Bøger udgivet af Pegasus Books

The French Revolution casts a long shadow, one that reaches into our own time and influences our debates on freedom, equality, and authority. Yet it remains an elusive, perplexing historical event. Its significance morphs according to the sympathies of the viewer, who may see it as a series of gory tableaux, a regrettable slide into uncontrolled anarchy—or a radical reshaping of the political landscape.In this riveting new book, Ian Davidson provides a fresh look at this vital moment in European history. He reveals how it was an immensely complicated and multifaceted revolution, taking place in different places, at different times, and in different spheres; and how subsequently it became weighted with political, social, and moral values. Stirring and dramatic—and filled with the larger-than-life players of the period and evoking the turbulence of this colorful time—this is narrative history at its finest.

"In 1187 Jerusalem, the holy city held by Christians for four generations and the prize of the First Crusade, fell to Saladin after a short siege. The Christians within were outnumbered ten to one, and yet the city held out long enough for favourable terms to be negotiated. The population was spared. The city was defended by a woman: Sibylla, Queen of Jerusalem. The Holy City had been lost, but the Christians maintained their footholds in the Middle East for another century. This region became known in Europe simply as Outremer, 'overseas'. Steeped in biblical wonder and the glamour of exoticism, Outremer has inspired generations of historians from antiquity to the modern day. Missing from both medieval and modern histories of the Outremer is the voice of the women of the kingdom. The stories of the queens and princesses who ruled and rebelled in this volatile region have all but been written out of the historical record. Even the women who carried water on to the battlefields, and were struck down with arrows as they toiled beneath the walls of besieged cities during the First Crusade, have had their roles omitted from the majority of the chronicles. The queens who defended their cities against Muslim besiegers, negotiated with Saladin, and ruled with 'unusual wisdom' similarly have seen their deeds overlooked. William of Tyre, the key historian for this period, gives a sympathetic portrayal of just one queen, and writes off the rest as manipulative harridans, or barely worth the words. He devotes the fewest possible pages in his hefty chronicle to the deeds of women, when indeed women played a key role in both the crusades themselves and the foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. There is a trend for male chroniclers of the crusades to concern themselves with the deeds of men, and this has carried over to much modern scholarship too. Kate Lombard's book intends to address the imbalance by shedding light on the deeds of some of the most daring, devious and devoted women that history has witnessed. She explores the lives of the female rulers of Outremer from the year 1095 to the fall of Jerusalem in 1187. The primary subjects are Morphia of Melitene, Melisende of Jerusalem, her rebellious sister Alice, her shrewd daughter Constance of Antioch and finally Sibylla of Jerusalem and her domineering mother Agnes of Courtenay, the women who presided over the collapse of the kingdom. Eleanor of Aquitaine is also a key figure, owing to her journey east with the Second Crusade and the love triangle that developed between her, Constance and Constance's husband Raymond of Antioch (Eleanor's own uncle). Queens of Jerusalem explores the role women played in the governing of the Middle East during periods of intense instability, and how they persevered to rule and seize greater power for themselves when the opportunity presented itself."--

An authoritative and rich history of the remarkable Xiongnu culture—a lost empire which preceded the Mongols and even China itself.The author of landmark histories such as Genghis Khan, Attila, and Xanadu invites us to discover a fertile period in Asian history that prefigured so much of the world that followed. The people of the first nomadic empire left no written records, but from 200 bc they dominated the heart of Asia for four centuries, and changed the world in the process. The Mongols, today’s descendants of Genghis Khan, see these people as ancestors. Their rise cemented Chinese identity and inspired the first Great Wall. Their descendants helped destroy the Roman Empire under the leadership of Attila the Hun. We don’t know what language they spoke, but they became known as Xiongnu, or Hunnu, a term passed down the centuries and surviving today as "Hun," and Man uncovers new evidence that will transform our understanding of the profound mark they left on half the globe, from Europe to Central Asia and deep into China. Based on meticulous research and new archaeological evidence, Empire of Horses traces this civilization’s epic story and shows how this nomadic cultures of the steppes gave birth to an empire with the wealth and power to threaten the order of the ancient world.

