In his clear and stimulatingly written book, Peter Burke leads us through the picture room of history, thus expanding the fund of historical sources. Images - far removed from any consideration of art - can also be read as materials for historical knowledge and offer the historian a chance to write history that has hardly been used up to now. Paintings, prints, caricatures, maps, posters, photographs and the moving images of film are meaningful, but they can also lie or conceal and manipulate reality. Using many examples from antiquity to the present day, from equestrian statues to Japanese woodcuts, Peter Burke tests his theory of historical, critically interpretive seeing. The reader will see many a picture with different eyes in the future!