Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Shapiro

Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail Balfe is a queer, auDHD author-illustrator and Emmy award-winning creative based in Brighton. Before writing books full-time, Abigail led digital campaigns for pop stars such as One Direction and Little Mix, and for TV broadcasters including Channel 4 and Netflix. She also performed stand-up comedy and won several small trophies for her onstage humour, which featured life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs, and rambling stories about her family. In 2023, Abigail was named one of the Top 50 Influential Neurodivergent Women in the UK.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

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Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Who owns language? In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngugi wa Thiong’o presents a series of essays that build on his vast wealth of work on language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. Intricate, nuanced and accessible, it reaffirms the revolutionary power of African languages to fight back against both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present.With immense relevance to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas is a brilliant distillation of the enduring themes of Ngugi’s work and a vital addition to the library of one of the world’s greatest and most provocative writers.

Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas

Justin Marozzi

Slavery in the Islamic world has a long, complex and controversial history. Captives and Companions is a brilliant synthesis of history and contemporary reportage, which brings to life the voices of the enslaved in stories of eighth-century concubines and ninth-century revolts, thirteenth-century slave soldiers who established dynastic rule over Egypt, Syria and Iraq, eighteenth-century corsairs and twentieth century 
pearl divers in the Gulf. It also includes first-hand accounts of this legacy in the twenty-first century, including the depredations of Daesh and continuing hereditary slavery in Mali and Mauritania. 
 
Justin Marozzi traces the extraordinary variety of enslavement in the Islamic world, which ranged from agricultural labour and domestic toil to elite concubinage, guardianship of sacred spaces, political leadership and even military command. He shows how Africa bore the brunt of the demand for slave labour, fuelled throughout the nineteenth century by expanding global markets and commodity chains. Slavers plied African coasts, traders raided inland for human cargo, and millions were marched across the Sahara into captivity. Meanwhile, North African corsairs turned the Mediterranean into a slave-raiding ‘free-for-all’ between Muslims, Christians and Jews. 
 
Taking the reader on an extraordinary historical journey from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu, Istanbul to the Black Sea, this is the riveting human drama of those caught up in one of history’s most remarkable overlooked stories.

Captives and Companions

A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World

Joad Raymond Wren

‘Highly ambitious and impressive … a rich, multifaceted and thought-provoking book' 
Noel Malcolm, Times Literary Supplement 
 
News moves. It is a battle, a scandal, a disaster. It is a letter, a newspaper, a proclamation. News is a material thing, but also something between us, something we take into us and feel. 
 
This book tells the story of news from the sunset of the Middle Ages to the rise of mass media in modern times. It begins in Renaissance Italy, with the envoys and merchants who drew in and disseminated news across Europe, establishing its channels and conventions. Following the beat of news around the continent, it uncovers a vast, invisible network traversing the boundaries of geography and politics, religion and language. 
 
Joad Raymond Wren allows the reader to see news – of the battle of Lepanto, the siege of Vienna – spreading around this network in real time. Dispelling the tenacious myth that news was until the printing press scarce and unreliable, and until the telegraph slow and provincial, he opens up windows onto a world buzzing with news from faraway. News brought the distant closer, and provided the means for Europe to know itself. The continent was, for a time, held together by that most essential of human acts: communication.

The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe

Toby Green

In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau? 
 
In The Heretic of Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness. 
 
Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. 
 
For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres’s case, we can see what this world was really like. The Heretic of Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived – its beliefs, values and people.

The Heretic of Cacheu

Struggles over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port

Frank Close

Henry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in Paris in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age. 
 
Destroyer of Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere. 
 
The story spans decades and continents, moving from Becquerel to Ernest Rutherford, the Cambridge-based, New Zealand scientist who first split the atom, expands to include Enrico Fermi in Rome, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, leading to the appearance of Robert Oppenheimer before climaxing with increasingly horrifying developments in the USA and USSR. The roles of three remarkable women – Lise Meitner, Ida Noddack and Irene Curie – are re-evaluated, and there are new insights into the work of Ettore Majorana, Fermi’s mercurial but brilliant assistant, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938, possibly after foreseeing the explosive power of nuclear energy. Above all, this is a story of how knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relationships, an indeed by chance, in a remarkable way.

Destroyer of Worlds

The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965

Sadiah Qureshi

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? 
 
Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. 
 
Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. 
 
Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

Vanished

An Unnatural History of Extinction

Ron Chernow

Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influen­tial, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Mark Twain went west and accepted a job at the local newspaper, writing dis­patches that attracted attention for their brashness and humour. It wasn’t long until the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance.In this rich and nuanced portrait of Twain, Ron Chernow brings his powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a jour­nalist, satirist, and performer, and a family man, Twain went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the epicentre of American culture, emerging as the nation’s most notable political pundit and the only white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him and led him and his family to nine years of exile between London, France, Germany and Italy. During this time, he lost his wife and two daughters – the last stage of his life marked by heartache, politi­cal crusades, and eccentric behaviour that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, includ­ing thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow here captures the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in literary history, reminding us why Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated and quoted over a hundred years after his passing.

Mark Twain

Edward White

For more than forty years, Diana, Princess of Wales, has been mythologized to the most extraordinary degree. Adored and lionized by some, ridiculed and traduced by others, Diana has always commanded a cultural presence unmatched by any other member of the royal family. 
 
In Dianaworld, Edward White offers both a portrait of the princess and a group portrait of those who existed in her orbit—from her royal in-laws, her servants, and the dilapidated ranks of the British aristocracy from which she rose, to drag performers, artists, Britain’s ethnic minorities, and the Gen Z superfans who maintain her status as a cultural icon. 
 
Drawing on a wide array of sources and perspectives, many never used in books about Diana or the royal family, White vividly recreates the world Diana lived in, explores the growth of her global reputation, and illuminates her lasting impact on the world she left behind.

Dianaworld

An Obsession

Manu S Pillai

**A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 ** 
 
'A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians' William Dalrymple 
 
When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity. 
 
Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj: while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries’ own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism. 
 
Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters – maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

Jordan B. Peterson

What is the true story of our lives—and what should it be? 
In his newest revolutionary offering, world-renowned clinical psychologist and bestselling author Jordan Peterson guides us through the ancient accounts of rebellion, sacrifice, suffering and triumph that have formed the foundations of the Western world. Drawing on the psychology of religion, mythology and philosophy, he reveals the profound wisdom of the Biblical stories—explaining why we ignore them, today, at our great peril.Adam and Eve and the eternal fall of mankind; the murderous war of Cain and Abel; the cataclysmic flood of Noah, the spectacular collapse of the Tower of Babel; Abraham’s terrible adventure, and the epic of Moses and the Israelites: What could such stories possibly mean? How have they helped us make sense of the world, and who we are, for millennia? How can they still guide us in our eternal search for meaning, aim and purpose?Powerfully illuminating and thought-provoking, We Who Wrestle with God brings the reader on an awe-inspiring intellectual journey through the greatest stories ever told.

We Who Wrestle With God

Perceptions of the Divine

Lee Seong-bok

Kick against words like you would kick back on a swing. You’ve got to feel as if the soles of your feet are touching the sky. 
 
Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of meditations on poetry, art and life, taken from the creative writing lectures of Lee Seong-bok, one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets. 
 
These 470 aphorisms, collected by his students, are evocative micropoems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we could sense but not put into words. Others unfurl fresh vistas and offer worlds to explore in their exciting and inspiring poetics. 
 
Together, they offer an invigorating and original answer to the questions: How – and why – do we write at all? What does it mean to create? And how should we see the world?

Indeterminate Inflorescence

Notes from a poetry class

Lluís Quintana-Murci

We are living through a revolution in knowledge. Over the past twenty years, genetics has shed light on the history of humanity in unprecedented ways. It enables us to study an individual's genome, compare it with populations worldwide, and understand its place in human history. 
 
Here biologist Lluís Quintana-Murci, one of the scientists at the forefront of this research, reveals how population genetics is transforming our understanding of who we are. Thanks to numerous discoveries, we now know how Homo sapiens spread around the world: from their exit from Africa approximately 60,000 years ago to the recent settlement of the remote lands of Polynesia within the last millennia. Population genetics has also shown that humans mixed with now-extinct species, including Neanderthals, enabling them to adapt to new environments and survive diseases. These cutting-edge genetic findings will shape our future too, offering the key to medicine tailored to individuals. 
 
But the greatest revelation of population genetics is that we are all mixed and the product of our ancestors’ long odyssey of migrations and adaptations across the globe. As Quintana-Murci explains, without diversity, without difference, there is no evolution. 
 
Filled with fascinating insights from the front line of research, Human Peoples is a pioneering guide to the ground-breaking science of our shared past.

