Aidan Potts

Aidan Smith

Aidan Storey

Aidan Trimble is the Chief Instructor to the Federation of Shotokan Karate and a former British, European and World Karate Champion, winning the world title in Tokyo - the home of Karate. Aidan has trained with some of the world's leading teachers of 'traditional' and 'sport' karate and is now an award-winning instructor and teacher who is in demand throughout the world. He can be contacted via www.fsk-karate.com.

Aidan Trimble

Aiden Aslin is a British-born resident of Ukraine. Living in Mykolaiv with his fiancé, he joined the Ukrainian marines in 2018 and was called to the frontline ahead of the Russian invasion in February 2022. He was one of over a thousand soldiers who surrendered after the month-long siege at the Mariupol steelworks, whereupon he was singled out for his British passport. His surrender, captivity, treatment and subsequent release received global media attention.

Aiden Aslin

Aiko Bethea is the founder of RARE Coaching &amp; Consulting, a leadership development company that helps aspiring leaders successfully navigate the workplace with more impactful approaches to leadership. She has worked with Fortune 100 companies, research &amp; academic institutes, and global non-profit organisations. Bethea is also Senior Leadership Consultant for the Brené Brown Education &amp; Research Group and was named by Forbes as a leading anti-racism educator. Bethea was a contributing writer in the New York Times bestselling anthology You Are Your Best Thing (2021). Anchored, Aligned, Accountable is her first book.

Aiko Bethea

Ailie Busby

Ailsa McFarlane was born in 1997 in Seattle, Washington, and grew up in Snowdonia in the United Kingdom. After leaving school, she studied veterinary science before dropping out to travel the United States and Europe by road. Highway Blue is her first novel.

Ailsa McFarlane

Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a New York Times bestseller, and An Invisible Sign of My Own; and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures and The Color Master. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Aimee Bender

Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) was a Martinican poet and politician who played a leading role in the struggle to liberate the French colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. Renowned for co-founding the Négritude movement, Césaire was a pioneer in surrealist poetry. His achievements as a writer were recognised worldwide with awards including the International Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Award, the Laporte Prize, the Viareggio-Versilia Prize for Literature, and the Grand Prix National de Poésie; in 2002, he was made Commander of the Order of Merit of Cote d'Ivoire. His works include the plays A Tempest (1969) and A Season in the Congo (1966), the searing political essay Discourse on Colonialism (1956), and the long poem Return to My Native Land (1950), dubbed "nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time" (Andre Breton).

Aimé Césaire

Aingeala Flannery

Aingelda Ardizzone

Ainsley Harriott is nothing short of a cookery legend; a pioneer in quick and easy home cooking, he has hosted some of the UK's most popular culinary series. His love of food and people, together with his natural curiosity and accessible recipes, make him a much-loved British TV personality. Recent popular ITV shows include Ainsley's Caribbean Kitchen, Ainsley Mediterranean Cookbook, Ainsley's Food We Love and now Ainsley's Good Mood Food.

Ainsley Harriott

Air Fryer UK

Aishling Morgan

Aisling Bea

Aisling Fitzsimons

Aislinn Hunter is the author of a novel, Stay; a collection of stories, What's Left Us; and two collections of poetry, Into the Early Hours and The Possible Past. The World Before Us is her first book of fiction in twelve years. After travelling to London and Edinburgh over the past few years to study for a PhD, Aislinn Hunter now lives and teaches in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Aislinn Hunter

Aiste Gazdar

Ajahn Sumedho

Ajay Chowdhury, the inaugural winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland prize, is a tech entrepreneur and theatre director. His children’s book – Ayesha and the Firefish, was published in 2016 and adapted into a musical which premiered in San Francisco. 
 
 
The Waiter (Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month), was published in 2021, and is the first in his critically-acclaimed crime series about Detective Kamil Rahman, an ex-policeman from Kolkata who has moved to Brick Lane in London. It is being adapted for television by Moonage Pictures.The Cook (Guardian Top Crime Books of the Year) was published in May 2022 to excellent reviews and deals with the issue of homelessness. The third book in the series – The Detective (Sunday Times Top Crime Books of the Year) – is about government surveillance and AI. The Spy (Longlisted Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing), the fourth book, sees Kamil infiltrate a terrorist cell. The Shadow (A Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month) is the latest book in the series.

