Bettany Hughes

Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul-- one city, where stories and histories collide. The gateway between East and West, North and South, it has been the capital city of the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires. Hughes takes us on an historical journey from the Neolithic to the present, exploring the ways that Istanbul's influence has spun out to shape the wider world. This is the story not just of emperors, viziers, caliphs, and sultans, but of the...

"For millennia, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have been known for their aesthetic sublimity, ingenious engineering, and sheer, audacious magnitude: The Great Pyramids of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Temple of Artemis, the Statue of Zeus, the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Echoing down time, each of these persists in our imagination as an emblem of the glory of antiquity,...

"Aphrodite was said to have been born out of the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus-and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. She's been a carnal symbol to Sappho, a Humanist muse to Renaissance artists, and a raunchy but subversive Shakespeare heroine. Proving...