Alex Kapranos

Alex Kerr is an American writer and Japanologist whose previous books include Lost Japan and Another Kyoto (with Kathy Arlyn Sokol). He was the first foreigner to be awarded the Shincho Gakugei Literature Prize for the best work of non-fiction published in Japan.

Alex Kerr

Alex Kershaw

Alex Kingston

Alex Kingston is TV royalty, celebrating 45 years in the business, from her debut in Grange Hill in 1980 to the title role (and BAFTA nomination) in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders, starring in over 150 ER episodes and becoming part of Doctor Who folklore as River Song. Her appearance in Doctor Who was meant to be a one-off but she became a regular and remains a fan favourite.

Alex Kirk grew up in the seaside town of Cleethorpes, which has brilliant beaches and the best fish and chips in the entire world. 
 
He has worked in a fish finger factory, as a plumber, a gardener, an English teacher, and for the last twenty-five years as a screenwriter, actor and comedian. Alex has written comedy shows for both radio and television, as well as being part of the writing team behind the wonderful Paddington 2 and Wonka. As an actor he has appeared in many TV productions such as My Family, Fresh Meat, The Detectorists and Coronation Street. 
 
He now lives in London with his family and a cat called Jonesey. This is his very first book.

Alex Kirk

Alex Laird is a medical herbalist with more than 20 years' experience. Trained in biomedicine and plant pharmacology, she treats patients in the only NHS herbal clinic based in a UK hospital at Whipps Cross. Alex is a visiting lecturer, and has published clinical research, and is the co-founder of the charity Living Medicine.

Alex Laird

Alex Latimer is an author and illustrator living in Cape Town, which is why he regularly has to shoo baboons out of his lounge. 
 
Alex's book Lion VS Rabbit won the Hampshire Picture Book Award 2014

Alex Latimer

Alex Livingston

Alex Manson-Smith is a journalist and copywriter. She has written lifestyle features for The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Evening Standard and Observer, as well as award-winning commercials for Google, YouTube and Nike.

Alex Manson-Smith

Alex Marshall grew up in the area where London sinks into Essex. He's an award-winning journalist who has been writing about music and politics for over a decade, and who has been published in the Guardian and by the BBC, amongst others. He started investigating national anthems back in 2008. This is his first book.

Alex Marshall

Alex Maunder

Alex McBride is a criminal barrister. He is the author of the 'Common Law' column in Prospect magazine and has contributed to the New Statesman and various BBC programmes, including From Our Own Correspondent.

Alex McBride

Alex McCarthy was born in Cardiff and grew up in South Wales. An alumna of London Contemporary Dance School, she worked as a dancer and choreographer for a number of years on stage, TV and film. In 2017, following a career change and several years of writing, Alex began to write this novel. She has a daughter and stepdaughter, and lives in Wales.

Alex McCarthy

Alex Michaelides was born in Cyprus to an English mother and a Greek-Cypriot father. He has an M.A. in English from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and an M.A. in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. 
 
The Silent Patient, his first novel, was a Sunday Times bestseller, and debuted at no. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide. The rights have been sold in a record-breaking 50 countries and it has been optioned for film by Plan B. His second novel, The Maidens, was an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and has been optioned for television by Miramax Television and Stone Village. His third thriller, The Fury, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller, and a Waterstones Thriller of the Month pick.

Alex Michaelides

Alex Montgomery

Alex Morris

Alex North was born in Leeds, where he now lives with his wife and son. He studied Philosophy at Leeds University, and prior to becoming a writer he worked there in their sociology department. The Whisper Man was a Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, and is being published in more than 30 languages.

Alex North

Alex O. Imas is Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at the University of Chicago School’s Booth School of Business. He is the recipient of the 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the Review of Financial Studies Rising Scholar Award, the New Investigator Award from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award from the Society of Judgment and Decision Making, the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Behavioral Economics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Alex O. Imas

Alex Owen

Alex Patrick was born in the Kentish town of Dartford in the South-East of England and has been drawing for as long as he can remember. His lifelong love for cartoons, picture books and comics has shaped him into the passionate children’s illustrator he is today. Alex loves creating original characters - he brings an element of fun and humour to each of his illustrations and is often found laughing to himself as he draws.

