Adrian Gilbert

Adrian Henri

Adrian House

Adrian Houston is a tree photographer and passionate conservationist. His work has seen him travel to some of the world's most unexplored and inhospitable terrains, with his powerful photographs subsequently gracing everything from advertising campaigns to magazine covers. In 2021 he published A Portrait of the Tree, a photography book that illustrated how trees connect us all on a universal level. Adrian's work has been exhibited both at The National Gallery and The Royal Academy of Arts. When he is not travelling, he is based at his studio in Soho, central London.

Adrian Houston

Adrian J Walker was born in the bush suburbs of Sydney, Australia in the mid '70s. After his father found a camper van in a ditch, he renovated it and moved his family back to the UK, where Adrian was raised. 
 
Ever since he can remember, Adrian has been interested in three things: words, music and technology, and when he graduated from the University of Leeds, he found a career in software. His novel The End of the World Running Club, a post-apocalyptic running fable about hope, love and endurance, was a Simon Mayo Radio 2 book club choice. 
 
He lives in Aberdeen with his wife and two children. To find out more visit: http://www.adrianjwalker.com/

Adrian J. Walker

Adrian Levy

Adrian Mourby

Adrian Orchard

Adrian Penketh

Adrian Raine

Adrian Reynolds was born in South Wales, and after studying at Swansea College of Art and later at Cambridgeshire College of Art and Technology, Adrian worked at Heffers Children's Book Shop before beginning to write and illustrate his own picture books. 
 
Adrian's very first books were published in 1997 and since then he has published more than forty titles, including the hugely popular Harry And The Bucketful Of Dinosaurs series, written by Ian Whybrow. He has won the Red House Picture Book Award and the Sheffield Children's Book Award.

Adrian Reynolds

Adrian Reynolds is a hugely talented illustrator who has worked on many picture books,including the wonderful Harry stories and four adventures featuring Pete and Polo. Adrian lives in Cambridge

Adrian Smith was born in Hackney, East London, on 27th February 1957. He joined Iron Maiden at the end of 1980. Adrian is the band member who has collaborated on the most side projects outside of Iron Maiden, as well as writing and recording a series of albums in the early '90s, before rejoining the band. Iron Maiden have sold 90 million albums, and tour the world playing to millions of fans. Onstage, Adrian uses Jackson and Gibson guitars. Offstage, he is an avid tennis player, however his main hobby is fishing. He takes his rod and gear out on tour with him wherever he goes. This is his first book.

Adrian Smith

Adrian Sykes

Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold, published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include novels Guns of the Dawn, Children of Time, Children of Ruin and the Echoes of the Fall series starting with The Tiger and the Wolf. He has won the Arthur C Clarke and Robert Holdstock awards.

Adrian Tchaikovsky

Adrian Tinniswood is professorial research fellow in history at the University of Buckingham, adjunct professor of history at Maynooth University and the author of many books on British history, including the Sunday Times bestseller The Long Weekend. He was awarded an OBE for services to heritage, and lives in the west of Ireland.

Adrian Tinniswood

Adrian Webster

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist at Bloomberg Opinion. Previously, he worked for the Economist for thirty-two years, including stints as its Lexington, Schumpeter and Bagehot columnist. He earned a doctorate in history from Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of All Souls College. He is the author or co-author of 11 other books, including The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy made the Modern World (2021).

Adrian Wooldridge

Adriana Arden

Adriana Hunter has translated more than one hundred books, and has won or been shortlisted for numerous translation prizes, most recently as the runner-up for the 2024 Scott Moncrieff Prize for her translation of Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly. She lives in Kent, England.

Adriana Hunter

Adriana Mather is the author of the New York Times bestselling How to Hang a Witch series and the Killing November series. Adriana is also an actor and producer and co-owns Zombot Pictures, a production company that makes feature films.

Adriana Mather

Adriana Rabinovich spent her childhood in Colombia, then moved to the US before coming to Britain in 1984. Following a career in design and marketing, Adriana trained at Leith's School of Food and Wine, then set up her own catering business, followed by The Little Red Barn in 1996. When her daughter was diagnosed with Coeliac disease at the age of eighteen months, Adriana used her catering and cooking knowledge to create recipes that not only worked for Ruthie's needs but appealed to children. The result is The Gluten-Free Cookbook for Kids.