This gripping memoir by the world’s foremost marine geologist is an enthralling blend of maritime history, popular science, and Clive Cussler–style adventure.David L. Mearns has discovered some of the world’s most fascinating and elusive shipwrecks. From the mighty battleship HMS Hood (sunk in a pyrrhic duel with the Bismarck) to solving the mystery of HMAS Sydney, to the crumbling wooden skeletons of Vasco da Gama’s sixteenth century fleet, Mearns has searched for and found dozens of sunken vessels in every ocean of the world. The Shipwreck Hunter chronicles his most intriguing finds. It describes the extraordinary techniques used, the detailed research and mid-ocean stamina (and courage) required to find a wreck thousands of feet beneath the sea, as well as the moving human stories that lie behind each of these oceanic tragedies. Combining the adventuring derring-do of Indiana Jones with the precision of a scientist, The Shipwreck Hunter opens an illuminating porthole into the shadowy depths of the ocean.

Agatha Christie was not only the most successful author of detective stories the world has ever known, she was also a mystery in herself, giving only the rarest interviews-declining absolutely to become any sort of public figure-and a mystery, too, in the manner in which she achieved her astonishing success. Distinguished crime novelist (and acclaimed critic) H. R. F. Keating brings together a dozen noted writers from both sides of the Atlantic to throw light on the ever-intriguing Dame Agatha. Some essays analyze Christie's art itself; some explain the reasons for her success-not just the books, but also in film and theatre. The myriad of critical angles explored here are penetrating, affectionate, enthusiastic, analytical, and even funny. Together, they give an almost unique insight into the life and work of the First Lady of Crime. Includes essays by Sophie Hannah, H. R. F. Keating, Elizabeth Walter, Julian Symons, Edmund Crispin, Michael Gilbert, Emma Lathen, Colin Watson, Celia Fremlin, Dorothy B. Hughes, J. C. Trewin, Philip Jenkinson, William Weaver, and Christianna Brand.

A magical place, a lost history: Trochenbrod, the setting for Everything is Illuminated, is now rediscovered for a new generation.

Eight bestselling, award-winning writers return to the time-honoured tradition of the seasonal ghost story in this spellbinding collection of new and original haunted tales.Long before Charles Dickens and Henry James popularized the tradition of supernatural horror, the shadowy nights of winter have been a time for people to gather together by the flicker of candlelight and experience the intoxicating thrill of a spooky tale. Now eight bestselling, award-winning authors-all of them master storytellers of the sinister and the macabre-bring the tradition to vivid life in a spellbinding new collection of original spine-tingling tales. Taking you from the frosty fens of the English countryside, to the snow-covered grounds of a haunted estate, to a bustling London Christmas market, these mesmerizing stories will capture your imagination and serve as your indispensable companion to cold, dark nights. So curl up, light a candle, and fall under the ghostly spell of winters past . . .

**One of Bill Gates' Top Five Book Recommendations** In 1869 Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev was puzzling over a way to bring order to the fledgling science of chemistry. Wearied by the effort, he fell asleep at his desk. What he dreamed would fundamentally change the way we see the world.Framing this history is the life story of the nineteenth-century Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who fell asleep at his desk and awoke after conceiving the periodic table in a dream-the template upon which modern chemistry is founded and the formulation of which marked chemistry's coming of age as a science. From ancient philosophy through medieval alchemy to the splitting of the atom, this is the true story of the birth of chemistry and the role of one man's dream.In this elegant, erudite, and entertaining book, Paul Strathern unravels the quixotic history of chemistry through the quest for the elements.

