Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Simukai Chigudu

In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’. 
 
Simukai Chigudu was one of the first generation to be born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe. Growing up he heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, how his father had been imprisoned and tortured as a student before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerilla, and how his mother had thrown off the strictures of the past to build a successful career helping other women do the same. Yet Simukai’s early life was also steeped in British tradition. With his classmates he sang English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket. 
 
Then, in 2002, he was one of thousands to leave the country as it descended into political violence and economic collapse. His new home: a boarding school in the north of England. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself. 
 
Chasing Freedom is his profound and remarkably moving story – that of a boy shaped through his parents’ buried trauma by the great currents of late-twentieth century history. It is the story of a family haunted by the cause of liberation, and of a new generation, still searching for their promised freedom.

Chasing Freedom

Coming of Age at the End of Empire

Louise Brangan

When the gates of the last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996, Ireland moved on. Or so it seemed. 
 
'Compelling, measured and deeply felt' ANNE ENRIGHT 
'A terrific yet harrowing unearthing of Ireland's shadowland. A landmark book' RORY CARROLL 
 
Following independence in 1922, Ireland began to chase a dream: to become the perfect Catholic nation. But purity had a price. Throughout the twentieth century, thousands of women and girls who did not conform – the wayward, the poor, the disabled, the abused – were sent to the Magdalene Laundries. Each was perceived to have fallen in some way. Once locked inside, their hair was shorn off, their names were erased – and then they were put to work. They washed, they scrubbed and they prayed, labouring in an attempt to salvage their souls. 
 
This remains one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the last Laundry’s closure, The Fallen is the forgotten story of the Magdalene Laundries, told through the voices of the women who endured them, the nuns who presided over them and the communities that lived alongside them. 
 
Unflinching and compassionate, Louise Brangan draws on archives and survivors’ testimonies to dismantle long-held myths about what the Laundries were, who was sent to these places of violence and secrecy, and why. As we move from the past into the present, Brangan compels us not only to confront this shameful history, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember? 
 
'Critical, informed and beautifully written' MÁIRÉAD ENRIGHT 
'Breaking silence is a catalyst for change' CAELAINN HOGAN 
 
Winner of the 2024 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award

The Fallen

The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence

Gavin Newsom

California Governor Gavin Newsom's intimate and poignant account of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics 
 
‘Go slow,’ his political elders advised him, but Gavin Newsom has never known such a speed. For Newsom, the California Dream is what lured his father’s family from Ireland, six generations ago. His great-great-grandfather, a cop, walked a beat in San Francisco, where almost 150 years later Newsom would be elected as mayor. 
 
Newsom has never lived anywhere but California. His childhood was spent being tugged between two worlds: his mother worked three jobs in order to care for her children while his father, a close friend of the Getty family, brought Newsom into a world of wealth and connections. But the vantage point was valuable: he inherited his mother’s perseverance and his father’s reverence of California – not only its wildness, but its opportunity. 
 
In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom traces the forces that have defined his ambitions as a politician. As mayor of San Francisco, he made waves when he violated state law in order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He launched bold efforts to counter climate change, improve mental health care, and enhance gun safety. Elected as governor and entering office into immediate hyper-partisan headwinds from Washington, DC, Newsom has constantly and consistently stuck his neck out. 
 
Here, he reflects on the long journey that ultimately shaped him into one of the most recognizable and accomplished elected officials in America.

Young Man in a Hurry

A Memoir of Discovery

Stefan Aust

The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of post-war Europe. A group of young people, most of them from solid, middle-class backgrounds, took the law into their own hands, and by means of arson, bombing, kidnap and murder sought to alter the direction of national, and indeed international, politics. 
 
Rooted in the student protest movement of the late 1960s, the story of the group begins in May 1970 with the freeing of Andreas Baader - imprisoned for planting fire bombs in protest against the Vietnam War - by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and others. They spent the years that followed requisitioning apartments from left-wing sympathisers, stealing cars and robbing banks in preparation for attacks on US military bases. 
 
After an intense manhunt, the ringleaders of the group, which now called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), were finally captured in 1972. Their prolonged trial began in 1975 and lasted for almost 2 years, in the course of which Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell. The other members of the group were convicted and received life sentences. 
 
