Penguin Books Australia

In the early nineteenth century China remained almost untouched by Britain and other European powers - ferocious laws forbade all trade with the West outside one tiny area of Canton. Anyone teaching a European to speak Chinese could be executed. But as new technology began to unbalance the relationship, foreigners gathered like wolves around the weakening Qing Empire. China should be opened, they believed...

Beyond Human Nature is a book about us all - and how we all live our lives, differently.

By looking back at seventy years of Penguin...

Winston Churchill told the House of Commons in 1940, 'During the first four years of the last war the Allies experienced nothing but disaster and disappointment. That was our constant fear: one blow after another, terrible losses, frightful dangers . . . we repeatedly asked ourselves the question: How are we going to win?'.

Food, and in particular the lack of it, was central to the experience of the Second World War.

Living with people who differ - racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically - is one of the most urgent challenges facing civil society today.  Though our society is becoming ever more complicated materially, we tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves.  Modern politics emphasizes unity and similarity, encouraging the politics of the tribe rather than of complexity...

To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world.  At every level from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a 'classical Europe', using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures.

For over two hundred years we have lived in a western-made world, one where the very notion of being modern was synonymous with being western. This original and ground-breaking new book argues that the twenty-first century will be different. With the rise of increasingly powerful non-Western countries, the west will no longer be dominant and there will be many ways of being modern. In this new era...

Old ways of thought permitted no process such as science for correcting errors and misconceptions. So ideas were static for long periods. Being bad explanations, even the best of them typically had little reach and were therefore brittle and unreliable beyond, and often within, their traditional applications. When ideas did change, it was seldom for the better, and when it did happen to be...

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio lived the darkest and most dangerous life of any of the great painters. The worlds of Milan, Rome and Naples through which Caravaggio moved and which Andrew Graham-Dixon describes brilliantly in this book, are those of cardinals and whores, prayer and violence. The patrons of the church competed to have the leading artists of the day in their households, and the artists...

The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women and children have sought their fortunes in every conceivable walk of life and in every imaginable climate. All over the British Empire, the United States and elsewhere, the Scottish contribution to the development of the modern world has been a formidable one, from finance to industry, philosophy...

In these wonderfully stylish and eclectic essays, Charles Nicholl pursues the fugitive traces of the past with the skill and relish that have earned him a reputation as one of the finest literary and historical detectives of our time.  

His subjects range from a murder-case in Renaissance Rome to the disappearance of Jim Thompson in 1960s Malaya, from the boyhood of Christopher Marlowe to the...

For centuries states have used their power to censor information, to conduct surveillance, to impose belief, to manipulate and to punish. Cullen Murphy's extraordinary, provocative new book explores the idea that the Inquisition - the Catholic body that existed in Europe and beyond for over 700 years - is not a medieval oddity, but is intrinsically bound up with the creation of the modern world.

Downloads, CDs and DVD mean it is possible to listen to hundreds of thousands of classical recordings today - but  how do you pick your way through the staggering array of music now on offer?

We live in a golden age for classical music. Never before has it been possible to access such a staggering array of performances. Through downloads, CDs and DVD listeners can access music from the medieval period to the modern, played by groups and individuals from around the world, and recorded at any point since the invention of recording itself.

'If you want to understand how we remember, and how we can all learn to remember better, then read this book'  Jonah Lehrer 

Can anyone get a perfect memory? Joshua Foer used to be like most of us, forgetting phone numbers and mislaying keys. Then he learnt the art of memory training, and a year later found himself in the finals of the US Memory Championship. He also discovered a truth we...

In  Private Empire, Steve Coll investigates the notoriously secretive  ExxonMobil Corporation, revealing the true extent of the power wielded by a  company whose annual revenues are larger than the total economic activity in  most countries. In many of the nations where it operates, ExxonMobil has a  greater sway than that of the US embassy, and in Washington it spends more...