Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood - Tapa dura

In Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, celebrated young travelwriter-historian Justin Marozzi gives us a many-layered history of one of the world's truly great cities - both its spectacular golden ages and its terrible disasters

'Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' - Sunday Telegraph

Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and conquerors.

Here, in the first new history of Baghdad in nearly 80 years, Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole tumultuous history of what was once the greatest capital on earth.

Justin Marozzi is a Councillor of the Royal Geographic Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Buckingham University. He has broadcast for BBC Radio Four, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, for which he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His previous books include the bestselling Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year (2004), and The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus.

South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara

'Justin Marozzi is that most precious rarity: a serious traveller who is also a real writer, with a wonderful feel for language, a gift for narrative and an enviable sensitivity and lightness of touch' William Dalrymple

'The first significant journey across the Libyan interior for a generation ... genuine exploration, the stuff from which all good travel books should be made' Michael Asher, TLS

Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World

'Outstanding ... Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph (Books of the Year)

'Marozzi creates a convincing portrait of a complex man living in an unsettled world ... he has brought the mighty warrior in from the cold and allowed him to stalk these pages with bloody magnificence' Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus

'The Man Who Invented History ... confirms Marozzi as a writer of real distinction and charm ... This is a book of remarkable substance and style, brimming with humanity [and] self-deprecating humour' Jeremy Seal, Sunday Telegraph

'"He celebrates the wonders of the world with a life-grabbing energy that is never less than infectious": so Marozzi praises his hero, but he might just as well have been describing himself ... A very Herodotean book ... entertaining, engaging and humane' Tom Holland, Times Literary Supplement