Alex Patrick

Alex Pavesi lives in Surrey, where he writes full time. He previously worked as a software engineer and before that obtained a PhD in Mathematics. He enjoys puzzles, long walks and recreational lock picking. His debut novel Eight Detectives has been published in more than twenty languages, and was picked by the Sunday Times and the New York Times as one of their books of the year.

Alex Pavesi

Alex Pellew

Alex Pole

Alex Renton is an award-winning writer and reporter whose career has ranged from theatre criticism, food writing and the investigation of child abuse to work as a political correspondent and war reporter in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is also the author of Planet Carnivore and Blood Legacy.

Alex Renton

Alex Richie

Alex Riley is an award-winning science writer and the author of A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It, his first book. He received a best feature award at the 2019 Association of British Science Writers Awards for his reporting on The Friendship Bench, a project that began in Zimbabwe in 2006 and has since provided mental health care to thousands of people in New York. Since leaving academia in 2015, he began writing popular science articles for magazines such as New Scientist, PBS's NOVA Next, BBC Future, Mosaic Science, Aeon, and Nautilus Magazine. He lives in Bristol.

Alex Riley

Alex Scarrow used to be a rock guitarist, then he became a graphic artist, then he decided to be a computer games designer. Finally, he grew up and became an author. He has written a number of successful thrillers and several screenplays, but it's YA fiction that has allowed him to really have fun with the ideas and concepts he was playing around with designing games. Alex lives in Norwich.

Alex Scarrow

Alex Scott MBE is an award-winning broadcaster and former professional footballer. She helped Arsenal in their historic 'quadruple' season, in which they won all of their trophy competitions, and was later appointed as the team's captain. She represented England in 140 appearances with the Lionesses, retiring as the second most-capped England player across the men's and women's game. 
 
Alex is one of the UK's most in-demand presenters, appearing on The One Show, Children in Need, Sport Relief and ITV's The Games. In 2021, she made history as the first permanent female host of BBC's Football Focus. She is an ambassador for the BBC's mental health platform, Headspace, and holds honorary doctorates from the University of East London and University of Hertfordshire.

Alex Scott

Alex Sharp

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Albert Jack

Mr Jack has been nimble and he's been quick, searching through the history of nursery rhymes and he's found out all kind of plum tales, just like little Jack Horner. He's unearthed the answers to some very curious questions... 
 
Who were Mary Quite Contrary and Georgie Porgie? How could Hey Diddle Diddle offer an essential astronomy lesson? And if Ring a Ring a Roses isn't about catching the plague, then what is it really about? This ingenious book delves into the hidden meanings of the nursery rhymes and songs we all know so well and discovers all kinds of strange tales ranging from Viking raids to firewalking and from political rebellion to slaves being smuggled to freedom. 
 
Full of vivid illustrations and with each verse reproduced, here are a multitude of surprising stories you won't be able to resist passing on to everyone you know. Your childhood songs and rhymes will never sound the same again.

Pop Goes the Weasel

The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes

Theodor Herzl

'We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes' 
 
Theodor Herzl's passionate advocacy of the founding of a Jewish state grew out of his conviction that Jews would never be assimilated into the populations in which they lived. Herzl concluded that the only solution for the majority of Jews would be organised emigration to a state of their own. 
 
Herzl's political and social plea was the result of centuries of restrictions, hostility and pogroms against the Jews of Europe. His revolutionary proposal for the solution to anti-Semitism was a Jewish state, where Jews could live in peace, free from persecution - and this hugely influential essay led directly to the creation of Israel. 
 
GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

The Jewish State

Penelope Lively

The only child of divorced parents, Penelope Lively was often sent to stay at her grandparents' country house Golsoncott. Years later, as the house was sold out of the family, she began to piece together the lives of those she knew fifty years before. 
 
In a needlework sampler, she sees her grandmother and the wartime children that she sheltered under her roof in 1940. Potted meat jars remind her of the ritual of doing the flowers for church. The smell of the harness room brings her Aunt Rachel - avant-garde artist, fervent horserider - vividly back to life. 
 
In A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively delves into the domestic past of her former home, and tells of her own youth and the contrasts between life today and the way they lived then.

