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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Sven Beckert

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organise our politics. Sven Beckert situates the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework in this fascinating new book. 
 
Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from merchant communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. Then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that would propel them across the oceans. This epic drama corresponded at no point to an idealised dream of free markets. All along, state-backed institutions and imperial expansions shaped its dynamics. 
 
Capitalism decentres the European perspective, highlighting agency, resistance, innovation and ruthless coercion around the world through to the present with the rise of Asian economies, particularly China. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely add up capitalism’s debits and credits in this monumental book, but allows us to think afresh about the past to help us re-imagine the future.

Capitalism

A Global History

Paul Gillingham

It begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucatán. Only ten years later, an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels seized the island city of Tenochtitlán, seat of one of the world’s great empires. It would become Mexico City, and marked the collision of two radically different worlds. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate and the most sophisticated city they had ever seen. For Mexicans the encounter brought horses, wheels, but also lethal germs – sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that would kill a majority of the indigenous population. 
 
Paul Gillingham’s superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures. He shows how the industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world, making it the centre of the first truly global economy. We then see how independence from Spain went on to bring calamitous wars with the United States and France. One of the world’s great social revolutions then remade Mexico and ushered in a one-party state that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century – before the country collapsed into violence in the drug wars of the 2000s. 
 
Mexico: A History uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been one of the world’s great innovators; a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.

Mexico: A History

Maria Alyokhina

2014: Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics. Russia invades Crimea. Putin is re-elected president. Several political prisoners are amnestied and released early from prison.Maria Alyokhina is among them. She had spent two years in a penal colony after performing the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ with her friends in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They had warned the rest of the world of the dangers of authoritarianism but the Russia she finds when she gets out of prison is even more oppressive.What can you do, she asks, when your country has been seized by all-powerful men who are waging war against another country and their own citizens?As Maria recounts her brave and colourful protests, we are drawn straight into the world of grassroots opposition and witness the absurd measures the Russian state takes to contain protest. And when the full-scale war against Ukraine starts and the Russian opposition is repeatedly silenced, Maria and her activist friends continue to resist despite the high stakes. They fight increasingly absurd cycles of detention and house arrest: sometimes with the smallest acts such as going for a walk or having a rainbow ice cream, until, faced with a new prison sentence, she escapes Russia in May 2022 dressed as a delivery food courier. Her story, like her life, is fiercely courageous, darkly funny and highly inspiring to anyone who wants to stand up for the truth.

Political Girl

Life and Fate in Russia

Branko Milanovic

Global neoliberalism is on its last legs, while a new international economic order is taking hold. Trade blocs, tariff wars, economic sanctions, and national champions are in; nationalism, anti-immigration movements and the far-right are on the rise. Liberalism is being rejected by the civic realm, as the status quo of the past fifty years crumbles. What remains in its wake? 
 
Drawing on original research, leading economist Branko Milanovic reveals the seismic shifts that are shaping our world. He details the facts: how the rising economic power of Asia is creating a new global ‘middle class’ in the greatest reshuffle of incomes since the Industrial Revolution. He explores our fears: why are we becoming increasingly unhappy, when the world is becoming richer and more equal? And he shows us the fight ahead: as plutocracy returns, global war threatens, and a new system silently shapes our nations, driving malcontent to breaking point. In The Great Global Transformation, Milanovic provides an invaluable guide to the new 21st century.

The Great Global Transformation

National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World

César A. Hidalgo

We all understand that knowledge shapes the fate of business and the growth of nations, but few of us are aware of the principles that govern its motion. The Infinite Alphabet unravels the laws describing the growth and diffusion of knowledge by taking you from a failed attempt to build a city of knowledge in Ecuador to the growth of China’s innovation economy. Through dozens of stories, you will learn why aircraft manufacturers in Italy began manufacturing scooters after the Second World War and how migrants like Samuel Slater shaped the industrial fabric of the United States. 
 
Knowledge is the secret to the wealth of nations. But to understand it, we must accept that it is not a single thing, but an ever-growing tapestry of unique ideas, experiences and received wisdom. An Infinite Alphabet that we are only beginning to fathom. 
 