Adriana Rabinovich

Adriana Trigiani is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of twenty-one books of fiction and nonfiction published in thirty-eight languages. In 2023, President Sergio Mattarella of Italy named her Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia. She is an award-winning playwright, television writer/producer, and filmmaker. Among her screen credits, Trigiani wrote and directed the major motion picture adaptation of her debut novel, Big Stone Gap. Adriana grew up in Appalachia, in the mountains of southwest Virginia, where she cofounded the Origin Project, an in-school writing program. Trigiani is honored to serve on the New York State Council on the Arts. She lives in Greenwich Village with her family. 
 
 Listen to Adriana and the luminaries of our times discuss the books that built their souls on the You Are What You Read podcast, available everywhere. https://linktr.ee/youarewhatyoureadpodcast

Adriana Trigiani

Adrienne Adhami is a leading well-being coach and keynote speaker, known for the motivational podcast Power Hour and the Modern Wellness Podcast. 
 
Adrienne is a sought-after brand advisor, specialising in well-being technology, strategy and innovation. She has delivered workshops and keynote speeches to brands including Apple, Spotify, Bupa and Range Rover. Her expertise ranges from achieving high performance to goal-setting and decision-making. 
 
Adrienne’s debut book, Power Hour, was published in 2020 and has since been translated into four languages. Listed as one of the ‘Top 25 Black Entrepreneurs to Watch’ by HSBC and UKBBS, Adrienne is a trailblazer inspiring individuals and organisations to reach their full potential. Decisions That Matter is her second book.

Adrienne Adhami

Adrienne Brodeur is the author of the memoir Wild Game, which is in development as a Netflix film. She founded the literary magazine Zoetrope: All-Story with Francis Ford Coppola, and currently serves as executive director of Aspen Words, a literary nonprofit and program of the Aspen Institute. She splits her time between Cambridge and Cape Cod, where she lives with her husband and children.

Adrienne Brodeur

In 1995 Adrienne Brodeur co-founded, along with filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the National Magazine Award-winning fiction magazine Zoetrope: All-Story. She then worked as a book editor in New York for several years, and is currently the Executive Director of the Aspen Words, a literary non-profit and part of the Aspen Institute in Colorado. She divides her time between New York City and Cape Cod.

As well as hosting the weekly Power Hour podcast, Adrienne Adhami is a leading wellness professional, TEDx speaker and a voice of inspiration, encouragement and motivation. Adrienne delivers talks and workshops to some of the world’s largest organisations and she regularly hosts live events and panel discussions. She has partnered with brands such as Adidas, Origins, Virgin Sport, Google and Apple and has been featured in ELLE magazine and the Telegraph, as well as being named a ‘New Face of Wellness’ by British VOGUE.

Adrienne Herbert

Adrienne Kennaway

Twenty-Four Books for Advent contains stories from Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, Louisa May Alcott, Washington Irving, L. M. Montgomery, O. Henry and Susan Coolidge, as well as many more beloved classic writers.

Advent Authors

ADELE GERAS was born in Jerusalem and travelled widely as a child. She started writing over twenty-five years ago and has published more than 80 titles. Ithaka was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Chirldren's Book Award. She lives in Manchester with her husband and has two grown-up daughters and two grandchildren.

Adèle Geras

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Tom Higham

50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters.

The World Before Us

How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

Neil Oliver

THE PERFECT READ FOR TROUBLED TIMES 
 
From the bestselling author of The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places comes this inspiring and beautifully written meditation on the wisdom inherited from our ancestors. 
 
For all we have gained in the modern world, simple peace of mind is hard to find. In a time that is increasingly fraught with complexity and conflict, we are told that our wellbeing relies on remaining as present as possible. But what if the key to being present lies in the past? 
 
