Ranging from the Peloponnesian war, to Trafalgar and Gettysburg, to the War in Iraq, this exciting book tells the stories of the most dramatic, memorable, and important conflicts in world history. This superb, one-volume reference describes almost 300 battles from around the world–from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, as well as from Europe and the Americas. All the battles are grouped in chapters which tell the wider story of a particular era or region, whether it be the ancient world or Asia and the Middle East. Each chapter includes an introduction that sets out the historical, tactical, and technological context, and looks at current debates among military historians. In addition, individual battles are placed within the wars of which they formed a part, allowing readers understand a battle’s full military and historical significance. With detailed maps, a wide range of illustrations, and an extensive index, this book offers a gold mine of information for everyone interested in world or military history.

Christianity, one of the world’s great religions, has had an incalculable impact on human history. This book, now the most comprehensive and up to date single volume work in English, describes not only the main ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics and human society. Diarmaid MacCulloch ranges from Palestine in the first century to India in the third, from Damascus to China in the seventh century and from San Francisco to Korea in the twentieth. He is one of the most widely travelled of Christian historians and conveys a sense of place as arrestingly as he does the power of ideas. He presents the development of Christian history differently from any of his predecessors. He shows how, after a semblance of unity in its earliest centuries, the Christian church divided during the next 1400 years into three increasingly distanced parts, of which the western Church was by no means always the most important: he observ