Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. The author of three previous novels, his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of the Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of their Best of Young British Novelists.

Adam Thirlwell

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, appeared in 1992 and he has published two books of stories and ten further novels, most recently Missing Fay (2017), and six poetry collections. 
 
 
www.adamthorpe.net

Adam Thorpe

Adam Tooze is the author of the highly praised Crashed, The Deluge and The Wages of Destruction, all published by Allen Lane. He has been the recipient of the Wolfson Prize for History, the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Prize and the Lionel Gelber Prize. Tooze has taught at Cambridge and Yale and is now Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.

Adam Tooze

Adam Usden

Adam Wagner

Adam Wasson

Adam Weymouth's work has been published widely, including in Granta, The Atlantic, The Observer and the BBC. His first book, Kings of the Yukon, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Lonely Planet Adventure Travel Book of the Year and the Prix Paul-Emile Victor. He has been named by the National Writing Centre as one of ten writers shaping the UK's future.

Adam Weymouth

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg (1937-95) was born on the outskirts of Warsaw. His science fiction writing is largely focused around the consequences of totalitarianism. Although largely unread during his lifetime, after his suicide in 1995 his work began to receive major critical attention. He is now considered to be, along with Stanislaw Lem, one of Poland's greatest science fiction writers.

Adam Wisniewski-Snerg

Ade Edmondson

Adele Lang

Adele Nozedar is an author and photographer. Previously, she was in a cult indie band, then ran her own indie record label and became A&amp;R Director/General Manager of a major record company. 
 
Her wide-ranging passions are reflected in her books, which include The Hedgerow Handbook (2012), The Signs and Symbols Sourcebook (2011), The Secret Language of Birds (2006), and The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans (2013).

Adele Nozedar

Adele Puhn

Adeline Yen Mah

Adelle Waldman is a freelance writer and book critic. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal's website. Her articles also have appeared in The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic,Slate,The Wall Street Journal, and other national publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Adelle Waldman

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand is an Indian illustrator based in France. She likes experimenting with bright, happy colours. She grew up reading fairytales, watching animated films and imagining adventure stories, and her style is an embodiment of her Indian heritage and western culture. She loves animals and taking long walks on the beach, but she is never too far away from a pencil and a paper to draw her perception of the world.

Aditi Kakade Beaufrand

Aditya Chakrabortty

Adiva Geffen is a bestselling writer and playwright. Her plays have appeared on major stages in Israel, she lectures and leads numerous writing workshops and she is a board member of the Israeli Writers’ Association. 
 
 Geffen started out as a special-education teacher, before serving as the spokesperson for the Habima National Theatre for more than a decade. She founded and subsequently led the Israeli Theatre Award for ten years, and now serves as head of The Gnazim Institute of the Hebrew Writers Association, the largest Hebrew literature archive in the world. 
 
 Born in Haifa, Israel and the mother of three sons, Geffen now lives in Tel Aviv with her partner Aharon Meidan.

Adiva Geffen

Adnan Sarwar, 35, is a former British soldier who served in the Iraq War.  He has since worked as a military consultant to film and is a writer based in London.  Read more at www.adnansarwar.com / @adnansarwar

Adnan Sarwar

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Loos (1877-1933) was a leading Austro-Hungarian architect, perhaps most famous for the revolutionary 'Loos House' opposite the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, which caused outrage when it was built in 1912, and the wonderful American Bar, also in Vienna. He wrote extensively on architecture and design, working in reaction to the elaborate mass of decoration celebrated by the Vienna Secession movement.

Adolf Loos

Adolfo García Ortega

Adomnan of Iona

Adonis

Adriaan Van Dis

Adrian Bean

Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer and performer from London, best known for his comedy sketches which, explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Adrian's work has earned him nearly 20 million followers across social media and has been featured in CNN, The Times and Vogue. Adrian was named one of the New Faces of Comedy at Just For Laughs, and his one-man play Inside Everyone sold out its debut run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival prior to opening.

Adrian Bliss

Adrian Desmond

Adrian Edmondson

Adrian Fort

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Sofi Thanhauser

Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool: through the stories of these five fabrics, Sofi Thanhauser illuminates the world we inhabit in a startling new way, travelling from China to Cumbria to reveal the craft, labour and industry that create the clothes we wear. 
 