In Wisdom of the Ancients, Neil Oliver takes us back in time, to grab hold of the ideas buried in forgotten cultures and early civilizations. From Laetoli footprints in Tanzania to Keralan rituals, stone circles and cave paintings, Oliver takes us on a global journey through antiquity. A master storyteller, drawing on immense knowledge of our ancient past, he distils this wisdom into twelve messages that have endured the test of time, and invites us to consider how these might apply to our lives today. The result is powerful and inspirational, moving and profound.

Wisdom of the Ancients

Life lessons from our distant past

Hanif Abdurraqib

At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was in a mood to reflect on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers the world had ever seen, but, she told the crowd, "I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too". Inspired by these words, celebrated poet and music critic Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide. 
 
 In prose that brims with jubilation and pain, A Little Devil in America explores a sequence of iconic and intimate performances which take Abdurraqib from mid-century Paris to the moon-and back down again, to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. Each moment in each performance he examines has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and his own personal history of love and grief-whether it's the twenty-seven seconds of 'Gimme Shelter' in which Merry Clayton sings, or the magnificent hours of Aretha Franklin's homegoing; Beyoncé's Super Bowl half-time show or a schoolyard fistfight; Dave Chapelle's skits or a game of spades among friends. 
 
 Infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians Abdurraqib loves, and richly textured with compassion and humour, A Little Devil in America is a unique exaltation of Black performances, cultures and communities.

A Little Devil in America

In Praise of Black Performance

Derek Scally

When Berlin-based journalist Derek Scally visited Christmas Vigil Mass in his hometown of Dublin, he found that like its congregants, the once-packed suburban church where he was an altar boy was quiet and slowly ageing. A collective identity lost, the dwindling power of the Church in Ireland was undeniable. 
 
The Best Catholics in the World is Scally's response - an empathetic and engaging voyage into the story of Irish Catholicism. Researched over three years, and including dozens of interviews conducted in Ireland and further afield, The Best Catholics in the World is a lively, original, moving and thought-provoking account of a country grappling with its troubling past and confusing present.

The Best Catholics in the World

The Irish, the Church and the End of a Special Relationship

Ivan Krastev

'We are able to imagine anything because we are being besieged by something that was considered unimaginable...' 
 
Beneath the panic and bluster, beneath the confusing speeches and the conflicting advice, the Coronavirus pandemic acted, changing our world in the most profound ways. The tragic human cost and the economic devastation will be assessed and calculated for decades to come. But the pandemic also changed things in ways that are less easily expressed and understood. It has made bare the frayed contradictions of modern life. It has distorted things that seemed simple and settled. It has affirmed plain, uncomfortable truths. 
 
In this brilliant, thought-provoking essay, Ivan Krastev, one of our most interesting thinkers today, explores the pandemic's immediate consequences and conceives of its long-term legacy. What will change for the young and for the old? Will things be different for the communities most harmed, and for those who escaped the worst? Where are we now with the US and China, with the UK and Europe? And how do we think our way through the unthinkable?

Is It Tomorrow Yet?

Paradoxes of the Pandemic

Margaret Coker

The Spymaster of Baghdad is the gripping story of the Falcons: the top-secret Iraqi intelligence unit that infiltrated the Islamic State. Against the backdrop of the most brutal conflict of recent decades, we chart the spymaster's struggle to develop the unit, follow the fraught relationship of two of his agents, the al-Sudani brothers - one undercover in ISIS, the other his handler - and track a disillusioned scientist as she turns bomb-maker. With unprecedented access to characters on all sides, Pulitzer Prize-finalist Margaret Coker challenges the conventional view that Western coalition forces defeated ISIS and reveals a page-turning story of unlikely heroes, unbelievable courage and good old-fashioned spycraft.

The Spymaster of Baghdad

The Untold Story of the Elite Intelligence Cell that Turned the Tide against ISIS

David Rooney

The measurement of time has always been essential to human civilization, from early Roman sundials to the advent of GPS. But while we have one eye on the time every day, are we aware of the power clocks have given governments, military leaders and business owners, and how they have shaped our lives and our world? 
 
