Books published by Vintage

In late June 1942, the dispirited and defeated British Eighth Army was pouring back towards the tiny railway halt of El Alamein in the western desert of Egypt.

The refinement of radiocarbon dating using the information form tree-ring counts has raised serious doubts about the accepted theoretical frameowkr of European prehistory.

The analysis of Nazism explores the emotionally powerful combination of tribalism and belief which enabled people to commit acts otherwise unimaginable. Drawing on accounts of participants, victims and observers, Jonathan Glover shows that different atrocities have common patterns which suggest weak points in our psychology.

This brilliant and ambitious book is an account of the events that made our world the place it is - geologically, climatically and ecologically - and a call for a new way of thinking about history. ' The proper sense of time, he argues, is one that allows us to appreciate the world and see what we are doing to it.

In this fascinating book, Clive Ponting separates the myths from the reality, and tells the true story of the heroism of the ordinary soldiers, often through eye-witness accounts of the men who fought and those who survived the terrible winter of 1854-55.

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation and concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire and the expansion of Europe. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations and social and economic change.

Starting out as a backing group for Ronnie Hawkins, before being propelled on to the world stage by Bob Dylan, The Band literally changed the course of music with their first two albums.

A second view holds that globalisation has a long history that can be traced back to the nineteenth century, if not earlier. First, it offers a categorisation of types and stages of globalisation that existed before the late twentieth century, No such taxonomy exists at present.

In this sequel to The Flame of Thika, Elspeth Huxley takes up her story after the family returns to Kenya after the First World War. ' The Times 'What a marvellous writer. ' Financial Times

it brings to life the petty jealousies that formed an integral part of both the building world and scientific milieu of the Royal Society. Above all, His Invention So Fertile makes clear to the general reader and the art historian just why Wren remains a cultural icon - both a creation and a creator of the world he lived in.

Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and Gottingen. When, in 1933 Jews were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his job and looked for employment in England.

His interpretation also rejects the thesis that Europe in 1914 had reached such a boiling point that war was bound to erupt and the theory that the origins of the War lay in a mighty arms race. By the end of the War, three great European empires - Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia - had disintegrated.

William Graves conveys the texture of life in Majorca, where he lived from the age of five in the household of his father, the poet Robert Graves. The book is also a portrait of Robert Graves, his "Muses" and his entourage, and a study of how the son of a famous father finds his own identity.

This illuminating collection of essays assesses the seventeenth century, interpreting what used to be called 'The Puritan Revolution', the ideas which helped to produce it and resulted from it, and the relation between these ideas and the political and economic events of the day.

By using different ways of describing the world of scientific endeavour, the author has produced a fascinating visually beautiful and highly entertaining book which allows us to witness the birth of a new science - the science of geology.

Finally reaching an uninhabited island, Shackleton, Worsley and four others sailed eight hundred miles in a small boat to the island of South Georgia, an astounding feat of navigation and courage.

In a series of long essays, James Wood examines the connection between literature and religious belief, in a startlingly wide group of writers.

A comprehensive study of Clausewitz's "On War", first published in 1832 and regarded as a classic study of the nature and conditions of warfare. Heuser shows how to read Clausewitz as well as how others have read him - from the military commanders of World War I to strategists in the nuclear age.

Oxfordshire, a land-locked county, is rich in geology, varied in landscape, steeped in history. With an area of 1, 007 square miles, a population of 560, 000 and towns such as Oxford, Abingdon, Banbury, Henley, Witney and Woodstock, Oxfordshire is one of the most literate - and visited counties in Britain.

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action.

In this ground-breaking book, Professor Norman Cohn traces popular beliefs about witches to their origins. He examines the fantasies that inspired the great European witch-hunt of the 16th and 17th centuries when thousands of innocent people were tortured and burned alive.

Nine Suitcases is a horror story but, sadly, a true one. Zsolt was both an accomplished novelist and a highly skilled journalist. He reports and analysizes the appalling events, almost immediately after they occurred, with exceptional freshness and a devastating blend of angry despair and cool detachment.

A renowned politician, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster and gardener, his position in society and politics allowed him an insight into the most dramatic events of British, indeed world, history. Nicolson's personal life was no less dramatic.

This is the story of London at war - or, perhaps, of Londoners at war, for Philip Ziegler, known best as a biographer, is above all fascinated by the people who found their lives so suddenly and violently transformed: the querulous, tiresome yet strangely gallant housewife from West Hampstead;

The siege of Venice, in 1848, is one of history's most thrilling and tragic episodes. Focusing on it, this book presents a story that embraces the wider world of the revolutionary Italy of Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Pope Pius IX, its battles, its dreams, and its wild zigzags between hope and despair.

Meanwhile a smaller group - the Ross Sea party, led by the impetuous one-eyed captain Aeneas Mackintosh and the hard-headed Ernest Joyce - went before them and landed on the opposite side of the continent.

In April 1478, a plot to murder the two heads of the powerful Medici family dramatically miscarried.

Badly wounded at the battle of Arnhem, and then spirited from his hospital bed by the Dutch Resistance, Brigadier John Hackett spent the winter of 1944 in Nazi-occupied Holland, hidden by a Dutch family, at great risk to their own lives, in a house a stone's throw from a German military police billet.