With the aid of Leonardo da Vinci's note books, as well as a wide variety of sources, this biography covers the full life of the great Renaissance painter and architect. It is an account of Leonardo, both as an artist and as an individual. The book charts the artist's family background, childhood and apprenticeship, successes and failures, patronage, travels, interests and friendships.

From the #1 bestselling author in France. Fred Vargas's books have been published in forty countries and over 10 million copies sold.
Three wounds in a perfectly straight line was the bloody signature that marked victims from every corner of France who had been murdered over the course of thirty years. Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, the chief of police in Paris's 7th Arrondissement, is deeply and personally familiar with the case, and though others were always framed and convicted for these crimes, including his own brother, the Commissaire knows the true identity of the...

This text challenges a prevailing assumption that women had little influence or power in France during the interwar period. Sian Reynolds shows how women in fact had both autonomy and authority within the political arena through their activities in social work, peace movements and strikes, and in other areas less directly linked with conventional politics. Sian Reynolds brings together two kinds of history: the political history of France between the wars as it appears in general textbooks, and the work carried out in women's history covering the same period. In doing so she creates a history...

This text challenges a prevailing assumption that women had little influence or power in France during the interwar period. Sian Reynolds shows how women in fact had both autonomy and authority within the political arena through their activities in social work, peace movements and strikes, and in other areas less directly linked with conventional politics. Sian Reynolds brings together two kinds of history: the political history of France between the wars as it appears in general textbooks, and the work carried out in women's history covering the same period. In doing so she creates a history...

By examining in detail the material life of pre-industrial peoples around the world, Fernand Braudel significantly changed the way historians view their subject. Volume I describes food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and the growth of towns.

The subject of The Wheels of Commerce is the development of mechanisms of exchange--shops, markets, trade networks, and banking--in the pre-industrial stages of capitalism.

Volume III investigates what Braudel terms "world-economies"the economic dominance of a particular city at different periods of history, from Venice to Amsterdam, London, New York."

A chilling new mystery from France's #1 bestselling writer
Twice awarded the International Dagger by the Crime Writers' Association, Fred Vargas has earned a reputation in Europe as a mystery author of the first order. In This Night's Foul Work, the intuitive Commissaire Adamsberg teams up with Dr. Ariane, a pathologist with whom he crossed paths twenty years ago, to unravel a beguiling mystery that begins with the discovery of two bodies in Paris's Porte de la Chapelle. Adamsberg believes it may be the work of a killer with split personalities, who is choosing his or her...

Marriage and Revolution is a double biography of Jean-Marie Roland (1734-1793) and Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, later Madame Roland (1754-1793), leading figures in the French Revolution. J.-M. Roland was minister of the Interior for a total of eight months during 1792. The couple were close to Brissot and the Girondins, and both died during the Terror. Mme Roland became famous for her posthumous prison memoirs and is the subject of many biographies, but her husband, despite being a key figure in administration of France, seldom out of the limelight during his time in office, is often marginalized in...