(Paperback)

Florence in the fifteenth century was the undisputed centre of the Italian Renaissance.

In this brilliant and absorbing book Vincent Cronin brings vividly to life the people and myriad achievements of this astonishingly fruitful epoch in human history.

(Paperback)

Following the collapse of Medici rule in fifteenth-century Florence, the centre of Renaissance activity moved first to Rome and finally to Venice.

(Paperback)

But the seed was sown and the crop, even after almost a century of atheistic communism, continues to grow in present-day China.

This story of the first fully documented contact between West and East offers a fascinating insight into the history of ideas during one of the most fertile eras in European and Chinese history.

(Paperback)

Yet this woman, who at the age of 33, after 17 years of unhappy marriage, placed her deposed and murdered husband's crown on her own head, had begun life as an insignificant German princess.

(Paperback)

First published 25 years ago, this biography of the Sun King uses contemporary sources to examine what sort of monarch Louis XIV really was.