In this spectacularly far-reaching book, David Rooney narrates a history of timekeeping and civilization in twelve concise chapters. Over their course, we meet the most epochal inventions in horological history, from medieval water clocks to Renaissance hourglasses, and from stock-exchange timestamps to satellites in Earth's orbit. We discover how clocks have helped people navigate the globe and build empires, but also, on occasion, taken us to the brink of destruction. 
 
This is the story of time, and the story of time is the story of us.

About Time

A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

Michael Strevens

It is only in the last three centuries that the formidable knowledge-making machine we call modern science has transformed our way of life and our vision of the universe - two thousand years after the invention of law, philosophy, drama and mathematics. Why did we take so long to invent science? And how has it proved to be so powerful? 
 
 The Knowledge Machine gives a radical answer, exploring how science calls on its practitioners to do something apparently irrational: strip away all previous knowledge - such as theological, metaphysical or political beliefs - and channel unprecedented energy into observation and experiment. In times of climate extremes, novel diseases and rapidly advancing technology, Strevens contends that we need more than ever to grasp the inner workings of our knowledge machine.

The Knowledge Machine

How an Unreasonable Idea Created Modern Science

Edwin Gale

Other species adapt to their environments; we alone create ours. Over generations, we have remade the world to suit ourselves - using improved knowledge and technology to confront the traditional scourges - and for the most part we enjoy prosperity beyond the dreams of our ancestors. What's more, in changing our world, we have also reshaped the human phenotype - the interaction between genes and environment that moulds our bodies and minds. 
 
The results can be seen in the streets of our post-industrial cities. We are taller and heavier, and live longer. We think and behave differently, and die from once-rare diseases. Our experiences of life have been transformed, and in turn so have our societies. 
 
Weaving together biology, social anthropology, epidemiology and history, Edwin Gale examines the shifting physical and mental dimensions of our lives, from ageing to illness, food production to reproduction, designer bodies to IQ tests, and asks: are we a self-domesticated species?

The Species that Changed Itself

How Prosperity Reshaped Humanity

Tim Harper

The end of Europe's empires has so often been seen as a story of high politics and warfare. In Tim Harper's remarkable new book the narrative is very different: it shows how empires were fundamentally undermined from below by young radicals from across Asia. They gathered in the great cities of Asia - Calcutta, Singapore, Batavia, Hanoi, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton and Hong Kong - and plotted the end of the colonial regimes with ceaseless ingenuity, both through persuasion and terrorism. Many were caught and killed or imprisoned, but others would go on to rule their newly independent countries. 
 
Drawing on an amazing array of sources, Underground Asia turns upside-down our understanding of twentieth-century empire. The reader enters an extraordinary world of stowaways, false identities, secret codes, cheap firearms, assassinations and conspiracies, as young Asians made their own plans for their future.

Underground Asia

Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire

John Darwin

Steam power transformed our world. It revolutionized work and production, but also the ease and cost of movement over land and water. The result was to throw open vast areas of the world to the rampaging expansion of Europeans and Americans on a scale previously unimaginable. 
 
Unlocking the World is the captivating history of the great port cities which emerged as the bridgeheads of this new steam-driven economy, reshaping not just the trade and industry of the regions around them but their culture and politics as well. They were the agents of what we now call 'globalization', but their impact and influence, and the reactions they provoked, were far from predictable. Nor were they immune to the great upheavals in world politics across the 'steam century'. 
 
This book is global history at its very best. Packed with fascinating case histories (from New Orleans to Montreal, Bombay to Singapore, Calcutta to Shanghai), individual stories and original ideas, Darwin's book allows us, for better or worse, to see the modern age taking shape.

Unlocking the World

Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam, 1830-1930

Luca Crippa

Maurizio Onnis

When Germany invaded Wilhelm Brasse's native Poland in 1939, he refused to swear allegiance to The Wehrmacht. He was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp as political prisoner number 3444. A trained portrait photographer, he was ordered by the SS to record the inner workings of the camp. He began by taking identification photographs of prisoners as they entered, went on to capture the criminal medical experiments of Josef Mengele, and also recorded executions. Between 1940 and 1945, Brasse took around 50,000 photographs. He took them because he had no choice. Brasse's conscience wouldn't allow him to hide behind his camera forever. First he risked his life by joining the camp's Resistance movement, faking documents and trying to smuggle images to the outside world to reveal the horror. Then, as Soviet troops advanced on the camp to liberate it, Brasse refused SS orders to destroy his photographs. 'Because the world must know,' he said. For readers of The Librarian of Auschwitz and The Boy Who Followed His Father into Auschwitz, this extraordinary true story of hope and courage lies at the very centre of Holocaust history.