César A. Hidalgo, a world-renowned scholar for his work on economic complexity, will walk you through the “three laws” and the many principles that govern how knowledge grows, moves, and decays. By the end of this journey, you will understand why knowledge grows exponentially in the electronics industry and what mechanisms govern its diffusion across geographic borders, social networks, and professional boundaries. 
 
Together these principles will teach you how knowledge shapes the world.

The Infinite Alphabet

And the Laws of Knowledge

Graham Harman

How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.

Waves and Stones

On the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Jonathan C. Slaght

Deep in the forests of Northeast Asia roams the majestic and revered Amur tigers, more popularly known as ‘The Siberian Tiger’. But in the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred of these graceful animals stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur River basin. As the Soviet Union fell, catastrophe arrived, with poaching and logging taking a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species. 
 
Taking us on a journey through remote frozen landscapes, globally renowned conservationist Jonathan Slaght charts the incredible story of how Russian scientists and American conservationists came together to save these magnificent, solitary creatures. He retraces their steps to show how this dedicated, fearless coalition laid the foundations of new tiger research across Asia, transforming public opinion around tigers from something to be feared and hunted, to creatures we must protect. 
 
Today, tigers occupy 7% of the lands they did 100 years ago, disappearing in the wild from Bali to Iran. In the ongoing global crisis of species destruction, Slaght shows us that the revival of the Amur tiger can bring us hope for the future: a model for how to live alongside, and revive, the natural world.

Tigers Between Empires

The Journey to Save the Siberian Tiger from Extinction

Paul McCartney

This is the story, in their own words, of a band that came to define a generation. Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run tells the madcap history of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band, from their humble beginnings in the early 1970s to their dissolution barely a decade later. Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, family and band members, and other key participants, Wings recounts the musical odyssey taken by a man searching for his identity in the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup. Soon joined by his wife – American photographer Linda McCartney – on keyboard and vocals, drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Denny Laine, McCartney sowed the seeds for a new band that would provide the soundtrack to the decade.Organised chronologically around McCartney, RAM and nine Wings albums, the narrative begins when a twenty-seven-year-old superstar, rumoured to be dead, fled with his new wife to a remote sheep farm in Scotland amid a sea of legal and personal rows. Being there gave McCartney time to create and was where this new band emerged. Wings then follows the group as they play unannounced shows at university halls, tour in a sheared-off double-decker bus with their children, survive a robbery on the streets of Nigeria, and eventually perform blockbuster stadium shows on their world tour, all while producing some of the most enduring music of the time.With extraordinary recollections collected by Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville and edited into a genre-defining oral history by Ted Widmer, Wings transports the reader to the grit and glamour of the 1970s. Introduced with a heartfelt foreword by McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run contains 150 black-and-white and colour photographs, many previously unseen, as well as timelines, a gigography and a full discography, in an art form all its own.

Wings

The Story of a Band on the Run

Robin Holloway

‘My aim in this book is to offer an invitation to the glorious long voyage of Western classical music for all those who enjoy and love it, and seek to deepen their enjoyment and love without getting caught up in musicology and technicalities: an entry to Aladdin’s cave, an injunction to ‘taste and see’ re-angled for the sense of hearing in all its complex and various modes. Not historical, but broadly chronological and thematic, from the earliest adventures in notation up to the present day – some fourteen centuries of continuity and interruptions, revolutions and renewals, complements and contrasts, via many detailed descriptions of individual composers and individual pieces. 
 
‘In part, it is an account of how music is made – its core of practice, skills, conventions, traditions – but also an attempt to chart the evolution of expression, what is being said, what felt, what communicated ‘from the heart to the heart’ – how music works upon its listeners, how it moves and stirs, how it reaches and appeals to the highest flights and deepest places (and everything between) of the organising pattern-making mind, the ebb and flow of the sensual body, the centres of emotion. 
 