Ajay Chowdhury

Ajaz Ahmed is the CEO of AKQA, the ideas and innovation company he founded aged 21. AKQA today employs over 1,500 people in 15 offices around the world. In 2014 AKQA won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise Innovation. Ajaz co-authored Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital. For essays and thoughts visit http://www.akqa.com/ajaz.

Ajaz Ahmed

Akasha Moon is a professional Tarot reader, medium and vocational healer. Under her other pen name Kala Trobe, she has published Invoke the Goddess and Invoke the Gods with Llewellyn. She's passionate about her subject and believes that, although it can bring about some serious benefits, magic can be a lot of fun.

Akasha Moon

Akiyuki Nosaka (1930-2015) was a novelist, singer, lyricist and former member of the House of Councillors in Japan. Born in Kamakura, Kanagawa, his memories of living through the Second World War – including the loss of his adoptive father in the 1945 Kobe bombings – served as the inspiration for his most famous short stories. In 1967, he won the Naoki Prize for Grave of the Fireflies and American Hijiki, both based on the Japanese experience of the War. Nosaka also wrote erotic fiction, including The Pornographers (1963), and in later life he continued his career as a newspaper and TV journalist, as well as a politician and chanson singer.

Akiyuki Nosaka

Dr Akong Tulku Rinpoche was an experienced meditation master of the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He was co-founder of the Samye Ling Tibetan Centre and supervised many other centres in Europe, Africa and Asia. He formed several humanitarian organisations for the aid of refugees, the distressed and the poor and was advisor to a large number of people, including therapists in the UK and Europe. He died in 2013.

Akong Tulku Rinpoche

Akshi Singh is an associate editor at Parapraxis and deputy editor at Critical Quarterly, and is the editor of a special collection of Critical Quarterly presenting new writing on Marion Milner. She collaborates regularly with the Derek Jarman lab, and writes for the London Review of Books. Singh moved to the UK from India to study for a PhD in psychoanalysis and literature with Jacqueline Rose. She is currently training to be a psychoanalyst at the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research.

Akshi Singh

Al Ewing

Al Franken

Al Gore

Al Holloway

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Johny Pitts

'Afropean. Here was a space where blackness was taking part in shaping European identity ... A continent of Algerian flea markets, Surinamese shamanism, German Reggae and Moorish castles. Yes, all this was part of Europe too, and these were people and places it needed to understand and embrace if it wanted fully functional societies. And Black Europeans, too, need to demand the right to document and disseminate our stories ... With my brown skin and my British passport - still a ticket into mainland Europe at the time of writing - I set out in search of the Afropeans, on a cold October morning.' 
 
Afropean is an on-the-ground documentary of areas where Europeans of African descent are juggling their multiple allegiances and forging new identities. Here is an alternative map of the continent, taking the reader to places like Cova Da Moura, the Cape Verdean shantytown on the outskirts of Lisbon with its own underground economy, and Rinkeby, the area of Stockholm that is eighty per cent Muslim. Johny Pitts visits the former Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where West African students are still making the most of Cold War ties with the USSR, and Clichy Sous Bois in Paris, which gave birth to the 2005 riots, all the while presenting Afropeans as lead actors in their own story.

Afropean

Notes from Black Europe

Emma Dabiri

Recent years have seen the conversation around black hair reach tipping point, yet detractors still proclaim 'it's only hair!' when it never is. This book is about why black hair matters and how it can be viewed as a blueprint for decolonisation. The author takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power and into today's Natural Hair Movement, the Cultural Appropriation Wars and beyond. We look at the trajectory from hair capitalists like Madam CJ Walker in the early 1900s to the rise of Shea Moisture today, touching on everything from women's solidarity and friendship, to forgotten African scholars, to the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids. 
 
The scope of black hairstyling ranges from pop culture to cosmology, from prehistoric times to the (afro)futuristic. Uncovering sophisticated indigenous mathematical systems in black hair styles, alongside styles that served as secret intelligence networks leading enslaved Africans to freedom, Don't Touch My Hair proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.

