Pocket Essentials imprint: 60 books

Situated at the crossroads of three continents, the Middle East has confounded the ambition of conquerors and peacemakers alike. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all had their genesis in the region but with them came not just civilization and religion but also some of the great struggles of history....

The world's largest democracy and second-most populous country, 21st-century India is a dynamic nation with a thrivting economy, made up of a variety of beliefs and peoples united under one flag. Ancient India was home to myriad kingdoms with boundaries that were ever changing while a variety of cultures...

Host of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, the fifth largest country in the world is the perfect topic for the next title in the Short History seriesDiscovered by Portuguese sailor and explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral more than 500 years ago, Brazil's history since then has been turbulent,...

An absorbing history, bringing explorers' tales vividly to life  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men who went to Antarctica with Captain Scott, said "Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time that has ever been devised." Yet there has never...

The Black Death is the name most commonly given to the pandemic of bubonic plague that ravaged the medieval world in the late 1340s. From Central Asia, the plague swept through Europe, leaving millions of dead in its wake. Between a quarter and a third of Europe's population died, and in England the...

Fragments of the rich and complex mythology of the ancient Celts of pre-Roman Europe were preserved in the monasteries of early Christian Ireland and in stories first written down in medieval Wales. The exploits of Cúlchulainn and Fionn mac Cumhaill and of Deirdre and Rhiannon have their roots in...

With the recent successes of Robert Downey, Jr. on the big screen and Benedict Cumberbatch on TV, the popularity of Sherlock Holmes is riding high and here is the essential guideWho is Holmes? The world's most famous detective, a drug addict with a heart as cold as ice, or a millstone around the...

An informative, lively guide through the rich mythology of Robin Hood, across all mediumsEveryone knows the story of England's greatest folk hero, the outlaw who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. This highly entertaining book begins with the search for the historical Robin, looking at...

Offering profiles of principal stars such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, and Brigitte Bardot as well as reviews and analysis of all the major films in the movement, this is the perfect primer to the group of French filmmakers who have become synonymous with effortless style and urban cool The...

Conspiracy theories are all here, but not just lined up to be ridiculed and dismissed. For among the absurd conspiracy theories currently proliferating on the internet, there are nuggets of real research about real conspiracies waiting to be mined. Fully sourced and referenced, this book is a serious examination of a fascinating phenomenon.

A concise, accessible history of one of the most important and fascinating conflicts of the 20th centuryOn March 8, 1965, 3,500 U.S. Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade made an amphibious landing at Da Nang on the south central coast of South Vietnam, marking the beginning of a conflict...

Inspired by internet video shorts and the YouTube revolution? Trying to break into the film industry? You can prove yourself by making a great short film at film school—if you can afford to go to film school; if you can't, then you're going to have to make your films without money. You're going...

For more than 2,000 years utopian visionaries have sought to create a blueprint of the ideal society—from Plato to H. G. Wells, from Cloudcuckooland to Shangri-La. The utopian impulse has generated a vast body of work, encompassing philosophy and political theory, classical literature, and science...

Gnosticism is the name given to various religious schools that proliferated in the first centuries after Christ, nearly becoming the dominant form of Christianity, but was eventually branded as heretical by the emerging Christian church. The long and diverse history of Gnosticism is recounted here,...