‘Everything is within the art itself, at whatever epoch, in whatever idiom, whatever genre or intention. Nor is evaluation eschewed – why, as well as how, it is so good and why sometimes so deplorable. The style throughout is inherently allusive and I have tried everywhere to preserve the intonations and rhythms of speech – spontaneous, improvised, natural as breathing’- Robin Holloway

Music’s Odyssey

An Invitation to Western Classical Music

Hu Anyan

Hu Anyan has held nineteen different jobs since he graduated. He’s been a convenience store clerk, a bicycle salesman, a security guard and a delivery driver (among many other things). Every time the work gets punishing or the bosses too bossy, he moves on, from city to city, carrying with him nothing but his copies of Chekhov and Carver. This is his story. 
 
A runaway bestseller in China, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is about what it’s like to try and make a living – and stay sane – in the gig economy. From the pecking order on a parcel-sorting factory floor to the perfect alcohol dose to get some daylight shut-eye before a punishing night shift, from the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the hiring departments to the ideal layout of a delivery route, Hu illuminates the hidden lives behind the roles that keep our world going. But he also shows how, through the liberating power of literature, he finds solace, and even freedom in his existence. Quietly radical, brimming with humanity and humour, this book asks: what does work really mean? What should it mean? And do any of us really know how to live?

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

On Making a Living

Vlatko Vedral

For the last century, physics has been following the paths set out by the same two theories—quantum mechanics and general relativity—and, let’s face it, it’s getting pretty boring. Despite these great theories being fundamentally in conflict, most scientists are simply chasing decimal points in laboratories. To give the deeper explanation of reality we seek, we need new ways to explore and critique our best ideas of the universe on the smallest and largest scales. 
 
The situation is much like that in 1890, right before Planck, Einstein and Bohr blew the roof off Newtonian physics. As Vlatko Vedral argues in Portals to a New Reality, this suggests we are on the brink of a new revolution.Vedral first explains the state of the art of our current understanding when it comes to quantum mechanics and general relativity. Then he shows how quantum information theory has opened up radical new avenues, giving us a series of extraordinary experiments that could upend physics. They can sound very strange—one essentially involves entangling a human with Schrödinger’s cat—but they lay bare the elements of our theories that are particularly problematic, such as the widespread belief that nothing truly exists unless it is observed. 
 
At present these take the form of fascinating thought experiments, but nothing, save inertia and a lack of ambition, stands in our way. This revolution has been a century in the making—the time has finally arrived to rewrite our understanding of the universe.

Portals to a New Reality

Five Experiments to Unlock the Future of Physics

Andrew Graham Dixon

The paintings of Johannes Vermeer of Delft are some of the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art. Yet like the life of Vermeer himself, they are mysterious and have for centuries defied explanation. Following new leads, and drawing on a mass of historical evidence, some of it freshly uncovered in the archives of Delft and Rotterdam, Andrew Graham-Dixon paints a dramatically new picture of Vermeer, revealing many of the painter’s hitherto unknown friendships as well as his previously undetected allegiance to a radical movement driven underground by persecution. 
 
He also vividly evokes the world of the Dutch Republic as it was in its so-called Golden Age. This was a watery world of fortresses and flood plains, taverns rocked by argument and cities stunned by devastating attacks and explosions: all linked by a network of canals where a uniquely efficient public transport system, operated by horse-drawn passenger barge, enabled people, goods and ideas to glide effortlessly from one place to another. The author sets Vermeer firmly in the context of his time, revealing the patterns of patronage that make sense of his work, and also exposing the difficulties posed by his home life, which was dominated by his Jesuit mother-in law and disturbed by the psychotic behaviour of her only son. 
 
In the past Vermeer has been imagined as a remote and enigmatic figure, but he emerges from this new account as a man deeply engaged with his own society: well-travelled, a reader of books, a man personally connected to many of the most interesting people of his time, including merchants, philosophers, preachers, bankers and regents, as well as his childhood friend, a philanthropic baker named Hendrick van Buyten. Vermeer was also deeply affected by the struggles that shook his world, the Eighty Years War for Dutch independence and the yet more terrible Thirty Years War, which ravaged the neighbouring German lands and resulted in the deaths of millions. The author shows how he was moved to become a pacifist by such atrocities, and thereafter made many of his closest friends in the ranks of Europe’s first peace movement. A further revelation is that Vermeer’s closest collaborator and chief patron was a woman, as were many others in his immediate circle. These are all previously untold stories. 
 