A House Unlocked

Jane Robinson

In 1869, when five women enrolled at university for the first time in British history, the average female brain was thought to be 150 grams lighter than a man's. Doctors warned that if women studied too hard their wombs would wither and die. When the Cambridge Senate held a vote on whether women students should be allowed official membership of the university, there was a full-scale riot. 
 
Despite the prejudice and the terrible sacrifices they faced, women from all backgrounds persevered and paved the way for the generations who have followed them since. By the 1920s, being an 'undergraduette' was considered quite the fashionable thing; by the 1930s, women were emerging from universities as anything from aviation engineers to professional academics. 
 
Bluestockings tells an inspiring story - of defiance and determination, of colourful eccentricity and at times heartbreaking loneliness, as well as of passionate friendships, midnight cocoa-parties and glorious self-discovery.

Bluestockings

The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education

Andrew Roberts

On 2 August 1944 Winston Churchill mocked Adolf Hitler in the House of Commons by the rank he had reached in the First World War. 'Russian success has been somewhat aided by the strategy of Herr Hitler, of Corporal Hitler,' Churchill jibed. 'Even military idiots find it difficult not to see some faults in his actions.' 
 
Andrew Roberts's previous book Masters and Commanders studied the creation of Allied grand strategy; The Storm of War now analyses how Axis strategy evolved. Examining the Second World War on every front, Roberts asks whether, with a different decision-making process and a different strategy, the Axis might even have won. Were those German generals who blamed everything on Hitler after the war correct, or were they merely scapegoating their former Führer once he was safely beyond defending himself? The book is full of illuminating sidelights on the principle actors that bring their characters and the ways in which they reached decisions into fresh focus.

The Storm of War

A New History of the Second World War

Iain Sinclair

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire is Iain Sinclair's personal record of the area of north-east London where he has lived for forty years. It is a documentary fiction, seeking to capture the spirit of place, before Hackney succumbs to mendacious green papers, eco boasts, sponsored public art and the Olympic Park gnawing at its edges. It is a message in a bottle, chucked into the flood of the future.

Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

A Confidential Report

Adrian Desmond

James Moore

In this remarkable book Adrian Desmond and James Moore, world authorities on Darwin, give a completely new explanation of how Darwin came to his famous view of evolution, which traced all life to an ancient common ancestor. Darwin was committed to the abolition of slavery, in part because of his family's deeply held beliefs. It was his 'Sacred Cause' and at its core lay a belief in human racial unity. Desmond and Moore show how he extended to all life the idea of human brotherhood held by those who fought to abolish slavery, so developing our modern view of evolution. 
 
Desmond and Moore argue that only by understanding Darwin's Christian abolitionist inheritance can we shed new light on the perplexing mix of personal drive, public hesitancy and scientific radicalism that led him finally in 1871 to publish The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The result is an epoch-making study of this eminent Victorian.

Darwin's Sacred Cause

Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins

Edwin Williamson

Now fully updated to 2009, this acclaimed history of Latin America tells its turbulent story from Columbus to Chavez. Beginning with the Spanish and Portugese conquests of the New World, it takes in centuries of upheaval, revolution and modernization up to the present day, looking in detail at Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Cuba, and gives an overview of the cultural developments that have made Latin America a source of fascination for the world. 
 
'A first-rate work of history ... His cool, scholarly gaze and synthesizing intelligence demystify a part of the world peculiarly prone to myth-making ... This book covers an enormous amount of ground, geographically and culturally' Tony Gould, Independent on Sunday

The Penguin History Of Latin America

New Edition

Robin Lane Fox

This remarkable and original book proposes a new way of thinking about the Greeks and their myths in the age of the great Homeric hymns. It combines a lifetime's familiarity with Greek literature and history with the latest archeological discoveries and the author's own journeys to the main sites in the story to describe how particular Greeks of the eighth century BC travelled east and west around the Mediterranean, and how their extraordinary journeys shaped their ideas of their gods and heroes. It gathers together stories and echoes from many different ancient cultures, not just the Greek - Assyria, Egypt, the Phoenician traders - and ranges from Mesopotamia to the Rio Tinto at Huelva in modern Portugal.