The 'war of six against sixty million' (Heinrich Böll) reached its climax in the autumn of 1977 when supporters tried to secure their release by kidnapping the president of the German Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, and later by hijacking a Lufthansa jet, which was eventually captured by German special forces at Mogadishu airport. On the morning the rescue was announced, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were all found dead in their cells. The 'German Autumn' marked the violent peak of a journey that had begun with peaceful protests against the American war in Vietnam : moral outrage had turned into blatant immorality. 
 
Stefan Aust's utterly absorbing account of these events reads like a first-class thriller. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is the definitive chronicle of seven years that changed Germany.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Simon Schama

Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Simon Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history of Britain, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. 
 
What makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain - one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it? 
 
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I. 
 
The first in a series, this volume paints a rich and vivid portrait of the life of the British people and their nation.

A History of Britain - Volume 1

At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

The final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain spans centuries, crosses the breadth of the empire and covers a vast expanse of topics - from the birth of feminism to the fate of freedom. 
 
The Fate of the Empire asks crucial questions about the nature of empire, journeying from celebrations of industrial and imperialist power at the Great Exhibition, to the catastrophic Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Through the military and economic shocks and traumas of our past, Schama asks the question that is still with us - is the immense weight of our history a blessing or a curse, a gift or a millstone around the neck of our future? 
 
This third and final volume in the series is a vast compelling history, made more so by the lively storytelling and big bold characters at the heart of the action. But alongside flamboyant heroes, like Nelson and Churchill, Schama recalls unsung heroines and virtually unknown enemies. Alongside the grand ideas, he exposes the grand illusions that cost untold lives.

A History of Britain - Volume 3

The Fate of Empire 1776-2000

James Fox

Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores. 
 
Travelling the length of Britain, from the Scilly Isles to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox seeks out the country’s last remaining master craftspeople. Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bell-founders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life — one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could shape our future. 
 
For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, enriching even the most modest things. And in this increasingly digital age, it is perhaps more valuable than ever. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

Craftland

A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

Michael Taylor

The Order of the Illuminati was a secret society of intellectuals, judges, soldiers, politicians and poets who genuinely sought to infiltrate and overturn the system of world power from within. Their ambitions were progressive and democratic at a time, the late eighteenth century, when Church and monarchy were all powerful. Dukes and Princes, the likes of Goethe and Mozart, joined – but in reality their effects were minimal. Within a few years of its founding, the order was outed and banned, its leaders prosecuted, exiled and shamed, and its life was over. But shortly after came the French Revolution, and so shocking was the upheaval and carnage that, in the absence of an adequate-seeming explanation, the Illuminati were blamed – and so the conspiracy theory was born. 
 
Grippingly told, richly peopled and based on original research, this is the true story that lies behind the original conspiracy theory from which all others have since derived, as well as the story the theory itself as it recurred over and over again – in Britain, Ireland, America and Europe. Through the great upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it shows how the theory became entwined with antisemitism and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, gained momentum through the rise of America’s Christian Right and even infused the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, before finding new leases of life in the paranoid thinking of 9/11 Truthers, Qanon, the ’Great Reset’ and the Manosphere. 
 
The Illuminati has a deep and unsettling hold on the public imagination and has done for centuries. This book, the first full account of its kind, explains how and why the myth was born and presents a disturbing account of its wholly undiminished power.

Illuminati

The History of a Conspiracy Theory

Ian Mortimer

This book tells the story of Mearsdon, the house where Ian Mortimer lives in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor. We very rarely have a continuous account of a particular place over a long stretch of history, but Mortimer has a documentary record of all the owners who lived there since the 1260s – although the origins of the building probably date back to the eleventh century. 
 
Blending the broadest national history and the most intimate local events with a description of changing daily life from the Norman Conquest to the present day, Mortimer acquaints us with the people who passed through the house – from its first known owner, John the Palmer, to the folklore collector Charlie Laycock, who turned the house into a museum in the early twentieth century, to Mortimer’s family living there today. And along the way he shows how national events – from the Black Death to the Prayerbook Rebellion, from the Civil Wars to the two world wars – affected a rural community in deepest Devon over a time span of 900 years. 
 
The result is fascinating social history like no other. Bringing to it the brilliant imagination and storytelling gifts that made his Time Traveller’s Guides such a huge success, Mortimer introduces us to lords and merchants, ale brewers and peasants, clergymen and murderers, to create a continuously evolving story. Seeing through its windows, we not only glimpse at the people who lived in the house over the ages; we also see through their eyes as they look out at the changing world around them.