The many piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer’s pictures, which are the heart of the book, shed new light on the intentions of the artist. Nearly all of his best loved works, Graham-Dixon shows, were originally painted for a single significant location in Delft. In light of such discoveries every one of Vermeer’s major paintings, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A View of Delft and The Milkmaid, are reassessed and their meanings rethought. As a result the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer – why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? – are persuasively answered here for the first time.

Vermeer

A Life Lost and Found

Serhii Plokhy

On 16 July 1945, the Nuclear Age began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the words of J. Robert Oppenheimer: 'Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.'While the threat of mutually assured destruction kept a lid on a simmering and tense geopolitical landscape, events like the Chernobyl disaster and near-misses like the Cuban Missile Crisis showed that total destruction was only ever one malfunction, mistake, or miscommunication away. Now, as governments re-arm their nuclear arsenals, treaties designed to limit the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons fall away, and nuclear weapons come increasingly within reach of non-state actors, we are on the brink of a renaissance of the nuclear industry.In The Nuclear Age, acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy paints an intricate picture of a world governed by fear. From the first artificial splitting of the atom in 1917 and the race to create the first atomic bomb in World War II, through the fraught arms race of the Cold War, to the imperialism, neo-colonial motivation and wars being waged today, the threat posed by nuclear weapons is as pertinent as ever. 
 
As he examines the motivations of key players, Plokhy confronts the crucial question of our age: what can we learn from the first nuclear arms race that can help us to stop the new one?

The Nuclear Age

An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival

Richard H. Thaler

Alex O. Imas

Nobel Prize-winner and co-author of Nudge, Richard Thaler, and rising star economist Alex Imas explore behavioral economics in this fully updated edition of the seminal work The Winner’s Curse 
 
Why do people cooperate with one another when they have no incentive to do so? Why do we hold onto possessions of little value? And why is the winner of an auction so often disappointed? 
 
Over thirty years ago, Richard Thaler introduced readers to behavioral economics in his seminal Anomalies column, written with collaborators including Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. These provocative articles challenged the fundamental idea at the heart of economics that people are selfish, rational optimizers, and provided the foundation for what became behavioral economics. That was then. Now, three decades later, Thaler has teamed up with economist Alex Imas to write a new book. Every chapter starts with an original Anomaly, retaining the spirit of its timestamp. Then, shifting to the present, they provide current updates to each, asking how the original findings have held up and how the field has evolved since then. 
 
It turns out these findings still show up almost everywhere. Anomalies pop up in people’s decisions to save for retirement and how they carry outstanding credit card debt. Even experts fail to optimize. The key concept of loss aversion explains missed putts by golf pros and the selection of which stocks to sell by portfolio managers. In this era of meme stocks and Dogecoin, it is hard to defend the view that financial markets are highly efficient. The good news, however, is that the anomalies have got much funnier. 
 
With both readability and rigor, The Winner’s Curse illuminates these ideas for anyone – from those with a cursory understanding of economics to fellow economists. Each chapter provides a key insight into human behavior so readers learn how to better understand the choices made by their friends, colleagues, and customers, and might just become better at making decisions themselves.

The Winner's Curse

Behavioral Economics Anomalies Then and Now

Andrew Ross Sorkin

In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin. 
 
With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivety in an endless boom led to wreckage. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world—where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again. 
 
This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late. 
 
Hailed as a landmark book, Too Big to Fail reimagined how financial crises are told. Now, with 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time—with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril.