Travelling Heroes

Greeks and their myths in the epic age of Homer

Glyn Williams

For centuries British navigators dreamt of finding the Northwest Passage - the route over the top of North America that would open up the fabulous wealth of Asia to British merchants. We know now that, while several such passages exist, during the period of the search by sailing vessels they were choked by impassable ice. But this knowledge was slowly won, as expedition after expedition, under the most terrible conditions, slowly filled in their patchy and sometimes fatally misleading charts. 
 
Arctic Labyrinth tells this extraordinary story with great skill and brilliance. From the tiny, woefully equipped ships of the first Tudor expeditions to the icebreakers and nuclear submarines of the modern era, Glyn Williams describes how every form of ingenuity has been used to break through or try to get round the nightmarish ice barriers set in a maze of sterile islands. The heroism, folly and horror of these voyages seem almost unbelievable, with entire ships crushed, mass starvation, epics of endurance - and all in pursuit of a goal that ultimately proved futile. 
 
Williams's book is both an important work of exploration and naval history, and a remarkable study in human delusion and fortitude.

Arctic Labyrinth

The Quest for the Northwest Passage

John Titford

The Penguin Dictionary of British Surnames is a useful and fascinating guide to the surnames that offer a unique insight into the place of origin, the occupations - and even the personality traits - of our ancestors. Detailed and informative, this dictionary covers the widest range of British surnames and is essential reading for anyone intrigued by the story of their name and by the history of their family. This edition replaces our out of date (and out of print) 1967 edition.

The Penguin Dictionary of British Surnames

Robert Gildea

Nineteenth-century France was one of the world's great cultural beacons, renowned for its dazzling literature, philosophy, art, poetry and technology. Yet this was also a tumultuous century of political anarchy and bloodshed, where each generation of the French Revolution's 'children' would experience their own wars, revolutions and terrors. 
 
From soldiers to priests, from peasants to Communards, from feminists to literary figures such as Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, Robert Gildea's brilliant new history explores every aspect of these rapidly changing times, and the people who lived through them.

Children of the Revolution

The French, 1799-1914

Jonathan Bate

How did plague turn Shakespeare from a jobbing hack into a courtly poet? How did Bottom's dream rewrite the Bible? How did Shakespeare's plays lead to the deaths of an earl and a king? And why was he the one dramatist of his generation never to be imprisoned? 
 
Weaving a dazzling tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues, Soul of the Age leads us on an exhilarating tour of the extraordinary, colourful and often violent world that shaped and informed Shakespeare's thinking. Written by one of the world's leading experts, it combines almost everything there is to know about the man and his work in one sensational narrative, and brings us closer than ever to understanding what being Shakespeare was actually like.

Soul of the Age

The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare

Neil Oliver

Captain Robert Falcon Scott didn't start out life as a hero. In fact, as a boy and young man he was considered small, frail and shy. So what was it that turned this ordinary man into a legend? 
 
Through his gripping new account of how this modest naval officer became Scott of the Antarctic, Neil Oliver vividly relates the awe-inspiring tales that inspired Britain's greatest hero. And alongside these epics of courage, fortitude and sacrifice, Oliver tells the astonishing stories of those heroes who followed Scott and whose deeds stood comparison with this iconic explorer's own humbling example. 
 
From Rorke's Drift to the Battle of Britain and Nelson to Neil Armstrong, these are men who understood - as Scott always did - that it was more important to die a hero than live a coward's life.

Amazing Tales for Making Men out of Boys

Gabrielle Hatfield

Hatfield's Herbal is the story of how people all over Britain have used its wild plants throughout history, for reasons magical, mystical and medicinal. Gabrielle Hatfield has drawn on a lifetime's knowledge to describe the properties of over 150 native plants, and the customs that surround them: from predicting the weather with seaweed to using deadly nightshade to make ladies' pupils dilate appealingly, and from ensuring a husband's faithfulness with butterbur to warding off witches by planting a rowan tree. Filled with stories, folklore and remedies both strange and practical, this is a memorable and eye-opening guide to the richness of Britain's heritage.

Hatfield's Herbal

The Curious Stories of Britain's Wild Plants

Steve Coll

The Bin Ladens are shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most closed, unaccountable countries on earth. Little has been known about the world that created Osama - until now. 
 
