto slave ships, a forced migration that had had seismic consequences for Africa and had transformed the Americas and materially enriched the Western world. It had also been largely unquestioned, in Europe at least, and among slave owners, traders and those who profited from the system, yet within a mere 75 years during the 19th century, slavery had vanished from the Americas, declined, collapsed and was destroyed by a complexity of forces that to this day remains disputed. Walvin shows here that it was in large part overthrown by those it had enslaved. He re-examines the significance of the resistance of the enslaved themselves, from sabotage and running away to outright violent rebellion. 304pp, map and fairly large print.

A concise, elegant and enlightening account of the immensely complex and often outright chaotic Holy Roman Empire in the early modern period (1496-1806) by the renowned German historian. Stollberg-Rilinger presents a new interpretation that reveals why it was not a failed state as many historians believe. The Holy Roman Empire emerged in the Middle Ages as a loosely integrated union of German states and city-states under the supreme rule of an emperor. Around 1500 it took on a more formal structure with the establishment of powerful institutions such as the Reichstag and the Imperial Chamber Court, that would endure more or less intact until the Empire's dissolution by Napoleon in 1806. It discusses the Empire's political culture and remarkably durable institutions and how it was a political body unlike any other - it had no standing army, no clear boundaries, no general taxation or bureaucracy. Bound together by personal loyalty and reciprocity, and constantly re-enacted by solemn rituals, we are taken from the Reform era at the dawn of 16th century to the crisis of the Reformation, from the consolidation of the Peace of Augsburg to the destructive fury of the Thirty Years' War, from the conflict between Austria and Prussia to the Empire's downfall in the age of the French Revolution. 164 pages, illus.

A rich exploration of the historical lineage of today's research universities which explains the reasons for their ascendancy in America and their continued international pre-eminence. When universities began in the Middle Ages, Pope Gregory IX described them as 'wisdom's special workshop' although he could not have foreseen how far these institutions would travel and develop. Tracing the 800 year evolution of the elite research university from its roots in medieval Europe to its remarkable incarnation today, this special book places the durable institution in sweeping historical perspective. In particular James Axtell focusses on the ways that the best American universities took on Continental influences from the late 19th century onwards. They proliferated from coast to coast, and their national role expanded greatly during World War Two and the Cold War. Axtell links the legacies of European universities and the Tudor-Stuart Oxbridge to nine colonial and hundreds of pre-Civil War colleges, and delves into how US universities were shaped by Americans who studied in German universities and adopted their discoveries to domestic conditions and goals. The graduate school, the PhD, and the research imperative became and remain the hallmarks of the university system and higher education institutions around the globe. The author writes in his prologue 'I had begun my scholarly publishing career at Yale in the history of education... where I taught an introductory seminar on the subject for two years. My first two books were on the one-time Oxford don John Locke's Educational Career and Writings (1968) and on the full range of education in colonial New England... Then, after the 100th anniversary of the massacre at Wounded Knee... I was drawn to the ethno-history of Indian-European relations in the colonial Americas which resulted in eight books.' Learn so much more than about the nation's Harvards. Princetons and Stanfords but about what energises and sustains research universities in the high-stakes 'brain race'. 417pp.

The most comprehensive and authoritative account available of the rapid ascendancy of the Incas, their politics, economics, religion, architecture, art and technology, and their subsequent downfall. The Incas emerged in the 14th century to build one of the largest empires of the ancient world. At its zenith Tawantinsuyu - 'The Fourfold Domain' - extended northwards from the Inca capital of Cusco along the spine of the Andes to embrace parts of modern Peru and Ecuador, and southwards into Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. The authors look in detail at Cusco and four parts of the empire, following the vast road system to explore not just famous sites such as Machu Picchu, but all the major regional settlements on and off the Inca Trail. The concluding chapter is devoted to the arrival of the Spaniards, the assassination of the Inca ruler Atawallpa, and the final years of the rebellious, neo-Inca state of the tropical forests of Vilcabamba. They look at weavers, smiths and potters, the sun, moon and the oracles, religion and ideology, herds, metals and mountains of sacrifice, finely fitted stonework to superbly engineered mountain terraces, stunning textiles to brilliant metalworking gold, silver and bronze. The Inca achievement is fully celebrated in this ideal Thames & Hudson softback. 189 illustrations, 49 in colour. 256pp.

Cornwall has had a rich history from the prehistoric period, the Norman Conquest and the turbulent Tudor age, to the Civil War and the First and Second World Wars. The chapters of the book look at different parts of Cornwall: Saltash to Fowey, the Rame Peninsula, Truro, St Austell to Falmouth, Rock to Bude, Hayle to Padstow, Helston to St Ives, and St Keverne to Porthleven. Start your journey at Saltash, the first place people arrive at in Cornwall after crossing a bridge from Devon. Learn how the town grew around its waterfront where the ferry service operated and how, during Henry II's reign, a port was set up at Saltash for the export of tin from local mines. Travel around the coast to Polperro which is a popular holiday spot with original fishermen's houses dating back hundreds of years with a Royal document first recorded in 1303. Find your way to Penzance, the most westerly major town in Cornwall in Mount's Bay, and uncover the earliest signs of a settlement in the area (dating back to the Bronze age) including a spear head, a knife, pins and pottery. Discover Helston where Flora Day takes place annually on 8th May and visitors can take part in the Furry Dance whose origin goes back for hundreds of years. The book celebrates Cornwall's place in literary history from Daphne Du Maurier's books such as Jamaica Inn and Frenchman's Creek to Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse. Places for visitors to see in the region are celebrated, such as the Eden Project, the Tate Gallery in St Ives and Rick Stein's restaurant in Padstow. There are brilliant images included to bring Cornwall to life, from an early view of Porthtowan showing a tin mine on the horizon and a photo of Porth Bridge at Newquay where several prehistoric burial mounds exist in the area, to Marazion Causeway leading to St Michael's Mount and Marazion is one of the oldest chartered towns in Britain. Paperback, black and white images, 152pp.

"And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England's mountains green?" William Blake's "Jerusalem" is a popular national song, performed at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and the opening of the 2012 Olympics. Blake imagines that England is a new Jerusalem visited by characters from the Christian story, and the author of this fascinating book shows how Blake's vision is one of many attempts to provide the majesty of Britain and its empire with a mythical ancestry from ancient times. Brutus of Troy, a survivor of the Trojan War described in Homer's Iliad, was the mythical great-grandson of Aeneas, though the author shows he may also have had his origins in historical figures of the late Roman empire. In the 4th century the historian Eusebius commented that the British were claiming that the biblical Apostles reached British shores, and in the middle ages the myth was used as a charter for English kings to extend their rule across the whole of Britain. In 12th century Britain the myth of Brutus was extremely popular, propagated by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of England, itself derived from the older historian Nennius and what we now know to be the pseudo-histories of Dares and Dictys. In his wanderings after the sack of Troy, Brutus and his followers arrived in England, landing at Totnes where the Brutus Stone is said to be the location of his first footfall on British soil. This classical story became linked with the myth of the wandering tribes of Israel, some of whom ended up in England, providing Queen Victoria with a speculative pedigree tracing her ancestry back to the House of David. The author suggests that a modern newspaper might report the arrival of Brutus as "Italian-born Turk leads Albanian asylum-seekers to Britain". Well researched and fascinating. 237pp, timeline, photos.