1929

The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History

Sudhir Hazareesingh

The ending of the slave trade and abolition of slavery by European powers during the 19th century is generally told as the work of enlightened liberals fighting against entrenched slaving interests in Africa, the Caribbean, and European capitals. Sudhir Hazareesingh here turns this narrative on its head, showing how the enslaved resisted their oppressors from the earliest years of the Atlantic slave trade in the 16th century until the abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865, and how this opposition was the driving force for change. 
 Daring To Be Free portrays the struggle for liberation from the perspective of the enslaved, wherever possible in their own words. It shines a light on the lives of revolutionaries like Toussaint Louverture, José Antonio Aponte, Nat Turner, and the pregnant rebel Solitude; freed writers of narrative accounts like Frederick Douglass and Ottobah Cugoano; and the countless maroons, insurgents and conspirators whose acts of defiance destabilised the slave order in the colonies and galvanized the movement for abolition in France, Britain, and the United States. Hazareesingh gives particular emphasis to the powerful roles of women as campaigners, disruptors and warriors. 
 
Drawing on written archives and oral history, as well as a rich body of secondary sources, the book traces the networks of cooperation that connected runaway settlements, covert rebellions and organized uprisings from Haiti, Jamaica, Brazil and Cuba to Mauritius and the United States. It shows us how the struggle for liberty was shaped not only by western Enlightenment ideals but by the spiritual, martial, and religious influences from the lives of the enslaved in Africa before the Middle Passage – and by the inspiring example of Haiti, the first successful anticolonial revolution and the first independent black state, which echoed down the 19th century. 
 
Daring To Be Free reshapes our understanding of Atlantic slavery by portraying how enslaved lives were defined not by their dehumanisation at the hands of colonialists and slavers but by their own resilience, solidarity, and commitment to freedom. It also examines the afterlife of the slave trade in contemporary discussions about the legacy of slavery and possibilities for redress, reparations, and memorial in our own time.

Daring to be Free

Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World

Hans Ulrich Obrist

When Hans Ulrich was a young boy, he was knocked down by a speeding car. Hospitalized for weeks, he discovered the healing powers of art. Once he was able to travel again, he began to set out alone, on night trains, to meet artists in their studios across Europe. 
 From these early youthful encounters with the art world to his first exhibition in his Zurich kitchen, and even penning 250 postcards while trapped by an avalanche in Val Bregaglia, Obrist takes us through the formative experiences that made him.Part unputdownable coming-of-age story, part tour de force of the contemporary art world, part user’s manual on how to live driven by curiosity, conversation, and not least hope, Life in Progress is an enchanting ode to what engaging with art and the people around us boundlessly affords.

Life in Progress

Carlo Rovelli

These seven short lessons guide us, with simplicity and clarity, through the scientific revolution that shook physics in the twentieth century and still continues to shake us today. In this enchanting overview of modern physics, Carlo Rovelli explains Einstein's theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind. 
 
Not since Richard Feynman's celebrated Six Easy Pieces has physics been so vividly, intelligently and entertainingly revealed.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Anniversary Edition

Malcolm Gaskill

Malcolm Gaskill knew two things about his great-uncle Ralph’s wartime adventures: he’d been a prisoner in Italy, and he’d cut his way out of a train with a knife and fork. Apart from that, he’d faded into family folklore, lost to view. Until, one hot afternoon in an English country garden, a chance conversation set Gaskill on his uncle’s trail… 
 
What Ralph really did in the war was, he discovers, even more extraordinary than the exaggerations of family myth. From last-ditch fighting in the Libyan desert and incarceration in a Puglian prisoner-of-war camp, to desperate, dramatic escapes and the assuming of an entirely new identity among the peasants and partisans of the Italian Alps, Gaskill traces a life transformed by conflict, while lifting the curtain on a long-forgotten episode of the Second World War. 
 
Yet The Glass Mountain is about more than war: it’s a haunting exploration of what it means to encounter the past, and how we remember, forget and recover it. As he follows his uncle’s path through dusty archives and the landscapes, towns and villages of present-day Italy, Gaskill finds himself confronted by questions that go to the heart of how we think about the people who came before us: Why do stories matter? How much of the past can ever be true?

The Glass Mountain

Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy

Mark Mazower

For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. 
 