"Calorie information is ubiquitous. On packaged food, restaurant menus, and online recipes we see authoritative numbers that tell us the calorie count of what we're about to consume. And we treat these numbers as gospel-counting, cutting, intermittently consuming and, if you believe some 'experts' out there, magically making them disappear. We all know, and governments advise, that losing weight is just a matter of burning more calories than we consume. But it's actually all wrong. In Why Calories Don't Count, Dr. Giles Yeo, an obesity researcher at Cambridge University, challenges the conventional model and demonstrates that all calories are not created equal. He addresses why popular diets succeed, at least in the short term, and why they ultimately fail, and what your environment has to do with your bodyweight. Once you understand that calories don't count, you can begin to make different decisions about how you choose to eat, learning what you really need to be counting instead. Practical, science-based and full of illuminating anecdotes, this is the most entertaining dietary advice you'll ever read"--

In her own time, she was recognized as a woman of unparalleled power. Beautiful and intelligent, she was portrayed as alternately a ruthless murderer and helpless victim, the most loving mother and the most powerful woman of the Roman empire, using sex, motherhood, manipulation, and violence to get her way, and single-minded in her pursuit of power for herself and her son, Nero.This book follows Agrippina as a daughter, born in Cologne, to the expected heir to Augustus's throne; as a sister to Caligula who raped his sisters and showered them with honors until they attempted rebellion against him and were exiled; as a seductive niece and then wife to Claudius who gave her access to near unlimited power; and then as a mother to Nero-who adored her until he had her assassinated.Through senatorial political intrigue, assassination attempts, and exile to a small island, to the heights of imperial power, thrones, and golden cloaks and games and adoration, Agrippina scaled the absolute limits of female power in Rome. Her biography is also the story of the first Roman imperial family-the Julio-Claudians-and of the glory and corruption of the empire itself.

A powerful and sweeping novel set over two tumultuous decades in Iraq from the National Book Award-nominated author of The Beekeeper. Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.

A haunting story of love, art, and betrayal, set against the heart-pounding backdrop of Antarctic explorationfrom the Boston Globe-bestselling author of The Clover House.The year is 1910, and two Antarctic explorers, Watts and Heywoud, are racing to the South Pole. Back in London, Viola, a photo-journalist, harbors love for them both. In Terra Nova, Henriette Lazaridis seamlessly ushers the reader back and forth between the austere, forbidding, yet intoxicating polar landscape of Antarctica to the bustle of early twentieth century London. Though anxious for both men, Viola has little time to pine. She is photographing hunger strikers in the suffrage movement, capturing the female nude in challenging and politically powerful ways. As she comes into her own as an artist, shes eager for recognition and to fulfill her ambitions. And then the men return, eager to share news of their triumph. But in her darkroom, Viola discovers a lie. Watts and Heywoud have doctored their photos of the Pole to fake their success. Viola must now decide whether to betray her husband and her lover, or keep their secret and use their fame to help her pursue her artistic ambitions. Rich and moving, Terra Nova is a novel that challenges us to consider how love and lies, adventure and art, can intersect.

An exploration of humanity's relationship with ice since the dawn of civilization, Of Ice and Men reminds us that only by understanding this unique substance can we save the ice on our planetand perhaps ourselves.Ice tells a story. It writes it in rock. It lays it down, snowfall by snowfall at the ends of the earth where we may read it like the rings on a tree. It tells our planet's geological and climatological tale. Ice tells another story too: a story about us. It is a tale packed with swash-buckling adventure and improbable invention, peopled with driven, eccentric, often brilliant characters. It tells how our species has used ice to reshape the world according to our needs and our desires: how we have survived it, harvested it, traded it, bent science to our will to make itand how in doing so we have created globe-spanning infrastructures that are entirely dependent upon it. And even after we have done all that, we take ice so much for granted that we barely notice it. Ice has supercharged the modern world. It has allowed us to feed ourselves and cure ourselves in ways unimaginable two hundred years ago. It has enabled the global population to rise from less than 1 billion to nearly 71/2 billionwhich just happens to cover the same period of time as humanity has harvested, manufactured, and distributed ice on an industrial scale. And yet the roots of our fascination with ice and its properties run much deeper than the recent past.

