Product Description: Shakespeare never set a play in his own Elizabethan London. From the castle in Elsinore where Hamlet avenges his father’s death to Cleopatra’s Alexandria at the height of the Roman Empire to the seaport town in Cyprus where we await the arrival of Othello, each of Shakespeare’s plays is set in a time or space remote from his primary audience...read more

Product Description: Artists have been drawn to the plays of Shakespeare for more than three centuries. For the artist, the challenge was to re-create the characters and the drama not on the living stage, but to freeze them into images that were timeless, and not bound within the walls of a theater...read more

Product Description: Taking the form of fact-filled travelogues, stunt-writing spectaculars, or genre-blurring imaginative works, travel writing has never been more popular than it is today. But beyond the self-conscious literary artistry of today’s narratives lies a rich and well-documented history of travel writing, stretching back over several thousand years and incorporating the work of mariners and missionaries, diplomats and dilettantes alike...read more

Product Description: Though technology has changed the tools of navigation available to us, maps are still the irreplaceable foundation of place and orientation. In this updated edition of Image of the World, map expert Peter Whitfield guides readers through a collection of some of the most extraordinary examples of maps—both visually stunning and historically revealing...read more

Product Description: The fifth in the new Naxos Audiobooks series In a Nutshell, The Renaissance is a short and accessible introduction to the era that gave us Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Palestrina. The Renaissance swept across Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, heralding intellectual revolutions in science, art, philosophy and politics, and marking a decisive shift towards modern thinking...read more

Like all the great historic cities of Europe, London appears to us solid and unchanging. It has been renewing or replacing the streets and buildings at its heart and has been spreading inexorably outwards. This book illustrates this process by maps of London. Approximately, 200 maps from the mid-sixteenth century are discussed.

Product Description: Francis Drake assured his place in history when, in his lone ship the Golden Hind, he sailed the Pacific to become the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. Drake the man, however, is the enigma and relatively little is known about him personally and what motivated him...read more