The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in this piercingly brilliant book. More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. 
 
Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn.

On Antisemitism

A Word in History

Steven Pinker

As a cognitive scientist, the ultimate subject of Steven Pinker’s fascination is how we think about each other’s thoughts, ad infinitum. It sounds impossible, but Steven Pinker shows that we do it all the time. This awareness, which we experience as something that is public or “out there,” is called common knowledge, and it has a momentous impact on our social, political, and economic lives. 
 
Common knowledge, Pinker shows, can make sense of many of life’s enigmas: financial bubbles and crashes, revolutions that come out of nowhere, the posturing and pretence of diplomacy, the eruption of social media shaming mobs and academic cancel culture, the awkwardness of a first date. But people also go to great lengths to avoid common knowledge—to ensure that even if everyone knows something, they can’t know that everyone else knows they know it. And so we get rituals like benign hypocrisy, veiled bribes and threats, sexual innuendo, and pretending not to see the elephant in the room. 
 
In exploring the paradoxes of human behaviour, When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows… invites us to understand the ways we try to get into each other’s heads, and the harmonies, hypocrisies, and outrages that result.

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...

Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage

Charles Moore

With unparalleled authority and dramatic detail, Charles Moore's definitive biography of Margaret Thatcher, now published in a single volume to mark the centenary of her birth, presents the whole history of the woman who transformed Britain and the world. 
 
With unique access to Thatcher’s private and governmental papers and extensive interviews with her, her family, and colleagues, Moore gives readers an unsurpassed portrait of her early years, her rise to power and her revolutionary eleven and a half years as Prime Minister. He guides us through her economic battles to her zenith at the Falklands crisis, her extraordinary three election victories and her dramatic final days in office. 
 
Moore describes her sometimes combative relationships with senior colleagues – especially Geoffrey Howe, Nigel Lawson and Michael Heseltine - who contributed both to her rise and to her fall. He portrays the strength and importance of her relationship with Queen Elizabeth II, while offering a candid account of their difficulties. He also brilliantly conveys Thatcher’s pivotal role on the world stage – including in the ending of the Cold War, the fierce battle over the future of Europe, and her relationships with Reagan, Gorbachev, Bush, Kohl and Mandela. He shows how she was a pioneer – of privatization, which has since been copied all over the world, and as the first leader of a major state to understand climate change. He explains how ‘Thatcherism’ became a set of ideas both welcomed and contested across the world. 
 
Throughout, Moore illuminates the complexities of Thatcher’s character – her determination, boldness and the challenges she faced as a woman in a male-dominated political world - but is by no means uncritical. He shows what was remarkable about her and what was infuriating, her extraordinary strengths and sometimes surprising vulnerability. 
 
This edition combines the insights of the original three volumes, providing a comprehensive portrait of one of the most influential figures of her age, whose life reminds us today of the power of great leadership.

Margaret Thatcher

The Authorized Biography: Single-volume Centenary Edition

Sara Ahmed

‘Behind many disasters are unheard complaints’ 
 
To complain is an intimate, dangerous act. Whether it’s speaking up about racism in the workplace or taking a stand against sexual harassment at university, the act of complaining to an institution can leave you isolated and undermined, all while the original injustice remains unresolved. Time and time again, we see these unanswered complaints compound to disastrous effect. 
 
In No is Not a Lonely Utterance, Sara Ahmed dissects the anatomy of a complaint, revealing how institutions create hostile environments that stigmatize complainers, and charts a way we can listen to grievances with ‘feminist ears’: going beyond mere validation and seeking instead to address the root causes of injustice and inequality. 
 
Weaving together testimonies from various walks of life, Ahmed shows us what we learn about the ways institutions exercise their power when complaints are raised, and indeed what we learn about our capacity to collectivize and create social bonds through complaint. In doing so, she inspires us to create better environments for our life’s work.

No Is Not a Lonely Utterance

The Art and Activism of Complaining

Catherine Clarke

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. 
 
These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time. 
 
A History of England in 25 Poems is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Catherine Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story.