 From the women who transformed stalks of flax into linen to clothe their families in nineteenth century New England to those who earn their dowries in the cotton-spinning factories of South India today, this book traces the origins of garment-making through time and around the world. Exploring the social, economic and environmental impact of our most personal possessions, Worn looks beyond care labels to show how clothes reveal the truth about what we really care about.

Worn

A People's History of Clothing

Mala Kacenberg

Growing up in a Polish village on the fringes of a deep forest, Mala has a wonderful childhood. But when the German invasion reduces her loved ones to starvation, Mala takes matters into her own hands and sneaks out to find food. On her way back, she is handed a smuggled letter that reveals her family and friends have been rounded up for deportation. With only her cat, Malach for company, she must flee. 
 
Malach becomes her family, her only respite from loneliness, and a guide through unfathomable darkness. Together, they navigate forests, outwit soldiers, and, against all odds, survive.

Mala's Cat

The moving and unforgettable true story of one girl's survival during the Holocaust

Michael Barber

With a wealth of both professional experience as government advisor and from his own journey overcoming a rare skin cancer diagnosis, Michael Barber offers an accessible guide on how to set and achieve even the most challenging of goals. Drawing on historic visionaries and modern heroes - from Mary Fischer and Rosa Parks to Paula Radcliffe and Gareth Southgate - Barber presents a unique combination of personal anecdote, historical evidence and interviews from inspirational figures to unpack the route to success. With both frank honesty, and humour, Accomplishment is set to empower readers with a blueprint of how they, too, can achieve greatness.

Accomplishment

How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things

Lewis R. Gordon

'Important . . . powerful . . . . an explanation of why Black protest is such a dangerous prospect to the white power structure' Kehinde Andrews, Guardian 
 
Where is the path to racial justice? In this ground-breaking book, philosopher Lewis R. Gordon ranges over history, art and pop culture - from ancient African languages to the film Get Out - to show why the answer lies not just in freeing Black bodies from the fraud of white supremacy, but in freeing all of our minds. Building on the influential work of Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois, Fear of Black Consciousness is a vital contribution to our conversations on racial politics, identity and culture. 
 
'Expansive . . . reminds us that the ultimate aim of Black freedom quests is, indeed, universal liberation' Angela Y. Davis

Fear of Black Consciousness

Jeremy Dronfield

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son, Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. 
 
When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son. 
 
Based on Gustav's secret diary and meticulous archive research, this book tells his and Fritz's story for the first time - a story of courage and survival unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust.

The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz

The Number One Sunday Times Bestseller

Marit Kapla

Winner of the 2019 August Prize 
 
Near the river Klarälven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Värmland, lies the Swedish village of Osebol. It is a quiet place: one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees. 
 
In the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady drip of relocations to the cities for work have seen Osebol's adult population dwindle to only 40-odd residents. The shops have closed; the bridge across the river is shut to traffic. But still, life goes on. Those who have inherited their farms for generations live alongside recent arrivals from near and far. People age; children grow up. Heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth. 
 
In this extraordinary book, Marit Kapla has gathered the voices of the villagers themselves, interviewing almost all of those remaining between the ages of 18 and 92. They alone speak. Arranged with only a handful of lines on each page, they tell of their griefs and joys, resentments and pleasures, enmities and loves, and memories that span a century of progress and upheaval. 
 
To read Osebol is to be immersed in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.

Osebol

Voices from a Swedish Village

Vaclav Smil

We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check - because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts. 
 
 In this ambitious and thought-provoking book we see, for example, that globalization isn't inevitable and that our societies have been steadily increasing their dependence on fossil fuels, making their complete and rapid elimination unlikely. Drawing on the latest science and tackling sources of misinformation head on - from Yuval Noah Harari to Noam Chomsky - ultimately Smil answers the most profound question of our age: are we irrevocably doomed or is a brighter utopia ahead?

How the World Really Works

A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

Dennis Duncan

Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play. Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past. Here, for the first time, its story is told. 
 
Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Revealing its vast role in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, Duncan shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.