In this gripping account prizewinning journalist Steve Coll has interviewed those closest to the family who rose from Yemeni peasants to jetsetting millionaires in two generations. In doing so, he reveals a Saudi Arabia torn between religious purity and the temptations of the West, telling a story of oil, money, power, patronage and dangerous cultural extremes.

The Bin Ladens

Oil, Money, Terrorism and the Secret Saudi World

Samuel. D Kassow

In the Autumn of 1940 the Jews of Warsaw were forced into a crowded ghetto, enduring unimaginable conditions until most were killed. Yet, amid this, one man, Emanuel Ringelblum, started an extraordinary clandestine organization dedicated to recording life under Nazi occupation. His aim: to ensure that, if he died, his people's history would still be written. 
 
Codenamed Oyneg Shabes, this underground group painstakingly gathered together an archive of some 35,000 documents - letters, poems, photographs, personal testimonies, menus, sketches, songs and official papers - which was buried in tin boxes and milk bottles just before the ghetto was razed to the ground. This secret cache lay deep beneath the rubble for years, long after most of the Oyneg Shabes's members had perished, until one of the few survivors led the way to its secret location. 
 
Only now can the story of this incredible historical record, and the people behind it, be fully told. It is a testament to an extraordinary act of defiance in the face of tyranny, and to the triumph of history.

Who Will Write Our History?

Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto

Jacqueline Simpson

Jennifer Westwood

Shiver at the story of the malevolent apparition of 50 Berkeley Square no one has survived seeing. 
 
Listen for the tapping cane, when Jeremy Bentham&rsquo;s mummified body walks through the corridors of University College. 
 
Watch out for the Roman centurion who still patrols the causeway linking Mersea Island to Essex. 
 
Shudder at the ghosts of kings and queens that keep returning to their old home at Windsor. 
 
Beware the black dog of Shap Fell: a sighting presages fatal accidents. 
 
England&rsquo;s history echoes with stories of unquiet spirits and hauntings, of headless highwaymen and grey ladies, of premonitions of death and indelible blood-stains. Here, county by county and place by place, Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson gather together all the most interesting supernatural tales from The Lore of the Land. From a ghostly army marching across Cumbria to landlords&rsquo; appeals against rates (because no one will rent their haunted house), from the phantom hitchhiker of the Blackwall Tunnel to Francis Drake&rsquo;s drum summoning him when England is in danger, these fascinating and unforgettable stories are part of our legendary past &ndash; and present.

The Penguin Book of Ghosts

Haunted England

Chris Patten

Globalisation, energy, international crime, Weapons of Mass Destruction, nuclear proliferation, small arms proliferation, international drugs trafficking, climate change, water shortage, migration, epidemic disease, the fraying of the nation state: the list of challenges facing our world is itself proliferating rapidly, and nobody seems to have much of a grip on what is going on. Digesting vast amounts of information from a multiplicity of sources, and drawing on his experience at the highest levels of national and international politics, Chris Patten analyses what we know in each of these areas and argues how in each of them we could get somewhere we might want to be. Very little, he says, has turned out as we might have expected twenty years ago, but there is plenty we can still do. 
 
Readers of Patten's previous books will know what a penetrating analyst and engaging writer he is. This is his most ambitious and impressive yet.

What Next?

Surviving the Twenty-first Century

Ruth Harris

Lourdes was at the very centre of nineteenth century debates on religion, science and medicine.   Both the Church and secularists championed the 'miracle' town as crucial in shaping how society should think about the mind, body and spirit.  Since the &lsquo;visions&rsquo; of Bernadette Soubirous in 1858 transformed the quiet Pyrenean town into an international tourist and pilgrimage destination, it has been a site for controversy.  In her well-crafted and carefully researched book, Harris deftly places Lourdes and its attendant spiritual movement firmly at the centre of French history and shows its significance in the country&rsquo;s development.

Lourdes

Body And Spirit in the Secular Age

Elie Wiesel

Marion Wiesel

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor&rsquo;s perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Night

Orlando Figes

Drawing on a huge range of sources - letters, memoirs, conversations - Orlando Figes tells the story of how Russians tried to endure life under Stalin. Those who shaped the political system became, very frequently, its victims. Those who were its victims were frequently quite blameless. The Whisperers recreates the sort of maze in which Russians found themselves, where an unwitting wrong turn could either destroy a family or, perversely, later save it: a society in which everyone spoke in whispers - whether to protect themselves, their families, neighbours or friends - or to inform on them.