A History of England in 25 Poems

Christopher Clark

Now part of the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian and German port of Königsberg has always been a somewhat sleepy place, doomed to be famous for having once been the residence of Immanuel Kant. But in the late 1830s, just for a short while, it became famous for all the wrong reasons.Christopher Clark’s brilliant new book is the result of many years of fascination with this strange case. Sensational accusations were bandied about, implying that beneath the town’s somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. For the Prussian authorities this was just the sort of moral collapse they feared most. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which had unsettled a generation, every lapse could be seen as the harbinger of new storms.A Scandal in Königsberg beautifully brings to life a time and a place that we would now situate in the tranquil ‘Biedermeier’ years between the seismic upheavals of the 1810s and 1840s. But there is a timeless quality to this small vortex of turbulence, in which spiritual hunger, vanity, professional rivalry, sexual incontinence, naivety and sheer human waywardness threatened to tear a city apart.

A Scandal in Königsberg

Lea Ypi

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?

Indignity

A Life Reimagined

Clare Jackson

James VI & I, who died 400 years ago, was one of Britain’s most consequential and interesting monarchs, not least in creating the British monarchy itself by joining the English and Scottish thrones. A major intellectual, James's preoccupations ranged from witchcraft and theological controversy to hunting, diplomacy, poetry and sartorial fashion. The 'Mirror of Great Britain' was a spectacular jewel that gave symbolic endorsement to James's vision of British union, but mirrors themselves — with their limitless capacity to magnify, illuminate and distort — supplied James with one of his favourite literary metaphors.Ruler of Scotland for nearly four decades before his accession to the English throne in 1603, James was a ‘cradle king’ whose long reigns encompassed extraordinary dramas, including his abduction in the ‘Ruthven Raid’ in 1582 and his attempted assassination in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In his lifetime, James often confounded contemporaries’ expectations while his posthumous reputation has been distorted by crude stereotypes.Closely attentive to James’s own words — in numerous publications, manuscript musings, topical verse and private correspondence — Clare Jackson's wonderful new book tells the story of this highly unusual monarch with great flair and insight.

The Mirror of Great Britain

A Life of James VI & I

Dan Wang

America used to pride itself on ambition. Today, it looks stuck. Meanwhile, China has been busy building the future. Over the past six years, technology analyst Dan Wang lived through China’s astonishing, messy progress and the dissolution of its relationship to the West. 
 
In Breakneck, Wang offers a new framework for understanding China — which helps us to see global geopolitics more clearly too. While China is an engineering state, fearlessly building megaprojects, America is a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad. Building big has fuelled China’s economic ascent. At the same time, social engineering has led to unbearable costs, including the traumas of zero-Covid and the one-child policy. Wang traverses China’s dazzling metropolises and factory complexes, blending political and economic analysis with reportage to show how the Communist Party’s darkening ambitions have unsettled its people. 
 
As the US and China are gearing up for a new Cold War, Breakneck reveals both the remarkable strengths and the appalling weaknesses of the engineering state. China has learned from the West's successes and failures - and now we in turn can learn from China, not least by taking its global ambitions seriously.

Breakneck

China's Quest to Engineer the Future

Peter Brannen

All life is made from CO2 . It was there at earth’s birth, and throughout evolution. It has kept our planet habitable for hundreds of millions of years. It has given us all the splendours of the world we know today. And yet it also holds the potential for life's destruction. 
 
In this gripping adventure through eras and places, award-winning science journalist Peter Brannen tells the story of the world’s most important molecule. We travel from the beginning of time all the way up to our present reality, witnessing the staggering journey that CO2 has undertaken. 
 
As we watch its movements through the rocks, the air, the oceans and living beings over four billion years, we come to see more clearly what it means for us to be churning through ancient life – in the form of fossil fuels – as we power our industrial world. We are, Brannen shows, performing an unprecedented experiment on our planet. If we are to avoid its catastrophic consequences, we must all begin to deepen our understanding of this curious substance, which has given us everything from the very first life forms on earth to the business titans reshaping our planet today.

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything

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

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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