The Auschwitz Photographer

The powerful true story of Wilhelm Brasse prisoner number 3444

Judith Herrin

In 402 AD, after invading tribes broke through the Alpine frontiers of Italy and threatened the imperial government in Milan, the young Emperor Honorius made the momentous decision to move his capital to a small, easy defendable city in the Po estuary - Ravenna. From then until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power in Italy. 
 
 In this engrossing account Judith Herrin explains how scholars, lawyers, doctors, craftsmen, cosmologists and religious luminaries were drawn to Ravenna where they created a cultural and political capital that dominated northern Italy and the Adriatic. As she traces the lives of Ravenna's rulers, chroniclers and inhabitants, Herrin shows how the city became the pivot between East and West; and the meeting place of Greek, Latin, Christian and barbarian cultures. 
 
 While Ravenna's palaces have crumbled, its churches have survived. In them, Catholic Romans and Arian Goths competed to produce an unrivalled concentration of spectacular mosaics, many of which still astonish visitors today. Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe brings the early Middle Ages to life through the history of this dazzling city.

Ravenna

Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe

Fernando Cervantes

The 'conquistadores', the early explorers and settlers of Spanish America, have become the stuff of legends and nightmares. In their own time they were glorified as heroic adventurers, spreading Christian culture and building an empire unlike any the world had ever seen. Today, they stand condemned for their cruelty and exploitation, as men who decimated the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas in their pursuit of gold and glory. 
 
In Conquistadores, Mexican historian Fernando Cervantes cuts through the layers of myth and fiction to immerse the reader in the world of the late-medieval imperialist. It is a world as unfamiliar to us as the Indigenous peoples of the New World were to the conquistadores themselves. Drawing upon a wide range of sources including diaries, letters and chronicles, Cervantes reframes the story of the Spanish conquest of the New World, set against the political and intellectual landscape from which its main actors emerged. From Columbus to Cortés, Pizarro and beyond, the explorers we think we know come alive in this thought-provoking and illuminating account of a period that irrevocably altered the course of world history.

Conquistadores

Laurence Rees

This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Both were prepared to create undreamt-of suffering, destroy individual liberty and twist facts in order to build the utopias they wanted, and while Hitler's creation of the Holocaust remains a singular crime, Rees shows why we must not forget that Stalin committed a series of atrocities at the same time. 
 
Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers of the Red Army and Wehrmacht, civilians who suffered during the conflict and those who knew both men personally, bestselling historian Laurence Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in history. This is a master work from one of our finest historians.

Hitler and Stalin

The Tyrants and the Second World War

Martin Latham

'The right book has a neverendingness, and so does the right bookshop.' 
 
This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or just curl up with them in bed. Taking us on a journey through comfort reads, street book stalls, mythical libraries, itinerant pedlars, radical pamphleteers, extraordinary bookshop customers and fanatical collectors, Canterbury bookseller Martin Latham uncovers the curious history of our book obsession - and his own. 
 
Part cultural history, part literary love letter and part reluctant memoir, this is the tale of one bookseller and many, many books.

The Bookseller's Tale

Sudhir Hazareesingh

The Haitian Revolution began in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue with a slave revolt in August 1791, and culminated a dozen years later in the proclamation of the world's first independent black state. After the abolition of slavery in 1793, Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave, became the leader of the colony's black population, the commander of its republican army and eventually its governor. During the course of his extraordinary life he confronted some of the dominant forces of his age - slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism and racial hierarchy. 
 