Index, A History of the

Malcolm Gaskill

In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust and denunciation. The finger of suspicion falls on a young couple struggling to make a home and feed their children: Hugh Parsons the irascible brickmaker and his troubled wife, Mary. It will be their downfall. 
 
The Ruin of All Witches tells the dark, real-life folktale of witch-hunting in a remote Massachusetts plantation. These were the turbulent beginnings of colonial America, when English settlers' dreams of founding a 'city on a hill', gave way to paranoia and terror, enmity and rage. Drawing on uniquely rich source material, Malcolm Gaskill brings to life a New World existence steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in curses and enchantments, and precariously balanced between life and death. 
 
Through the gripping micro-history of a family tragedy, we glimpse an entire society caught in agonized transition between supernatural obsessions and the age of enlightenment. We see, in short, the birth of the modern world.

The Ruin of All Witches

Life and Death in the New World

Rafia Zakaria

Most of us believe that feminism is a force for good. In the past 200 years, it has paved the way for women to advance economically, increasing their safety and their power in society, and advocating for their needs and experiences. But not for all women. 
 
If you are poor, if you are an immigrant to the West or (even worse!) don't live here at all, and above all if your skin is not white, the door to mainstream feminism has been shut to you from day one. This is not oversight or an accident. It is an active and sustained strategy to advance white women at the expense of everyone else. And what makes this con especially dangerous - and especially effective - is how most of us have no idea we are participating in it. 
 
In Against White Feminism, lawyer, academic and human rights activist Rafia Zakaria traces the connections between feminism and white supremacy from the first suffrage movements right up to the world we inherit today, demonstrating how a coalition supposedly based on equality is in fact riddled with inequality and exploitation. And she issues a powerful call to every reader to build a new kind of feminism, lighting the path to emancipation for all.

Against White Feminism

Paul Craddock

We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world, but it's a lot older than you think. As ancient as the pyramids, its history is even more surprising. In Spare Parts, cultural historian Paul Craddock takes us on a fascinating journey, from Indian surgeons regrafting lost noses in the sixth century BC, to seventeenth century blood transfusions between humans and dogs, to the French seamstress whose needlework paved the way for kidney transplants in the early 1900s. 
 
Expertly weaving together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery has constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal and machine. It shows us that the history -- and future -- of transplant surgery is tied up with questions not only about who we are, but also what we are, and what we might become.

Spare Parts

An Unexpected History of Transplants

George Dyson

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 
 
How did we end up in a world where humans coexist with technologies we can no longer fully control or understand? 
 
George Dyson plots an unexpected course through the past 300 years to reveal the hidden connections that underpin our digital age, ending with a premonition of what lies ahead. 
 
From an eighteenth-century Russian voyage across the North Pacific, to the mirror signals that heralded the age of digital telecommunications and the invention of the vacuum tube, Analogia interweaves historical adventure with scientific insight in a deeply personal story that frames the pursuit - and cost - of the digital revolution in a captivating new light.

Analogia

The Entangled Destinies of Nature, Human Beings and Machines

Angela Y. Davis

In these newly collected essays, interviews and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. 
 
 Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyses today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. 
 
 Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that 'Freedom is a constant struggle.'

Freedom Is A Constant Struggle

Tayi Tibble

The voice of Tayi Tibble is one of most exciting in poetry today. In Poukahangatus (pronounced 'Pocahontas'), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies - Greek, Maori, feminist, kiwi - peeling them apart and respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies and Twilight to exquisite renderings of precise emotions and the natural world alike. Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics chart the overflowing beauty, irony and ruination of her surroundings. 
 
Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history without merely telling it, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation. These are warm, provocative and profoundly original poems, written from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work and gender are intimately and insidiously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and asks how she as a Maori woman fits into trends, stereotypes and popular culture. With language that is at once colourful, passionate and laugh-out-loud funny, Poukahangatus announces the presence of a surpassingly daring new poet.

Poukahangatus

John Sutherland

Ranging all the way from Aaron's Rod to Zuleika Dobson, via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch, literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very personal guide to the most rewarding, most remarkable and, on occasion, most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written. 
 
He brilliantly captures the flavour of each work and assesses its relative merits and demerits. He shows how it fits into a broader context and he offers endless snippets of intriguing information: did you know, for example, that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow; that Voltaire completed Candide in three days, or that Anna Sewell was paid £20 for Black Beauty? It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so wittily informative, bite-sized pieces. 
 