The Whisperers

Private Life in Stalin's Russia

Charles Esdaile

No other soldier has provoked as much anger or as much fervour as Napoleon Bonaparte. Was he a monster, driven on by an endless, ruinous quest for military adventure &ndash; or was he a social and political visionary, brought down by petty reactionaries clinging to their privileges? 
 
Charles Esdaile&rsquo;s major new work reframes our understanding of Napoleon. Napoleon&rsquo;s Wars looks beyond the insatiable greed for glory to create a new, genuinely international context for Napoleon&rsquo;s career. The battles themselves Esdaile sees as almost side-effects, the consequences of rulers being willing to take the immense risks of fighting or supporting Napoleon &ndash; risks that could result in the extinction of entire countries and regimes.

Napoleon's Wars

An International History, 1803-1815

Noam Chomsky

At a time when the United States exacts a greater and greater power over the rest of the world, America's leading voice of dissent needs to be heard more than ever.  In over thirty timely, accessible and urgent essays, Chomsky cogently examines the burning issues of our post-9/11 world, covering the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush presidency and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  This is an essential collection, from a vital and authoritative perspective.

Interventions

Alison Light

Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants &ndash; cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write. 
 
Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf&rsquo;s extensive diaries and letters and brilliant detective work, Alison Light chronicles the lives of those forgotten women who worked behind the scenes in Bloomsbury, and their fraught relations with one of the twentieth century&rsquo;s greatest writers.

Mrs Woolf and the Servants

David Nasaw

Celebrated historian David Nasaw, whom The New York Times Book Review has called &quot;a meticulous researcher and a cool analyst,&quot; brings new life to the story of one of America's most famous and successful businessmen and philanthropists&mdash;in what will prove to be the biography of the season. 
 
Born of modest origins in Scotland in 1835, Andrew Carnegie is best known as the founder of Carnegie Steel. His rags to riches story has never been told as dramatically and vividly as in Nasaw's new biography. Carnegie, the son of an impoverished linen weaver, moved to Pittsburgh at the age of thirteen. The embodiment of the American dream, he pulled himself up from bobbin boy in a cotton factory to become the richest man in the world. He spent the rest of his life giving away the fortune he had accumulated and crusading for international peace. For all that he accomplished and came to represent to the American public&mdash;a wildly successful businessman and capitalist, a self-educated writer, peace activist, philanthropist, man of letters, lover of culture, and unabashed enthusiast for American democracy and capitalism&mdash;Carnegie has remained, to this day, an enigma. 
 
Nasaw explains how Carnegie made his early fortune and what prompted him to give it all away, how he was drawn into the campaign first against American involvement in the Spanish-American War and then for international peace, and how he used his friendships with presidents and prime ministers to try to pull the world back from the brink of disaster. 
 
With a trove of new material&mdash;unpublished chapters of Carnegie's Autobiography; personal letters between Carnegie and his future wife, Louise, and other family members; his prenuptial agreement; diaries of family and close friends; his applications for citizenship; his extensive correspondence with Henry Clay Frick; and dozens of private letters to and from presidents Grant, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, and British prime ministers Gladstone and Balfour, as well as friends Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, and Mark Twain&mdash;Nasaw brilliantly plumbs the core of this facinating and complex man, deftly placing his life in cultural and political context as only a master storyteller can.

Andrew Carnegie

Virginia Nicholson

In 1919 a generation of young women discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round, and the statistics confirmed it. After the 1921 Census, the press ran alarming stories of the 'Problem of the Surplus Women - Two Million who can never become Wives...'. This book is about those women, and about how they were forced, by a tragedy of historic proportions, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity and their future happiness.

Singled Out

How Two Million Women Survived without Men After the First World War

Ed Glinert

The streets and squares of the West End of London, some of the most famous in the world, have been home to poets and pop stars, world-renowned artists and revolutionary anarchists.  They have been a playground of gangsters and gamblers, secret agents and religious visionaries.  The exploits of these and many other colourful characters are recounted in Ed Glinert's latest volume.  Packed with atmospheric incident and detail, it's a treasure trove of stories of the people, places and events at the hub of the world's most exciting city.