Human Peoples

On the Genetic Traces of Human Evolution, Migration and Adaptation

Paul McCartney

In 2020, an extraordinary trove of nearly a thousand photographs taken by Paul McCartney on a 35mm camera was re-discovered in his archive. They intimately record the months towards the end of 1963 and beginning of 1964 when Beatlemania erupted in the UK and, after the band's first visit to the USA, they became the most famous people on the planet. The photographs are McCartney's personal record of this explosive time, when he was, as he puts it, in the 'Eyes of the Storm'. 
 
1964: Eyes of the Storm presents 275 of McCartney's photographs from the six cities of these intense, legendary months - Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C. and Miami - and many never-before-seen portraits of John, George and Ringo. In his Foreword and Introductions to these city portfolios, McCartney remembers 'what else can you call it - pandemonium' and conveys his impressions of Britain and America in 1964 - the moment when the culture changed and the Sixties really began.

1964: Eyes of the Storm

Jordan B. Peterson, clinical psychologist and 'the world's most influential public intellectual' (New York Times), has improved the lives of millions of people around the world with his books, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order. Drawing on ancient wisdom, as well as deeply personal lessons from his own life and clinical practice, he gives us the courage to seek truth and meaning in everything we do. 
 
Discover both volumes - Peterson's complete set of 24 rules for life - in this beautifully designed box set.

24 Rules For Life

The Box Set

Charles Moore

Margaret Thatcher was the longest-serving Prime Minister of the twentieth century and one of the most influential figures of the postwar era. Volume One of Moore's authorized biography gives unparalleled insight into her early life, especially through her extensive correspondence with her sister, and recreates brilliantly the atmosphere of British politics as she was making her way, taking us up to the zenith of her power: victory in the Falklands. 
 
Based on unrestricted access to all Lady Thatcher's papers, unpublished interviews with her and all her major colleagues, this is the indispensable portrait of a towering figure of our times.

Margaret Thatcher

The Authorized Biography, Volume One: Not For Turning

In June 1983 Margaret Thatcher won the biggest increase in a government's Parliamentary majority in British electoral history. Over the next four years, as Charles Moore relates in this central volume of his uniquely authoritative biography, Britain's first woman prime minister changed the course of her country's history and that of the world, often by sheer force of will. 
 
The book reveals as never before how she faced down the Miners' Strike, transformed relations with Europe, privatized the commanding heights of British industry and continued the reinvigoration of the British economy. It describes her role on the world stage with dramatic immediacy, identifying Mikhail Gorbachev as 'a man to do business with' before he became leader of the Soviet Union, and then persistently pushing him and Ronald Reagan, her great ideological soulmate, to order world affairs according to her vision. For the only time since Churchill, she ensured that Britain had a central place in dealings between the superpowers. 
 
But even at her zenith she was beset by difficulties. The beloved Reagan two-timed her during the US invasion of Grenada. She lost the minister to whom she was personally closest to scandal and almost had to resign as a result of the Westland affair. She found herself isolated within her own government over Europe. She was at odds with the Queen over the Commonwealth and South Africa. She bullied senior colleagues and she set in motion the poll tax. Both these last would later return to wound her, fatally. 
 
In all this, Charles Moore has had unprecedented access to all Mrs Thatcher's private and government papers. The participants in the events described have been so frank in interview that we feel we are eavesdropping on their conversations as they pass. We look over Mrs Thatcher's shoulder as she vigorously annotates documents, so seeing her views on many particular issues in detail, and we understand for the first time how closely she relied on a handful of trusted advisors to help shape her views and carry out her will. We see her as a public performer, an often anxious mother, a workaholic and the first woman in western democratic history who truly came to dominate her country in her time. 
 
In the early hours of 12 October 1984, during the Conservative party conference in Brighton, the IRA attempted to assassinate her. She carried on within hours to give her leader's speech at the conference (and later went on to sign the Anglo-Irish agreement). One of her many left-wing critics, watching her that day, said 'I don't approve of her as Prime Minister, but by God she's a great tank commander.' This titanic figure, with all her capacities and all her flaws, storms from these pages as from no other book.

The Authorized Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants

Duncan Campbell-Smith

For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two start-up ventures: the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. This book traces their stories in the nineteenth century, their glory days before 1914 - and their remarkable survival in the face of global wars and the collapse of world trade in the first half of the twentieth century. 
 