Through the Windows of an Ordinary House: A History of England

Robert A Caro

Hailed as 'the greatest biography of our era' (The Times) this is the fourth part of Robert Caro's multi-award-winning best-selling work on American President Lyndon Johnson. 
 
The Passage of Power, 'the series' crowning volume' (Economist), spans the years 1958 to 1964, arguably the most crucial years in the life of Johnson and pivotal years for American history. This era saw some of the most frustrating moments of Johnson's career, but also some of his most triumphant. His battle with the Kennedy brothers over the 1960 Democratic nomination for president was a bitter one, and the ensuing years of Johnson's vice-presidency were marked with humiliation. But, thrust into power following the assassination of J. F. Kennedy, Johnson grasped the presidential role with unprecedented skill. Caro also provides a fresh perspective on Kennedy’s assassination from Johnson's viewpoint, and penetrates deep into what it was like for him to assume a position of such power at a time of national crisis. 
 
The Passage of Power documents Johnson's extraordinary early presidency, forcing previously abandoned bills on the budget and civil rights through an uncooperative Congress and striving to achieve what he saw to be the highest standard of office. 
 
In The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro shows a delicacy of touch and a profoundness of insight into the state of a nation under the hand of a political master. Collectively these volumes constitute a major history of America in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.

The Passage of Power

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 4)

Simon Morrison

An erudite and entertaining history of Moscow, a city whose rich past offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics 
 
Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, eleven time zones, and nearly one hundred and fifty million people, some thirteen million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a ‘big village’ – the demeaning nickname the St. Petersburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbour – into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. 
 
That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic – not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back to the city’s founding as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of external forces – from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler – set their sights on Moscow, bolstering its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defence and resurrection. 
 
Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, Morrison shows us that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past, but also to grasp the grim logic of its present. 
 
A Kingdom and a Village is a magisterial biography of a place – and an essential guide to a people and a nation.

A Kingdom and a Village

A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

A K Benjamin

What does it take to care for a stranger? Really care. 
 
The Case for Love is a reflection on a career treating patients with brain trauma - people whose thoughts and feelings are largely unknowable - and how and why those treatments failed. 
 
It is a reconstruction of three haunting cases in which the patients were tragically misunderstood - and an attempt through the power of the imagination to understand and make amends. 
 
It then describes the author's abandonment of his career and his tumultuous quest for healing and redemption. 
 
It is also a story of intimate relationships, pets, fatherhood and heartbreak, culminating in a moment of psychedelic transcendence and rebirth. 
 
It is about the overpowering need for connection - and how, increasingly, we are trapped in ourselves. 
 
It is a meditation on empathy and an act of atonement. 
 
It is a unique, hybrid work of clinical case study and pure invention that destroys the boundary between fact and fiction in order to bring us face-to-face with the shocking, liberating truth. 
 
__________ 
 
Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad 
 
'Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka's 'The Country Doctor', and you still won't quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book' William Fiennes 
 
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I've read' Olivia Laing 
 
'A perfectly extraordinary - not to mention extraordinarily perfect - tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book' Stephen Fry 
 
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths' Stewart Lee 
 
'A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story' Roddy Doyle 
 
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

The Case for Love

My Adventures In Other Minds

Barton Gellman

'A remarkable, authentic and chilling exposé of a global conspiracy that reads like a first-rate conspiracy thriller: a book of gripping, compulsive and disturbing impact' William Boyd 
 
Dark Mirror is the ultimate inside account of the vast, global surveillance network that now pervades all our lives. 
 
Barton Gellman’s informant called himself ‘Verax’ – the truth-teller. It was only later that Verax unmasked himself as Edward Snowden. But Gellman’s primary role in bringing Snowden’s revelations to light, for which he shared the Pulitzer prize, is only the beginning of this gripping real-life spy story. Snowden unlocked the door: here Gellman describes what he found on the other side over the course of a years-long journey of investigation. It is also the story of his own escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries after he discovered his own name on a file in the NSA document trove and realised that he himself was under attack. 
 
Through a gripping narrative of paranoia, clandestine operations and jaw-dropping revelations, Dark Mirror delineates in full for the first time the hidden superstructure that connects government espionage with Silicon Valley and the most powerful corporation whose name you’ve never heard. Who is spying on us and why? Here are the answers.

