1938. Eighteen-year-old Sidney Chambers is dancing with Amanda Kendall at her brother’s birthday party at the Caledonian Club. No one can believe that there could ever be...

1894. A well-respected academic is found dead in a gentlemen’s convenience cubicle at the British Museum, the stall locked from the inside. Professor Lance Pickering had been...

Charged with treason under Theodoric the Great in sixth-century Rome, Boethius served one year’s imprisonment, awaiting trial and eventual execution. During this time, he wrote...

Intended to be a defense of the Christian religion, Pensées is a penetrating collection of thoughts on faith, reason and theology. Unfinished at the time of Pascal’s death, the...

The Story of My Life is the explosive and exhilarating autobiography by the infamous libertine Giacomo Casanova. Intense and scandalous, Casanova’s extraordinary adventures take...

Cambridge, 1939. The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout—The Great Darkness—covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector...

Born out of the political turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan stands out as one of the most in influential political and philosophical texts of the seventeenth century. It...

1796. Pearce and his wife Emily are in living in Bath when Minister of War Henry Dundas turns up and suggests a second mission to the Vendée, this time as a liaison between the...

John Pearce, having negotiated the highly questionable sale of the two French prizes taken in The Devil to Pay, has left HMS Flirt, as well as the crew and the wounded Henry Digby...

It was Adam Smith (1723–1790) who first established economics as a separate branch of knowledge, and many would say his work has never been surpassed. The Wealth of Nations,...