Black Spartacus draws on a wealth of archival material, much of it overlooked by previous biographers, to follow every step of Louverture's singular journey. Sudhir Hazareesingh shows that Louverture developed his unique vision and leadership not solely in response to imported Enlightenment ideals and revolutionary events in Europe and the Americas, but through a hybrid heritage of fraternal slave organisations, Caribbean mysticism and African political traditions. Above all, Hazareesingh retrieves Louverture's rousing voice and force of personality, making this the most engaging, as well as the most complete, biography to date.

Black Spartacus

The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture

Joseph Henrich

'A landmark in social thought. Henrich may go down as the most influential social scientist of the first half of the twenty-first century' MATTHEW SYED 
 
Do you identify yourself by your profession or achievements, rather than your family network? Do you cultivate your unique attributes and goals? If so, perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. 
 
Unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? What part did these differences play in our history, and what do they mean for our collective identity? 
 
Joseph Henrich, who developed the game-changing concept of WEIRD, uses leading-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology to explore how changing family structures, marriage practices and religious beliefs in the Middle Ages shaped the Western mind, laying the foundations for the world we know today. Brilliant, provocative, engaging and surprising, this landmark study will revolutionize your understanding of who - and how - we are now. 
 
'Phenomenal ... The only theory I am aware of that attempts to explain broad patterns of human psychology on a global scale' Washington Post 
 
'You will never look again in the same way at your own seemingly universal values' Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development, University College London

The Weirdest People in the World

How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Paolo Zellini

The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes. 
 
In this elegant book, mathematician and philosopher Paolo Zellini offers a brief cultural and intellectual history of mathematics, ranging widely from the paradoxes of ancient Greece to the sacred altars of India, from Mesopotamian calculus to our own contemporary obsession with algorithms. Masterful and illuminating, The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men transforms our understanding of mathematical thinking, showing that it is inextricably linked with the philosophical and the religious as well as the mundane - and, indeed, with our own very human experience of the universe.

The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men

A Cultural History

Daniel Lieberman

In industrialized nations, our sedentary lifestyles have contributed to skyrocketing rates of obesity and diseases like diabetes. A key remedy, we are told, is exercise - voluntary physical activity for the sake of health. However, most of us struggle to stay fit, and our attitudes to exercise are plagued by misconceptions, finger-pointing and anxiety. 
 
But, as Daniel Lieberman shows in Exercised, the first book of its kind by a leading scientific expert, we never evolved to exercise. We are hardwired for moderate exertion throughout each day, not triathlons or treadmills. Drawing on over a decade of high-level scientific research and eye-opening insights from evolutionary biology and anthropology, Lieberman explains precisely how exercise can promote health; debunks persistent myths about sitting, speed, strength and endurance; and points the way towards more enjoyable and physically active living in the modern world.

Exercised

The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health

Ben Macintyre

Ursula Kuczynski Burton was a spymaster, saboteur, bomb-maker and secret agent. Codenamed 'Agent Sonya', her story has never been told - until now. 
 
Born to a German Jewish family, as Ursula grew, so did the Nazis' power. As a fanatical opponent of the fascism that ravaged her homeland, Ursula was drawn to communism as a young woman, motivated by the promise of a fair and peaceful society. 
 
From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, to preventing nuclear war (or so she believed) by stealing the science of atomic weaponry from Britain to give to Moscow, Ursula conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. 
 
In Agent Sonya, Britain's most acclaimed historian Ben Macintyre delivers an exhilarating tale that's as fast-paced as any fiction. It is the incredible story of one spy's life, a life that would alter the course of history . . .

Agent Sonya

From the bestselling author of The Spy and The Traitor

Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy

Mary McAleese

When a young Mary McAleese told a priest that she planned to become a lawyer, the priest dismissed the idea: she knew no one in the law, and she was female. The reality of what she went on to achieve - despite those obstacles, and despite a sectarian attack that forced her family to flee their home - is even more improbable. 
 
In this luminous memoir, Mary McAleese traces that astonishing arc: from the tight streets of north Belfast, to a professorship in Dublin while still in her twenties, behind-the-scenes work on the peace process, and two triumphant terms as President of Ireland. She writes of her encounters with prime ministers, popes and royalty with the same easy candour and intimacy with which she describes her childhood. And her account of the latest act in her remarkable career - quietly pursuing a doctorate, and loudly opposing the misogyny of the Church - is inspiring. 
 