Dark Mirror

Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State

Ben Dark

The half a million species of plant alive today are a mere 3% of the vast number of plant species ever to have existed. All share a single common origin: the first plant-like algae to wash up on land 484 million years ago. 
 
Through the stories of sixteen plant families, each representing a distinct evolutionary lineage, Green Kingdom tells the epic story of how plant-life emerged, adapted and came to shape our planet, from the development of stems, leaves, trunks and seeds, through to the emergence of flowers, poisons, carnivory and parasitism. Taking us into the lives and minds of the adventurers, poets, philosophers and scientists who pieced this staggeringly rich and dramatic story together over two millennia of observation and enquiry, Dark reveals how each turning point in the development of plants can be traced to a defining event in the planet’s history: catastrophic asteroid strikes, volcanic chain eruptions, sudden glaciations, or the gradual parting of continents. 
 
Reanimating ancient lost worlds, and bringing the wonder and stupendous variety of plants to life as never before, Green Kingdom is both a hidden history of the earth and a family saga, as rich and unexpected as any story ever told.

Green Kingdom

The Family History of Plants

Camilla Cavendish

Award-winning journalist Camilla Cavendish embarks on a compassionate yet frank investigation into why we’re having fewer children, how it's changing the world and what we should do about it 
 
Camilla Cavendish travels across cultures and continents to investigate one of the most intimate decisions we all make – whether or not to have children. In Britain, one in five couples have no children, and almost half of all families have only one. The populations of China, Japan, Russia and Italy are shrinking rapidly. Poland and South Korea could all but vanish from the map. Pro-natalists wail that feminism has killed the family. Governments throw money at childcare subsidies. Would-be grandparents wring their hands at the apparent selfishness of the young. But the conversation is in the wrong place. 
 
As birth rates plummet, Cavendish offers a startling blend of data and stories to uncover what is really driving the baby gap. Meeting people from a diverse range of ethnicities and experiences, she reveals a tapestry of motivations – from a dating recession to a loss of faith in the future; from the pressures of modern parenting to infertility struggles; from the atomisation of society to a deeply human instinct to mirror each other. 
 
Interviewing voices from across the new political divide, Cavendish warns against weaponising babies. She encounters women going it alone and men who’ve missed out, finds communities quietly bucking the trend and speaks to scientists on the verge of extending the biological clock. 
 
By examining the profound implications of a world where fewer children are born, Generation Maybe argues for a future in which we respect the happily childfree, while genuinely empowering those who long for children. Incisive and humane, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about the world we may – or may not – choose to make for the next generation.

Generation Maybe

Why We're Having Fewer Children, and What It Means for Us All

Stephen Greenblatt

Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. 
 
From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s inspiration and rival, who helped to bring England out of the cultural darkness and into the light. 
 
In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry – which to him is a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. 
 
What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of many others, including his youthful collaborator William Shakespeare. By the time of his murder in a Deptford tavern in 1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe will be the most celebrated dramatist of his time. 
 
Stephen Greenblatt grippingly reconstructs the involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his masterpieces about power and its costs. And he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world – involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still. 
 
Dark Renaissance is a scintillating life of a writer whose blazing talent catapulted England from cultural backwater to crucible of creativity.

Dark Renaissance

The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe

David Van Reybrouck

Whenever there are elections, the results are the same: fear-mongering, division and broken promises. Against Elections offers a new diagnosis &ndash; and an ancient remedy. 
 
'Excellent . . . Why does our system keep electing people whose incomes, assets, interests and psychology are hugely at variance with ours? Because that is what it is designed to do' George Monbiot, Guardian 
 
'Very persuasive . . . invigorating' Daniel Finkelstein, The Times 
 
As this ingenious book shows, the original purpose of elections was not democracy: it was to exclude the people from power by appointing an elite to govern over them. 
 
In fact, for most of its 3000-year history, democracy did not involve elections at all: members of the public were appointed to positions in government through a combination of volunteering and lottery. 
 
Based on studies and trials from around the globe, this hugely influential manifesto presents the practical case for a true democracy &ndash; one that actually works. 
 
Urgent, heretical and completely convincing, Against Elections leaves only one question to be answered: what are we waiting for? 
 
