Titres dans De l’Ouest

Award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has drawn enthusiastic praise for his books, which are sharply-focused studies as well as glorious celebrations of their subjects. In The Basque History of the World, he turns his eye toward Europe’s oldest surviving culture - a culture as mysterious as it is fascinating. Settled in the western Pyrenees Mountains of France and Spain, the Basque nation is not drawn on maps and the origin of their forbidden language has never been discovered.

De l'émergence d'homo sapiens à nos jours, cette brève histoire de l'humanité est délibérément tournée vers l'intelligence du monde tel qu'il se recompose sous nos yeux. Or, c'est dans les profondeurs les moins conscientes de la vie sociale, celles auxquelles Emmanuel Todd a consacré sa vie de chercheur, que gît l'explication de ce qui nous apparaît aujourd'hui comme le grand désordre du monde.

Founded by Alexander the Great and built by self-styled Greek pharaohs, the city of Alexandria at its height dwarfed both Athens and Rome. It was the marvel of its age, legendary for its vast palaces, safe harbors, and magnificent lighthouse. But it was most famous for the astonishing intellectual efflorescence it fostered and the library it produced. If the European Renaissance was the "rebirth" of Western culture, then Alexandria, Egypt, was its birthplace.

On the western part of the Iberian Peninsula, touching the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean lies a nation with a proud history that influenced Europe and the rest of the world. But the Portugal of today carries within its soil the history of bygone eras, one that you can trace back to prehistoric times.

Simon Schama explores the mysterious contradictions of the Dutch nation that invented itself from the ground up, attained an unprecedented level of affluence, and lived in constant dread of being corrupted by happiness. Drawing on a vast array of period documents and sumptuously reproduced art, Schama recreates in precise detail a nation's mental state. He tells of bloody uprisings and beached whales, of the cult of hygiene and the plague of tobacco, of thrifty housewives and profligate tulip-speculators.

How did descendants of Viking marauders came to dominate Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East? It is a tale of ambitious adventures and fierce freebooters, of fortunes made and fortunes lost. The Normans made their influence felt across all of western Europe and the Mediterranean, from the British Isles to North Africa, and Lisbon to the Holy Land. In Empires of the Normans we discover how they combined military might and political savvy with deeply held religious beliefs and a profound sense of their own destiny.

The profoundly inspiring and fully documented saga of Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose "voices" moved her to rally the French nation and a reluctant king against British invaders in 1428, has fascinated artistic figures as diverse as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Voltaire, George...

Celebrated historian John Hirst offers a fascinating exploration of the qualities that made Europe a world-changing civilization. The Shortest History of Europe begins with a rapid overview of European civilization, describing its birth from an unlikely mixture of classical learning and Christianity and German warrior culture. Over the centuries, this unstable blend produced highly distinctive characters - pious knights and belligerent popes, and beyond - and its coming apart provided the dynamic of European history in modern times.

Accusés d’être à l’origine de la Révolution française, d’avoir noyauté les États-Unis d’Amérique dès leur naissance ou encore d’avoir précipité l’effondrement de l’Union soviétique, les Illuminati font les beaux jours des théories complotistes les plus extravagantes depuis plus de deux siècles.Derrière ces affabulations, une société secrète, les Illuminaten, a bel et bien existé, en Bavière. Fondé à la fin du XVIIIe siècle par Adam Weishaupt, alias Spartacus, ce club très sélect inspiré de la franc-maçonnerie a attiré parmi les plus radicaux tenants des Lumières et a très vite été interdit.

Belgique, le 15 janvier 2015. À Verviers, les hommes des Unités spéciales partent à l'assaut d'une maison ouvrière dans laquelle trois terroristes préparent un attentat. La fusillade qui s'ensuit intervient une semaine après l'attentat meurtrier de Charlie Hebdo ; elle présage la vague de terreur qui va frapper la Belgique et la France. En première ligne, l'inspecteur principal Lionel D. de l'Escadron spécial d'intervention (ESI). Pour la première fois, un membre de cette unité d'élite de la police fédérale belge se livre à coeur ouvert sur sa vie et sur son travail.

The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe.

Stuart Hills embarked his Sherman DD tank on to an LCT at 6:45 a.m., Sunday, June 4th, 1944. He was 20 years old, un-blooded, fresh from a public-school background, and officer cadet training. He was going to war. Two days later, his tank sunk; he and his crew landed from a rubber dinghy with just the clothes they stood in. After that, the struggles through the Normandy bocage in a replacement tank, engaging the enemy in a constant round of close encounters, led to a swift mastering of the art of tank warfare and remarkable survival in the midst of carnage and destruction.

Best-selling author and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson has won widespread acclaim for thought-provoking works such as Civilization and High Financier. The Great Degeneration tackles nothing less than the decline of Western civilization. Ferguson posits that slowing growth, outrageous debt, and antisocial behavior are contributing to the erosion of the West’s once rock-solid foundations. Ferguson excavates the causes and shows how heroic leadership and radical reform are needed to right the course.

How much can change in less than two and a half years? In the case of Britain in the Sixties, the answer is: almost everything. From the seismic coming of the Beatles to a sex scandal that rocked the Tory government to the arrival at No 10 of Harold Wilson, a prime minister utterly different from his Old Etonian predecessors. A Northern Wind, the keenly anticipated next instalment of David Kynaston’s acclaimed Tales of a New Jerusalem series, brings to vivid life the period between October 1962 and February 1965.

After the long period of cultural decline known as the Dark Ages, Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, art, literature, philosophy, and science and began to develop a vision of Western society that remains at the heart of Western civilization today. By placing the image of the Virgin...

New York Times Bestseller The epic true story of Dunkirk—now a major motion picture, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and starring Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hardy, and Mark Rylance In 1940, the Allies had been beaten back by the Nazis across France to the northern port of Dunkirk. In...

William Shakespeare's gripping play showed Caesar's assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, a generals' plot put together by Caesar's disaffected officers and designed with precision. Brutus and Cassius were indeed key players, but they had the help of a third man - Decimus. He was the mole in Caesar's entourage, one of Caesar's leading generals, and a lifelong friend.

In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler's army was beaten, and expected that the war would be over by Christmas. But the disastrous Allied airborne landing in Holland, American setbacks on the German border and in the Hürtgen Forest, together with the Battle of the Bulge, drastically altered that timetable. Hastings tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, and paints a vivid portrait of the Red Army's onslaught on Hitler's empire.

This is the astonishing true story of three teenage Dutch girls, Hannie Schaft and sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, that has inspired many throughout the world. When Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands in World War II, these girls took up arms against the enemy by seducing high-ranking Nazi officers, luring them into the woods and killing them. They provided Jewish children with safe houses and gathered vital intelligence for the resistance.

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. Together, they presided over the last years of dynastic Europe and the outbreak of the most destructive war...