How did "the West" come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by nineteenth-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in The West, his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. "The West" was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders.

Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell met by chance in a Venetian restaurant in September 1962. Prior to this fateful meal, Larissa escaped the siege of Leningrad and lived in the Urals, surrounded by Spanish revolutionaries. She became Keeper of Italian Drawings at the Hermitage and attended the 1962 Venice Biennale, where she stole (“I didn’t steal it. I liberated it”) a Matisse painting. Francis was a historian who never felt safe in England, his own country, and had abandoned hope of falling in love or finding anyone who could love him.

Bestselling historian Professor Frank McDonough tackles the subject in the same way as his brilliantly reviewed and bestselling titles in this series. The penultimate title in the Hitler's Germany series, the book marks the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Nazi regime, offering the listener a sweeping narrative tackling the major characters, significant events of this horrific period of Nazi doctrine formed in their early years of the 1920s, that would evolve into full-blown genocide of a race of people by the end of World War Two.

The Great Heist has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.