'Riveting' Irish Examiner 
'Persuasive' Financial Times 
'A convincing case' Observer

Against Elections

The Case for Democracy

Anthony Scaramucci

An explosive insider story of the biggest mistakes in history and how to put them right — from the man who saw America’s wrong moves up close, White House insider turned host of the hit podcast, The Rest is Politics: US 
 
We’re living in an age of deep political anger and frustration. Where did it come 
from, and how do we get out? 
 
Anthony Scaramucci’s electrifying answer – rooted in history, business, and first-hand experience – reveals the true origins of America’s current crisis, charting how both political parties made a series of catastrophic decisions that dismantled a postwar period of unprecedented stability and prosperity. Each decision deepened inequality, corroded trust, and fueled the anger that empowered Donald Trump’s rise and his assault on democracy. 
 
The story Scaramucci tells is ‘money-point-of-view history’: it gallops from Wall St to Main St, from the boardroom to the Situation Room. A product of the working class who rose to the heights of finance and power, he has witnessed first-hand how money and ambition have always lived in tension with ideals. And he brings a rare skin-in-the game perspective to showing how both parties failed the people they once represented. 
 
It will take courage and tough action but in All The Wrong Moves he sets up the challenge to cut through partisanship and embrace some right ones. 
 
All the Wrong Moves is not about right and left. It’s about right and wrong. It is a portrait of America which has the clarity of an X-ray and is a blistering display of storytelling and analysis.

All the Wrong Moves

How Three Catastrophic Decisions and Years of Sh*tshow Politics Led to Trump – and How We Find a Way Out

Lady Hale

Our laws and justice system might touch our lives when we have an accident, a wrong is done to us, or we have a family difficulty. They are vast, ancient and cover everything from the personal to the regulation of our government. But to most of us, they are a web of intimidating institutions and practices. 
 
Lady Hale – former President of the Supreme Court and an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and for the causes she has championed – shows us how the law is on our side. Taking us into the complexities of real courts and real decisions, we see that we all have rights: schoolchildren, disabled people, workers, minorities and patients. 
 
Here are true stories from every part of the justice system, from lowly benefits tribunals and magistrates’ courts to the lofty heights of the Royal Courts of Justice and the Old Bailey; stories about the dilemmas of deciding what is right and just, and which invite you to say where justice lies before knowing what the courts decided. From mundane situations to the dramatic and the extraordinary, we see how the people whose needs the law is designed to protect actually experience it. 
 
With the Law on Our Side is a citizen’s guidebook to the law in our land, a top-to-bottom tour with a supremely expert guide. In captivating stories, it tells us what the law is about, how it works and most importantly why we should all care about it.

With the Law on Our Side

How the law works for everyone and how we can make it work better

How the Law Works and How We Can Make It Work Better for Everyone

Colin Turnbull

The Forest People is an astonishingly intimate and life-enhancing account of a hunter-gatherer tribe living in harmony with nature -- and an all-time classic of anthropology. 
 
For three years, Colin Turnbull lived with an isolated group of Pygmies deep in the forest of the African Congo, experiencing their daily life first-hand. He attended their hunting parties and initiation ceremonies, witnessed their music and their rituals, observed their quarrels and love affairs. He documented them as an anthropologist but was accepted among them as a friend. 
 
A ground-breaking work in its time, The Forest People made him one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. It remains a transporting account of an earthly paradise and of a legendary and fascinating people. 
 
With a new foreword by Horatio Clare.

The Forest People

Shirley Hughes

The book begins with a small girl in West Kirby who is obsessed with comics: The Daily Sketch, The Daily Express and The Mirror-each of these newspapers helped to shape one of our finest illustrators. Shirley's story takes us from this gentle start, through the second world war, and to a career, which began with Art School in a blitzed Liverpool, led to Oxford, and then to London. Shirley reflects on art, and her own development, in a tale which is fascinating and full of personalities. She describes her own creative process as 'the nearest thing I know to flying into the sun' and it is this passion for the world of illustration, which shines through the book and gives it a unique personality. Lavishly illustrated throughout with sketches from her Italian sketchbooks, doodles from boring meetings, roughs from what would later become classic picture books and perfectly executed paintings done just for the fun of it, this book will be a treasured gift for those who love art and those who have grown up with the enduring characters from Shirley's books who inhabit so many homes through this country and beyond.