Encyclopaedic and entertaining by turns, this is a wonderful dip-in book, whose opinions will inform and on occasion, no doubt, infuriate. 
__________________________________________________ 
'Generous, enjoyable and well informed.' Observer 
 
'Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned: this book will feed your addiction.' Mail on Sunday

How to be Well Read

A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities

Niall Ferguson

Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why? 
 
While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work - pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. 
 
Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline.

Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe

Rupa Marya

Raj Patel

'A work of exhilarating scope and relevance ... What a rare and powerful experience to feel a book in your very body' Naomi Klein 
 
'Health is not something we can attain as individuals, for ourselves, hermetically sealed off from the world around us. An injury to one is an injury to all.' 
 
Our bodies, societies and planet are inflamed. In this boldly original book, renowned political economist Raj Patel teams up with physician Rupa Marya to illuminate the hidden relationships between human health and the profound injustices of our political and economic systems. In doing so, they offer a radical new cure: the deep medicine of decolonization. 
 
Journeying through the human body - our digestive, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, reproductive, immune, and nervous systems - Marya and Patel show how inflammation is connected not just to the food that we eat, the air that we breathe and access to healthcare, but is also linked to the traumatic events we experience and the very model of health that doctors practice: one which takes things apart, rather than seeking to bring ideas and lived experiences together. 
 
Combining the latest scholarship on globalization and biology with the stories of patients in marginalized communities and the wisdom of Indigenous groups, Inflamed points the way toward a medicine that heals what has been divided and has the potential to transform not only our bodies but the world.

Inflamed

Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Patrick Roberts

Jungle is a new and ambitious history of the world, telling the remarkable story of the world's tropical forests from the arrival of the first plants millions of years ago to the role of tropical forests in the evolution of the world's atmosphere, the dinosaurs, the first mammals and even our own species and ancestors. Highlighting provocative new evidence garnered from cutting-edge research, Dr Roberts shows, for example, that our view of humans as 'savannah specialists' is wildly wrong, and that the 'Anthropocene' began not with the Industrial Revolution, but potentially as early as 6,000 years ago in the tropics. We see that the relationship between humankind and 'jungles' is deep-rooted, that we are all connected to their destruction, and that we must all act to save them. Urgent, clear-sighted and original, Jungle challenges the way we think about the world - and ourselves.

Jungle

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History

How Tropical Forests Shaped World History – and Us

Joe Keohane

In our cities, we barely acknowledge one another on public transport, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we carefully curate who we interact with. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we've never met. But what if strangers, long believed to be the cause of many of our problems, were actually the solution? 
 
In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane discovers the surprising benefits that come from talking to strangers, examining how even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. Warm, witty, erudite and profound, this deeply researched book will make you reconsider how you perceive and approach strangers, showing you how talking to strangers isn't just not a way to live, it's a way to survive.

The Power of Strangers

The Benefits of Connecting in a Suspicious World

Michael Pollan

Of all the many things humans rely on plants for, surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate, calm, or completely alter the qualities of our mental experience. In This Is Your Mind On Plants, Michael Pollan explores three very different drugs - opium, caffeine and mescaline - and throws the fundamental strangeness of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs, while consuming (or in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants, and the equally powerful taboos. 
 
In a unique blend of history, science, memoir and reportage, Pollan shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively. In doing so, he proves that there is much more to say about these plants than simply debating their regulation, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. This ground-breaking and singular book holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds and our entanglement with the natural world.

This Is Your Mind On Plants

Opium—Caffeine—Mescaline

Rosita Boland

'My dictionary's first two definitions of 'comrade' are: 
 
A close companion. 
An intimate associate or friend. 
 
The third one is: 
A fellow soldier. 
 
My friends have been all those things to me.' 
 
In this stunning essay collection, award-winning journalist Rosita Boland explores the many friendships that have shaped her life. Surprising and beautiful, she writes about the imaginary friends of early childhood, books that have provided companionship and joy, kindred spirits met while travelling, the friend she hoped might become something more, and also the friendships that become lost over time. 
 