The unravelling of the Empire after 1945 eventually forced Britain's overseas banks to confront a different future. The Standard and the Chartered, alarmed at the expansion of American banking, determined in 1969 on a merger as a way of sustaining the best of the City's overseas traditions. But from the start, Standard Chartered had to grapple with the fading fortunes of its own inherited franchise - badly dented in both Asia and Africa - and with radical changes in the nature of banking. Its British managers, steeped in the past, proved ill-suited to the challenge. By the late 1980s, efforts to expand in Europe and the USA had brought the merged Group to the brink of collapse. 
 
Yet it survived - and then pulled off a dramatic recovery. Standard Chartered realigned itself, just in time, with the phenomenal growth of Asia's 'emerging markets', many of them in countries where the Chartered had flourished a century earlier. In the process, the Group was transformed. Trebling its workforce, it brushed aside the global financial crisis of 2008 and by 2012 could look back on a decade of astonishing growth. Recent times have added an eventful postscript to a long and absorbing history. 
 
Crossing Continents recounts Standard Chartered's story with a wealth of detail from one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain's commercial influence has actually worked in practice around the world over one hundred and fifty years.

Crossing Continents

A History of Standard Chartered Bank

Nicholas Vincent

King John ruled England for seventeen and a half years. For most of that time he enjoyed, if not popularity, then great wealth and power. Yet to posterity his entire reign has come to be embodied in a single image. Furious, outmanoeuvred, crippled with vice, the King sits at Runnymede sealing or more often (and anachronistically) signing Magna Carta. No matter whether we approach this event as reactionaries wishing that the King would assert himself, as conservatives delighted by the restoration of constitutional 'rights', or as radicals longing for liberty and revolution, Runnymede changes everything in our perception of King John. Seventeen years of history are reduced to a picnic on the banks of the Thames. John is exposed as villainous and pathetic. The people triumph. Tyranny is righted. 
 
Nicholas Vincent's fascinating portrayal of a complex man unpicks the character behind one of England's most despised kings. Was he as evil as legend suggests? Or has he been unfairly misunderstood?

John (Penguin Monarchs)

An Evil King?

Greta Thunberg

'We are the change and change is coming' 
 
In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day. A year later, she was joined in her strike by over seven million people around the world. 
 
This is the record of a game-changing year in the fight against the climate crisis. Collecting the speeches that sparked a global movement, and iconic images of those who made it happen, No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it. 
 
With new speeches from Vienna, Paris, New York and Montreal

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Illustrated Edition

Stella Tillyard

George IV spent most of his life waiting to become king: as a pleasure-loving and rebellious Prince of Wales during the sixty-year reign of his father, George III, and for ten years as Prince Regent, when his father went mad. 
 
'The days are very long when you have nothing to do' he once wrote plaintively, but he did his best to fill them with pleasure - women, art, food, wine, fashion, architecture. He presided over the creation of the Regency style, which came to epitomise the era, and he was, with Charles I, the most artistically literate of all our kings. Yet despite his life of luxury and indulgence, George died alone and unmourned. 
 
Stella Tillyard has not written a judgemental book, but a very human and enjoyable one, about this most colourful of all British kings.

George IV (Penguin Monarchs)

King in Waiting

Ruchir Sharma

India is a country obsessed by politics. In early 2019, it faces national elections, and urgent questions present themselves: will India continue down a path of populism and increasingly strident Hindu nationalism or will it return to its postcolonial secular vision? Is the long-promised economic boom finally at hand, or is some form of socialism part of India's DNA? Will the seemingly invincible Modi triumph again, or will India revert to its habit of throwing out incumbents? Bestselling author Ruchir Sharma has been on the road during Indian elections for twenty years and here distills the wisdom of his observations and experiences over that time in a deeply insightful book about the world's largest and most complex exercise in democracy.

Democracy on the Road

Edmund King

The youngest of William the Conqueror's sons, Henry I (1100-35) was never meant to be king, but he was destined to become one of the greatest of all medieval monarchs, both through his own ruthlessness and intelligence and through the dynastic legacy of his daughter Matilda, who began the Plantagenet line that would rule England until 1485. A self-consciously diligent and thoughtful king, his rule was looked back on as the real post-invasion re-founding of England as a new realm, integrated into the continent, wealthy and stable. 
 
Edmund King's wonderful portrait of Henry shows him as a strikingly charismatic and thoughtful man. His life was dogged by a single great disaster, the death of his teenage heir William in the White Ship disaster. Despite astonishing numbers of illegitimate sons, Henry was now left with only a daughter. This fact would shape the rest of the 12th century and beyond.

