Haus Publishing: 189 books

Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924). It is September 1919 - a meeting hall in a small mid-Western city. A thin man is speaking to a sceptical audience about peace. He has already met the city fathers and has been warned that 'out here' what happens in Europe means very little. Even the late war scarcely impinged...

On the face of it, Winston Churchill and Charlie Chaplin—two icons of the twentieth century—couldn’t be more different. One is the grand statesman whose resolve led a nation in the struggle against Nazi Germany, the other the world-famous actor and comedian behind The Great Dictator, whose owns...

Of even greater importance for Hungary's future were the activities of the champions of an independent state of Czechs and Slovaks. Tomas Masaryk, a Czech professor of philosophy and a future leader of his people, was hard at work within a month of the outbreak of war lobbying in Paris and London...

Unscrupulous, devilishly ambitious and undeniably charismatic, Domenico Barbaja was the most celebrated Italian impresario of the early 1800s and one of the most intriguing characters to dominate the operatic empire of the period. Dubbed the "Viceroy of Naples", Barbaja managed both the...

Otto von Bismarck (1815–98) has gone down in history as the Iron Chancellor, a reactionary and militarist whose 1871 unification of Germany set Europe down the path of disaster to World War I. But as Volker Ullrich shows in this new edition of his accessible biography, the real Bismarck was far...

In 2005, a group of actors in Kabul performed Shakespeare's Love’s Labour's Lost to the cheers of Afghan audiences and the raves of foreign journalists. For the first time in years, men and women had appeared onstage together. The future held no limits, the actors believed. In this fast-moving,...

In 2005, everything seemed possible in Afghanistan. The Taliban was gone. A new government had been elected. A cultural renaissance was energizing the country.An actress visiting from Paris casually proposed to some Afghan actors in Kabul: Why not put on a play? The challenges were huge. It had been...

The story of the Indian soldiery in the Great War needs a new telling and one important chapter of it will be about the Maharajah of Bikaner: Dashing, autocratic and a formidable public speaker, Ganga Singh commanded his own camel corps called the Ganga Risala, fought on the Western Front and in Egypt,...

Inspirational partisan leader; doctrinaire communist and yet a thorn in Moscow's side; leading light in the Non Aligned Movement. The break-up of Yugoslavia, the country Tito, the Croat turned Yugoslav had created was inevitable after his death in 1980.

The story of the Arab Revolt and the Hashemite princes who led it during the First World War is inextricably linked in modern eyes to the legend of Lawrence of Arabia as portrayed in David Lean's 1962 film. But behind this romantic image lies a harsher reality of wartime expediency, double-dealing...

World War I sounded the death knell of empires. The forces of disintegration affected several empires simultaneously. To that extent they were impersonal. But prudent statesmen could delay the death of empires, rulers such as Emperor Franz Josef II of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Sultan Abdu'lhamid...

In 2008, Bhutan triumphantly took the stage as the world’s youngest democracy. But despite its growing prominence—and rising scholarly interest in the country—Bhutan remains one of the least studied, and least well-known places on the planet. Karma Phuntsho’s The History of Bhutan is...

Britain's first woman prime minister, friend of Ronald Reagan and the longest serving head of government in the 20th century (1979-90), but also the only one to be removed from office in peacetime by pressure from within her own party

The Silk Road is not a place, but a journey, a route from the edges of the Mediterranean to the central plains of China, through high mountains and inhospitable deserts. For thousands of years its history has been a traveler’s history, of brief encounters in desert towns, snowbound passes and nameless...