Here's the Story is warm, witty, often surprising and relentlessly fascinating: an extraordinarily intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable public figures of our time.

Here’s the Story

A Memoir

Chris Gosden

Three great strands of practice and belief run through human history - science, religion and magic. Over the last few centuries, magic - the idea that we have a connection with the universe, and that the universe responds to us - has developed a bad reputation. But it is still with us, as it has been for millennia, as Professor Chris Gosden shows in this extraordinarily bold and unprecedented history. 
 
As Gosden argues, magic preceded religion and science. It has been with us from the curses and charms of ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish magic, to the shamanistic traditions of Eurasia, indigenous America and Africa, the alchemy of the Renaissance, colonial dismissals of magic as backwards, and quantum physics today - where magic and science converge. Drawing on his decades of research around the world, and with incredible breadth and authority, this timely history of human thought across thousands of years rightly shows the role that magic has played in shaping civilization.

The History of Magic

From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present

Rebecca Henderson

Free market capitalism is one of humanity's greatest inventions, and the greatest source of prosperity the world has ever seen. But it's also on the verge of destroying the planet and destabilizing society in its single-minded pursuit of maximizing shareholder value. 
 
Rebecca Henderson, McArthur University Professor at Harvard University, argues for a new framework; one that can simultaneously make a positive societal impact by confronting the realities of the environment and the need to address social and economic inequality, while also delivering sustained financial performance to ensure economic growth that brings prosperity and wellbeing to society as a whole. 
 
Drawing on the lessons of companies from around the world who are acting on this responsibility - who are not only surviving but are thriving, becoming leaders in their industries and beginning to drive the wheels of change - Professor Henderson proves that this is not only a moral imperative for business but also the only way to remain competitive in our changing world.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire

Shortlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2020

John Gooch

While staying closely aligned with Hitler, Mussolini remained carefully neutral until the summer of 1940. Then, with the wholly unexpected and sudden collapse of the French and British armies, Mussolini declared war on the Allies. This decision proved a horrifying miscalculation, dooming Italy to its own prolonged and unwinnable war, immense casualties and an Allied invasion in 1943 which ushered in a terrible new era for the country. 
 
 John Gooch's new book is the definitive account of Italy's war experience. Beginning with the invasion of Abyssinia and ending with Mussolini's arrest, Gooch brilliantly portrays the nightmare of a country with too small an industrial sector, too incompetent a leadership and too many fronts on which to fight. 
 
 This remarkable book rightly shows the centrality of Italy to the war, outlining the brief rise and disastrous fall of the Italian military campaign.

Mussolini's War

Fascist Italy from Triumph to Collapse, 1935-1943

Laurence C. Smith

Rivers have opened frontiers, defined borders, supported trade, generated energy and fed billions. Most of our greatest cities stand on river banks or deltas, and our quest for mastery has spurred staggering advances in engineering, science and law. Rivers and their topographic divides have shaped the territories of nations and the migration of peoples, and yet - as their resources become ever more precious - can foster cooperation even among enemy states. And though they become increasingly domesticated, they remain a formidable global force: these vast arterial powers promote life but are capable of destroying everything in their path. 
 
From ancient Egypt to our growing contemporary metropolises, Rivers of Power reveals why rivers matter so profoundly to human civilization, and how they continue to be indispensable to our societies and wellbeing.

Rivers of Power

How a Natural Force Raised Kingdoms, Destroyed Civilizations, and Shapes Our World

Augustine Sedgewick

Coffee is one of the most valuable commodities in the history of the global economy and the world's most popular drug. The very word 'coffee' is one of the most widespread on the planet. Augustine Sedgewick's brilliant new history tells the hidden and surprising story of how this came to be, tracing coffee's 400-year transformation into an everyday necessity. 
 
The story is one that few coffee drinkers know. It centres on the volcanic highlands of El Salvador, where James Hill, born in the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester, founded one of the world's great coffee dynasties. In the process, Hill helped to turn El Salvador into perhaps the most intensive monoculture in modern history, a place of extraordinary productivity, inequality and violence. 
 