Henry I (Penguin Monarchs)

The Father of His People

Pete Souza

As Chief Official White House photographer, Pete Souza travelled with the president to document each meeting, trip and encounter for historical record. His moving, candid images were shared widely on social media throughout President Obama's eight year tenure. This book contains a carefully curated selection of images that capture the spirit of a historic era.

Obama: An Intimate Portrait

The Historic Presidency in Photographs

Nandan Nilekani

Viral Shah

For many aspects of how our countries are run - from social security and fair elections to communication, infrastructure and the rule of law - technology can play an increasingly positive, revolutionary role. In India, for example, where many underprivileged citizens are invisible to the state, a unique national identity system is being implemented for the first time, which will help strengthen social security. And throughout the world, technology is essential in the transition to clean energy. 
 
This book, based on the authors' collective experiences working with government, argues that technology can reshape our lives, in both the developing and developed world, and shows how this can be achieved.

Rebooting India

Realizing a Billion Aspirations

Jancis Robinson

Julia Harding

José Vouillamoz

An indispensable book for every wine lover, from some of the world's greatest experts. 
 
Where do wine grapes come from and how are they related to each other? What is the historical background of each grape variety? Where are they grown? What sort of wines do they make and, most importantly, what do they taste like? 
 
Using the most cutting-edge DNA analysis and detailing almost 1,400 distinct grape varieties, as well as myriad correct (and highlighting almost as many incorrect) synonyms, this particularly beautiful book includes revelatory grape family trees, and a rich variety of illustrations from Viala and Vermorel's seminal ampelography with century-old illustrations. Combining Jancis Robinson's world view, nose for good writing and good wines with Julia Harding's expertise and attention to detail plus Dr Vouillamoz's unique level of scholarship, Wine Grapes offers essential and original information in greater depth and breadth than has ever been available before. A book for wine students, wine experts and wine lovers everywhere.

Wine Grapes

A complete guide to 1,368 vine varieties, including their origins and flavours

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins has travelled the length and breadth of England to select his thousand best churches. Organised by county, each church is described - often with delightful asides - and given a star-rating from one to five. All of the county sections are prefaced by a map locating each church, and lavishly illustrated with colour photos from the Country Life archive. Jenkins contends that these churches house a gallery of vernacular art without equal in the world. Here, he brings that museum to public attention.

England's Thousand Best Churches

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics, shows how today's crisis parallels the events that caused the Great Depression - and explains what it will take to avoid catastrophe. 
 
In 1999, in The Return of Depression Economics, Paul Krugman surveyed the economic crises that had swept across Asia and Latin America, and warned that those crises were a warning for all of us: like diseases that have become resistant to antibiotics, the economic maladies that caused the Great Depression were making a comeback.In the years that followed, as Wall Street boomed and financial wheeler-dealers made vast profits, the international crises of the 1990s faded from memory. But now depression economics has come to America: when the great housing bubble of the mid-2000s burst, the U.S. financial system proved as vulnerable as those of developing countries caught up in earlier crises - and a replay of the 1930s seems all too possible. 
 
In this new, greatly updated edition of The Return of Depression Economics, Krugman shows how the failure of regulation to keep pace with an increasingly out-of-control financial system set the United States, and the world as a whole, up for the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s. He also lays out the steps that must be taken to contain the crisis, and turn around a world economy sliding into a deep recession. Brilliantly crafted in Krugman's trademark style-lucid, lively, and supremely informed - this new edition of The Return of Depression Economics will become an instant cornerstone of the debate over how to respond to the crisis.

The Return of Depression Economics

Charles Timoney

THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT FRANCE: You burnt Joan of Arc! ? Smuggling live chickens into rugby matches is patriotic ? How many times to kiss on the cheek ? Where not to cross the road ? French guns don't go 'bang' ? What do you call a party? ? bon appetit is vulgar ? A six-pack is a bar of chocolate ? The dangers of being called Peter or Penny ? Your smallest finger is your 'ear' finger ? The importance of Wednesdays ? How to tip ? and when to celebrate Christmas? 
 
Forget the French you learnt at school. Based on twenty years of hard-won knowledge, Pardon My French takes you through all the words you need to survive, shows how and why they work, and steers you past all the pitfalls and potential embarrassments of speaking French in France. 
 
From sugar-cube etiquette to why the Marseillaise is all about slaughtering Austrians and Prussians as bloodily as possible, Charles Timoney lays bare the Gallic mindset alongside their bizarre language. Covering all areas of everyday life from eating and drinking to travel, work and, crucially, swearing and sounding like a teenager, this is not just the most entertaining, but also the most useful book on France and the French you'll ever read.

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