West End Chronicles

300 Years of Glamour and Excess in the Heart of London

William D. Cohan

William D. Cohan's The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères &amp; Co. is the astonishing story of the world's most elite and legendary investment bank - and the men who reigned over it all. 
 
 For over 150 years Lazard Frères had stood apart from other Wall Street firms by offering ultra-wealthy clients the wisdom of its 'Great Men': from Felix Rohatyn, the escapee from Nazi-occupied France turned financial genius, to Michel David-Weill, the inscrutable French billionaire 'Sun King'; from Steve Rattner, the boy wonder from Long Island who clashed violently with the old guard, to larger-than-life CEO Bruce Wasserstein, 'Bid-Em-Up-Bruce', who broke with the bank's traditions and made himself billions in the process. They amassed unimaginable fortunes and would stop at nothing to make a deal, until their titanic egos started to jeopardize everything. 
 
 In The Last Tycoons William Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes us into their mysterious and secretive world, telling a story of ruthless ambition, whispered advice, explosive feuds, glamorous mistresses, decadent excesses and unimaginable wealth. 
 
 'Spellbinding' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Financial Times 
 
 'A definitive account ... it lives up to the billing' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The Times 
 
 'Has sent a jolt through Lazard and the rest of Wall Street' &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Wall Street Journal 
 
 William D. Cohan was an award-winning investigative journalist before embarking on a seventeen-year career as an investment banker on Wall Street. His first book, The Last Tycoons, about Lazard, won the 2007 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and was a New York Times bestseller. His second book, House of Cards, also a bestseller, is an account of the last days of Bear Stearns &amp; Co. He is also the author of Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World.

The Last Tycoons

The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

Norman Stone

The First World War was the overwhelming disaster from which everything else in the twentieth century stemmed. Fourteen million combatants died, a further twenty million were wounded, four empires were destroyed and even the victors&rsquo; empires were fatally damaged. The sheer complexity and scale of the war have encouraged historians to write books on a similar scale. But now Norman Stone, one of Britain&rsquo;s greatest historians, has achieved the almost impossible task of writing a terse, brilliantly written, opinionated and witty short history of the conflict. In only 140 pages he distils a lifetime of teaching, arguing and thinking into what will be one of the most talked about history books of years to come.

World War One

A Short History

I Funny

I Like Birds

I Wanna Be Your Girl

I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue

ICONIC

ITCH

Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides

Following a horrific car accident in which she was the only survivor, seventeen year old Mia is faced with a choice. Does she stay, living with her grandparents and her loving boyfriend, or does she leave? She makes a difficult decision, leaving  it all behind her, breaking Adam's heart. Three years later, and the pair find themselves thrown together in New York, reminding Mia of her past and everything that she left behind her. If I stay and Where She Went are simultaneously tragic and hopeful, exploring grief, romance and memory.

If I Stay

In Our Time

In The Night Garden

In Their Own Words

Ink and Iron

Inspector Iwata

Inspector Maigret

DI Tony McLean of the Lothian and Borders Police knows Edinburgh like the back of his hand - an invaluable advantage when simultaneously pursuing depraved and dangerous criminals, and dodging overbearing superiors. Alongside a few trusted colleagues like DS 'Grumpy Bob' Laird and DS Kirsty Ritchie, McLean is an unorthodox force to be reckoned with . . .

Inspector McLean

Inspector Sejer

Inspector Taleb Series

Inspector Webb

Instinct Series

Intercrime

Invisible Series

Irish Classics

Iron Seas

Charismatic, handsome, and fiercely loyal, Isaac Bell is a no-nonsense private detective at the Von Dorn Detective Agency. Travelling all over early 20th century America in pursuit of justice for his clients, chasing down a steam train in a sports automobile is all in a day's work for Bell. And while he's on the trail of thieves, killers, and sometimes much worse, he'll have to use his every last wit to stay ahead of those he seeks, and to stay alive. . .

Isaac Bell

Witness the political struggles and tragedies of Queen Isabella, King Ferdinand and their children as ambitions take over in a time of civil war.

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