Drinking Matters offers the first comparative survey of early modern public houses. A combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis weaves written, visual and material evidence into a reconstruction of their unique contribution to European culture. Extrapolating from the heterogeneous case studies of Bern and Bavaria, the argument stresses the bewildering versatility of drinking establishments. Public houses emerge as communication spaces in a state of continuous renegotiation. As facilitators of infinite forms of human exchange, they supported rulers as easily as rebels. 'Innovative' principles like consumer choice did not need to be invented by the modern restaurant, they characterized the trade from its medieval origins. Local cultural life depended on inns just as much as the early modern communication revolution. Within a communal infrastructure featuring town halls, market squares and parish churches, public houses became the principal social sites in preindustrial Europe. After about 1800, processes of fragmentation and diversification ended their golden age.

At the heart of relativity theory, quantum mechanics, string theory, and much of modern cosmology lies one concept: symmetry. In Why Beauty Is Truth, world-famous mathematician Ian Stewart narrates the history of the emergence of this remarkable area of study.

No Longer Poetry is a groundbreaking new anthology of Romanian poetry that presents each poet’s work in the original Romanian and translated into English by the collection’s editors.  Since the fall of communism in 1989 Romanian poetry has underdone dramatic changes as writers struggled to reorient themselves and their work in a country where poetry was perceived as a product of the old world. This anthology contains the work of eleven poets from the core of the first post-Communism generation, and showcases their powerful new voices that affirm a very different kind of literary conscience to that of their predecessors.

Engendering whiteness represents a comparative analysis of the complex interweaving of race, gender, social class and sexuality in defining the contours of white women's lives in Barbados and North Carolina during the era of slavery. Despite their gendered subordination, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women a range of privileges. Hence, their whiteness, as much as their gender, shaped these women's social identities and material realities.

The Oxford Companion to Black British History is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the long and fascinating history of black people in the British Isles:

from African auxiliaries stationed on Hadrian's Wall in the 2nd century AD, through John Edmonstone, who taught taxidermy to Charles Darwin, Mary Seacole, the 'Black Florence Nightingale', and Walter Tull, footballer and First World War officer, to our own day.

It considers such key concepts as Emancipation and Reparations.