From the inimitable and bestselling author Thomas Cahill, another popular history, focusing on the Renaissance and Reformation and how this innovative period changed the Western world.

"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending-a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle Époque Paris, via the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the...

The twentieth century was born not in the trenches of the Somme, but rather in the fifteen years preceding World War I. In this short span of time, a new world order was emerging in ultimately tragic contradiction to the old. The major topics of the day: terrorism, globalization, immigration, consumerism, the collapse of moral values, and the rivalry of superpowers. These were the years in which the political and personal repercussions of the Industrial...

The award-winning author of The Vertigo Years argues that in the aftermath of World War I, Western culture redirected energies into hedonistic, aesthetic and intellectual adventures of self-discovery in ways that triggered world-changing innovations.

"A short collection of brilliant early essays that offers a fascinating context for the Milan Kundera's subsequent career and holds a mirror to much recent European history. It is also remarkably prescient with regard to Russia's current aggression in Ukraine and its threat to the rest of Europe."--Amazon.

"A captivating exploration of how "Western Civilization"--the concept of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times--is a powerful figment of our collective imagination"--

Describes some of the important political and cultural events and well-known people of the Renaissance.