** A Massachusetts Book Award "Fiction Honor" ** An unforgettable story about the triumphs and travails of a woman unwilling to play by the rules, based on the remarkable life of pioneering feminist and abolitionist Lucy Stone.

The incredible story of the creation of a continentour continent from the acclaimed author of The Last Volcano and Mask of the Sun.The immense scale of geologic time is difficult to comprehend. Our livesand the entirety of human historyare mere nanoseconds on this timescale. Yet we hugely influenced by the land we live on. From shales and fossil fuels, from lake beds to soil composition, from elevation to fault lines, what could be more relevant that the history of the ground beneath our feet? For most of modern history, geologists could say little more about why mountains grew than the obvious: there were forces acting inside the Earth that caused mountains to rise. But what were those forces? And why did they act in some places of the planet and not at others? When the theory of plate tectonics was proposed, our concept of how the Earth worked experienced a momentous shift. As the Andes continue to rise, the Atlantic Ocean steadily widens, and Honolulu creeps ever closer to Tokyo, this seemingly imperceptible creep of the Earth is revealed in the landscape all around us. But tectonics cannotand do notexplain everything about the wonders of the North American landscape. What about the Black Hills? Or the walls of chalk that stand amongst the rolling hills of west Kansas? Or the fact that the states of Washington and Oregon are slowly rotating clockwise, and there a diamond mine in Arizona? It all points to the geologic secrets hidden inside the 2-billion-year-old-continental masses. A whopping ten times older than the rocky floors of the ocean, continents hold the clues to the long history of our planet. With a sprightly narrative that vividly brings this science to life, John Dvoraks How the Mountains Grew will fill readers with a newfound appreciation for the wonders of the land we live on.

A sweeping and original history of the Anglo-Saxons by national bestselling author Marc Morris.Sixteen hundred years ago Britain left the Roman Empire and swiftly fell into ruin. Grand cities and luxurious villas were deserted and left to crumble, and civil society collapsed into chaos. Into this violent and unstable world came foreign invaders from across the sea, and established themselves as its new masters. The Anglo-Saxons traces the turbulent history of these people across the next six centuries. It explains how their earliest rulers fought relentlessly against each other for glory and supremacy, and then were almost destroyed by the onslaught of the vikings. It explores how they abandoned their old gods for Christianity, established hundreds of churches and created dazzlingly intricate works of art. It charts the revival of towns and trade, and the origins of a familiar landscape of shires, boroughs and bishoprics. It is a tale of famous figures like King Offa, Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor, but also features a host of lesser known characters - ambitious queens, revolutionary saints, intolerant monks and grasping nobles. Through their remarkable careers we see how a new society, a new culture and a single unified nation came into being. Drawing on a vast range of original evidence - chronicles, letters, archaeology and artefacts - renowned historian Marc Morris illuminates a period of history that is only dimly understood, separates the truth from the legend, and tells the extraordinary story of how the foundations of England were laid.

Bringing Sherlock Holmes from the Victorian Era into the dark days of World War II, this imaginative new thriller confronts the world’s greatest detective with a killer emulating the murders of Jack the Ripper.London, 1942. A killer going by the name of “Crimson Jack” is stalking the wartime streets of London, murdering women on the exact dates of the infamous Jack the Ripper killings of 1888. Has the Ripper somehow returned from the grave? Is the self-styled Crimson Jack a descendant of the original Jack—or merely a madman obsessed with those notorious killings? In desperation Scotland Yard turn to Sherlock Holmes, the world's greatest detective. Surely he is the one man who can sift fact from legend to track down Crimson Jack before he completes his tally of death. As Holmes and the faithful Watson tread the blacked out streets of London, death waits just around the corner. Inspired by the classic film series from Universal Pictures starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, which took Sherlock Holmes to the 1940s, this is a brand-new adventure from a talented author who brilliantly evokes one of mystery fiction’s most popular characters.