Life-affirming, affecting and wise, Comrades is a powerful exploration of what it is to live, to connect, and to be human in this world.

Comrades

A Lifetime of Friendships

Helena Attlee

From the moment she hears Lev's violin for the first time, Helena Attlee is captivated. She is told that it is an Italian instrument, named after its former Russian owner. Eager to discover all she can about its ancestry and the stories contained within its delicate wooden body, she sets out for Cremona, birthplace of the Italian violin. This is the beginning of a beguiling journey whose end she could never have anticipated. 
 
Making its way from dusty workshops, through Alpine forests, cool Venetian churches, glittering Florentine courts, and far-flung Russian flea markets, Lev's Violin takes us from the heart of Italian culture to its very furthest reaches. Its story of luthiers and scientists, princes and orphans, musicians, composers, travellers and raconteurs swells to a poignant meditation on the power of objects, stories and music to shape individual lives and to craft entire cultures.

Lev's Violin

An Italian Adventure

David Graeber

David Wengrow

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself. 
 
 Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy, then what kinds of organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities than we tend to assume. 
 
 The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision and faith in the power of direct action.

The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

Kehinde Andrews

The New Age of Empire destroys the self-congratulatory myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built, and we are still living under this system today: America is now at the helm, perpetuating global inequality through business, government, and institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. The West is rich because the Rest is poor. Capitalism is racism. The Enlightenment, which underlies every part of our foundational philosophy today, was and is profoundly racist. A work of essential clarity, The New Age of Empire is a groundbreaking new account of our place in our profoundly corrupt global system.

The New Age of Empire

How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World

Nicholas Crane

By knowing the shape of our earth we can create maps, survive the oceans, follow rivers, navigate the skies, and travel across the globe. This is the story of our world, of how we discovered what no one thought possible - the shape of the earth. 
 
A thrilling and page-turning account of the first major expedition by data gatherers and qualified observers to interior Peru, to discover the shape and magnitude of the earth. Until humanity discovered this it would be impossible to produce accurate maps and sea charts, without which thousands of lives would be lost, and exact locations of cities, roads and rivers would never be known. This fascinating and dramatic story weaves scientific rigour, egos, funding crises and betrayal with sea voyages, jungles and volcanoes.

Latitude

The astonishing adventure that shaped the world

James Holland

It took a certain type of courage to serve in a tank in World War Two. Encased in steel, surrounded by highly explosive shells, a big and slow-moving target, every crew member was utterly vulnerable to enemy attack from all sides. Living - and dying - in a tank was a brutal way to fight a war. 
 
The Sherwood Rangers were one of the great tank regiments. They had learned their trade the hard way, under the burning sun of North Africa, on the battlefields of El Alamein and Alam el Halfa. By the time they landed on Gold Beach on D-Day, they were toughened by experience and ready for combat. 
 
From that moment on, the Sherwood Rangers were in the thick of the action til the war's end. They and their Sherman tanks covered thousands of miles and endured some of the fiercest fighting in Western Europe. The first British unit to cross into Germany, their engagements stretch from the Normandy beaches, to the bridges at Eindhoven, and the grinding crossing of the Siegfried Line and on into the Nazi heartland.

Brothers in Arms

One Legendary Tank Regiment's Bloody War from D-Day to VE-Day

Ritchie Robertson

'The best single-volume study of the Enlightenment that we have' Literary Review 
 
The Enlightenment is one of the formative periods of Western history, yet more than 300 years after it began, it remains controversial. It is often seen as the fountainhead of modern values such as human rights, religious toleration, freedom of thought, scientific thought as an exemplary form of reasoning, and rationality and evidence-based argument. Others accuse the Enlightenment of putting forward a scientific rationality which ignores the complexity and variety of human beings, propagates shallow atheism, and aims to subjugate nature to so-called technical progress. 
 
Answering the question 'what is Enlightenment?' Kant famously urged men and women above all to 'have the courage to use your own understanding'. Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. His book goes behind the controversies about the Enlightenment to return to its original texts and to show that above all it sought to increase human happiness in this world by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. His book overturns many received opinions - for example, that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion (though it did challenge the authority traditionally assumed by the Churches). It is a master-class in 'big picture' history, about one of the foundational epochs of modern times.