The book follows coffee from the Hill family plantations into the supermarkets, kitchens and work places of the United States, and finally into today's omnipresent cafés. Sedgewick reveals the unexpected consequences of the rise of coffee, which reshaped large areas of the tropics, transformed understandings of energy, and ultimately made us dependent on a drug served in a cup.

Coffeeland

A History

Vaclav Smil

Is flying dangerous? How much do the world's cows weigh? And what makes people happy? 
 
From earth's nations and inhabitants, through the fuels and foods that energize them, to the transportation and inventions of our modern world - and how all of this affects the planet itself - in Numbers Don't Lie, Professor Vaclav Smil takes us on a fact-finding adventure, using surprising statistics and illuminating graphs to challenge lazy thinking. 
 
Packed with 'Well-I-never-knew-that' information and with fascinating and unusual examples throughout, we find out how many people it took to build the Great Pyramid, that vaccination yields the best return on investment, and why electric cars aren't as great as we think (yet). There's a wonderful mix of science, history and wit, all in bite-sized chapters on a broad range of topics. 
 
Urgent and essential, Numbers Don't Lie inspires readers to interrogate what they take to be true in these significant times. Smil is on a mission to make facts matter, because after all, numbers may not lie, but which truth do they convey?

Numbers Don't Lie

71 Things You Need to Know About the World

Daniel Todman

The second part of Daniel Todman's epic history of the Second World War opens with one of the greatest disasters in British military history - the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Unlike the aftermath of Dunkirk, there was no redeeming narrative available here. Britain had been defeated by a far smaller Japanese force in her grandly proclaimed, invincible Asian 'fortress'. 
 
The unique skill of Daniel Todman's history lies in its never losing sight of the inter-connectedness of the British experience. The agony of Singapore, for example, is seen through the eyes of its inhabitants, of its defenders, of Churchill's Cabinet and of ordinary people at home. Each stage of the war, from the nadir of early 1942 to the great series of victories in 1944-5 and on to Indian independence, is described both as it was understood at the time and in the light of the very latest historical research. 
 
Britain's War is a triumph of narrative, empathy and research, as gripping in its handling of individual witnesses to the war - those doomed to struggle with bombing, rationing, exhausting work and above all the absence of millions of family members - as of the gigantic military, social, technological and economic forces that swept the conflict along. It is the definitive account of a drama which reshaped our country.

Britain's War

A New World, 1942-1947

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins has travelled the length and breadth of Great Britain, from Waterloo to Wemyss Bay, Betws-y-Coed to Beverley, to select his hundred best railway stations. Blending his usual insight and authority with his personal reflections and experiences - including his founding the Railway Heritage Trust - the foremost expert on our national heritage deftly reveals the history, geography, design and significance of each of these glories. 
 
 Beautifully illustrated with colour photographs throughout, this joyous exploration of our social history shows the station's role in the national imagination; champions the engineers, architects and rival companies that made them possible; and tells the story behind the triumphs and follies of these very British creations. These are the marvellous, often undersung places that link our nation, celebrated like never before.

Britain's 100 Best Railway Stations

Clementine Rose

Coco Wyo

Code Red

Cold Case Quartet

Commissaire Adamsberg

Confessions

Confessions of a Working Girl

Conversations from a Long Marriage

Cosy Colouring

County Cup

Coven of Bones

Crash Bang Wallop

Crazy House

Crimson Lake Series

Crimson Sails

Critical Role

Cross My Heart

The Crossfire series is a quintet that follows the emotional and romantic journey taken by Gideon Cross and Eva Tramell. A number one internationally bestselling series, the Crossfire books are available in forty territories . . . and counting.

Crossfire

Crown

Cruel is the Light

D is for Death

Detective Harry Virdee should be at home with his wife, but he's been suspended from work just as the biggest case of the year lands on what would have been his desk. He can't keep himself away . . . 
 
Luther meets The Wire in this gritty crime series set in Bradford.

D.I. Harry Virdee

DC Icons

London has a new detective - DC Max Wolfe is on the hunt and he means to get his man, whatever the consequences…

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