A Life Drawing

Ian Watt

This is the story of a most ingenious invention: the novel. Desribed for the first time in The Rise of The Novel, Ian Watt's landmark classic reveals the origins and explains the success of the most popular literary form of all time. 
 
In the space of a single generation, three eighteenth-century writers -- Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding -- invented an entirely new genre of writing: the novel. With penetrating and original readings of their works, as well as those of Jane Austen, who further developed and popularised it, he explains why these authors wrote in the way that they did, and how the complex changes in society – the emergence of the middle-class and the new social position of women – gave rise to its success. Heralded as a revelation when it first appeared, The Rise of The Novel remains one of the most widely read and enjoyable books of literary criticism ever written, capturing precisely and satisfyingly what it is about the form that so enthrals us.

The Rise Of The Novel

Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding

Richard Fortey

'A very well written book about geology and geological history' Sir David Attenborough, The Times 
 
'I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western locomotive took me on a journey westwards from London further and further back into geological time, from the age of mammals to the age of trilobites...' 
 
So begins this enthralling exploration of time and place in which Richard Fortey peels away the top layer of the land to reveal the hidden landscape - the rocks which contain the story of distant events, which dictate not only the personality of the landscape, but the nature of the soil, the plants that grow in it and the regional characteristics of the buildings. We travel with him as our guide throughout the British Isles and as the rocks change so we learn to read the clues they contain: that Britain was once divided into two parts separated by an ocean, that Scottish malt whisky, Harris tweed, slate roofs and thatched cottages can be traced back to tumultuous events which took place many millions of years ago. The Hidden Landscape has become a classic in popular geology since its first publication in 1993. This new edition is fully updated and beautifully illustrated.

The Hidden Landscape

A Journey into the Geological Past

Simon Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. 
 
From the beginning of July 1637, battles raged on for 200 years - both at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe, America and India. Most would be wars of faith - waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'. 
 
The British Wars is a story of revolution and reaction, inspiration and disenchantment, of progress and catastrophe, and Schama's evocative narrative brings it vividly to life.

A History of Britain - Volume 2

The British Wars 1603-1776

Dominique Moisi

Samuel Huntington's landmark book, The Clash of Civilizations, presented a vision of a world divided by cultural differences, national interests, and political ideologies. In The Geopolitics of Emotion, Dominique Moïsi brilliantly demonstrates that the world is nowadays more likely to be shaped by the 'clash of emotions'. 
 
Moïsi contends that both Europe and the United States are dominated by a fear of the 'other' and by the loss of their national identity and purpose. For Muslims and Arabs, the combination of historical grievances, exclusion from the economic boon of globalization, and civil and religious warfare has created a culture of humiliation that is quickly devolving into a culture of hatred. 
 
And as the West and the Muslim world lock horns, Asia, able to concentrate on building a better future, has come to embody 'the culture of hope'. 
 
By making clear the driving emotions behind today's headlines, Dominique Moisi offers a better understanding of the world we live in and perhaps a more constructive approach to the conflicts that plague us.

The Geopolitics of Emotion

How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope are Reshaping the World

Jerry White

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert. 
 
London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. 
 
In Jerry White’s acclaimed history of London’s magnificent and boisterous rebirth we witness the astonishing drama of daily life in the midst of this burgeoning city.

London In The Eighteenth Century

A Great and Monstrous Thing

Rachel Morley

A transporting and gloriously entertaining journey through the hidden lives of England’s rural parish churches 
 
The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a deserted rural church only to see it transform – through her expert eyes – into a portal to the past, one that brings England’s people and history to life in the most colourful, moving and unexpected ways. 
 
Through their wall-paintings and monuments, their graffiti and plaques, carved beams and crypts, their jumble of furniture and oddities, Morley shows these buildings to be the living expression of centuries of communal history and folk culture, time capsules of wonder and connection. The stories they contain are both boisterous and tender, raucous and sublime, transporting us to the ancient and medieval past, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble. 
 
Often the oldest and most significant building in a settlement, churches are where for centuries births have been celebrated, relationships consecrated and deaths memorialised, where the great and enduring mysteries have been contemplated, and where the ghosts of countless, unnamed, normal lives are to be found. As Rachel Morley shows, the concentration of human experience within their walls is so rich and so layered, that they offer as close an encounter with the past as it is possible to get.

Church Crawling

The Secret Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches

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