The Enlightenment

The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790

Priya Satia

For generations, British thinkers told the history of an empire whose story was still very much in the making. While they wrote of conquest, imperial rule in India, the Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean was consolidated. While they described the development of imperial governance, rebellions were brutally crushed. As they reimagined empire during the two world wars, decolonization was compromised. Priya Satia shows how these historians not only interpreted the major political events of their time but also shaped the future that followed. 
 
Satia makes clear that historical imagination played a significant role in the unfolding of empire. History emerged as a mode of ethics in the modern period, endowing historians from John Stuart Mill to Winston Churchill with outsized policymaking power. Braided with this story is an account of alternative visions articulated by anticolonial thinkers such as William Blake, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. P. Thompson. By the mid-twentieth century, their approaches had reshaped the discipline of history and the ethics that came with it.

Time's Monster

History, Conscience and Britain's Empire

A. C. Grayling

In very recent times humanity has learnt a vast amount about the universe, the past, and itself. But through our remarkable successes in acquiring knowledge we have learned how much we have yet to learn: the science we have, for example, addresses just 5 per cent of the universe; pre-history is still being revealed, with thousands of historical sites yet to be explored; and the new neurosciences of mind and brain are just beginning. 
 
What do we know, and how do we know it? What do we now know that we don't know? And what have we learnt about the obstacles to knowing more? In a time of deepening battles over what knowledge and truth mean, these questions matter more than ever. Bestselling polymath and philosopher A. C. Grayling seeks to answer them in three crucial areas at the frontiers of knowledge: science, history and psychology. A remarkable history of science, life on earth, and the human mind itself, this is a compelling and fascinating tour de force, written with verve, clarity and remarkable breadth of knowledge.

The Frontiers of Knowledge

What We Know About Science, History and The Mind

Charles Townshend

In the aftermath of the horrors of the Irish Famine, the grim, distrustful relationship between Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom deteriorated into a generations-long argument about 'Home Rule'. The unprecedented nature of the Irish problem made it extraordinarily difficult for either side to reach a compromise. For many years actual independence seemed inconceivable. And then, as these bitter disputes continued, it became clear that under no circumstances would the Protestants be party to any of it. 
 
 The Partition is a remarkable, clear-sighted and thoughtful account of how two unthinkable events - full Irish independence and the creation of the state of Northern Ireland - came to pass. The Irish nationalist claim to leave ran into a loyalist demand to remain, threatening large-scale violent resistance. 
 
 Here Charles Townshend lays out what is ultimately a tragic story, as partition became the only answer to an otherwise insoluble problem. The settlement of the Irish question conjured up heroes and villains, led to civil war and finally to Ulster's catastrophic Troubles. The hard border has always been seen as a failure of both British and Irish statecraft, but has endured now for a century. The Partition brilliantly brings to life the contingency and uncertainty that created it.

The Partition

Ireland Divided, 1885-1925

By Hand

Byrne & Balzano

Described by his creator as 'short, fat and primitive', Evert Bäckström is a rather unique homicide detective but he is undeniably the real deal with it comes to modern policing. 
 
This series is blackly comic, thrillingly compelling and utterly real.

Bäckström

CAMP GOLD

Caedmon Aisquith

Cairo Trilogy

Can You Solve the Murder?

Capital

Care Bears

Cartoon Kid

Cath Kidston

A crime-fiction series with a twist - private investigator Catherine Berlin, is a damaged soul struggling with a heroin addiction, but she still manages to do her best, even when her own neck is on the chopping block.

Catherine Berlin

Celeste Express

Central Intelligence

Chaos and Flame

Charles Hayden

Charles Paris Dramatisations

Charlie Bass

Charlie Changes Into a Chicken

Charlie and Lola

Cherry Blossoms After Winter

Chevalier

Chinese Cinderella

Life at Tanglewood isn't all sleepovers, picnics and beach parties. Cherry, Summer, Skye, Coco and Honey all face some tough life challenges in this delicious series from bestselling girls' favourite Cathy Cassidy. Every sister has a secret to share. Which one will be your favourite?

Chocolate Box Girls

Christmas

Chronicles of Vladimir Tod

Churchminister

Welcome inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, and learn how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.

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