Don't Touch My Hair

Roderick Beaton

We think we know ancient Greece, the civilization that shares the same name and gave us just about everything that defines 'western' culture today, in the arts, sciences, social sciences and politics. Yet, as Greece has been brought under repeated scrutiny during the financial crises that have convulsed the country since 2010, worldwide coverage has revealed just how poorly we grasp the modern nation. This book sets out to understand the modern Greeks on their own terms. 
 
How did Greece come to be so powerfully attached to the legacy of the ancients in the first place, and then to define an identity for its people that is at once Greek and modern? This book reveals the remarkable achievement, during the last 300 years, of building a modern nation on, sometimes literally, the ruins of a vanished civilization. This is the story of the Greek nation state but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, of the collective identity that goes with it. It is not only a history of events and high politics, it is also a history of culture, of the arts, of people and of ideas.

Greece

Biography of a Modern Nation

Virginia Nicholson

Turn the page back to the 1960s, a decade whose radiant light-show seemed to shower everything it touched with stardust: in the midst of Beatlemania, Penguin Books are found 'Not Guilty' in the Lady Chatterley trial, Mary Quant introduces the mini-skirt, and the Pill becomes available on the NHS. Time magazine coins the phrase 'Swinging London', the first female High Court Judge is appointed and abortion is legalized. 
 
But did the world really change for women? And what did the women of the 60s ultimately take away from a youth supposedly given over to sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll? This book is an act of homage and a journey for those engaging in similar questions today. How Was It For You? reconstructs the real 1960s, through the eyes of the women who lived it. From Floella Benjamin and Pattie Boyd to ordinary, remarkable women, this is their story.

How Was It For You?

Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s

Sarah Knott

What was mothering like in the past? When acclaimed historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she asked herself this question. But accounts of motherhood are hard to find. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars, politics and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten. 
 
Using the arc of her own experience, from miscarriage to the birth and early babyhood of her two children, Sarah Knott explores the ever-changing habits and experiences of motherhood across the ages. 
 
From the labour pains felt by a South Carolina field slave to the triumphant smile of a royal mistress pregnant with a king's first son; from a 1950s suburban housewife to a working-class East Ender taking her baby to the factory; these remarkable tales of mothering create a moving depiction of an endlessly various human experience.

Mother

An Unconventional History

Christopher Hill

Within the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century which resulted in the triumph of the protestant ethic - the ideology of the propertied class - there threatened another, quite different, revolution. Its success might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic. 
 
In The World Turned Upside Down Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless' men, the outbursts of sexual freedom, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs.

The World Turned Upside Down

Radical Ideas During the English Revolution

Toby Green

By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world since around 1000 CE, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. 
 
Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

A Fistful of Shells

West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution

Sunil Amrith

Asia's history has been shaped by its waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia's history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts, and seas - and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them. Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps, and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations. 
 
Today, Asian nations are racing to construct hundreds of dams in the Himalayas, with dire environmental impacts; hundreds of millions crowd into coastal cities threatened by cyclones and storm surges. In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only Asia's past and its future.

Unruly Waters

How Mountain Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia's History

Lilia M. Schwarcz

Heloisa M. Starling

Since Europeans first reached Brazil in 1500 it has been an unfailing source of extraordinary fascination. More than any other part of the 'New World' it displayed both the greatest beauty and grandeur and witnessed scenes of the most terrible European ferocity. 
 
Brazil: A Biography, written by two of Brazil's leading historians and a bestseller in Brazil itself, is a remarkable attempt to convey the overwhelming diversity and challenges of this huge country from its origins to the 21st century - larger than the contiguous USA and still in some regions not fully mapped. The book's major themes are the near-continuous battles to create both political institutions and social frameworks that would allow stable growth, legal norms and protection for all its citizens. Brazil's failure to achieve these except in the very short term has been tragic, but even now it remains one of the world's great experiments - creative, harsh, unique and as compelling a story for its inhabitants as for outsiders.

Brazil: A Biography

Ramachandra Guha

Gandhi lived one of the great 20th century lives. He inspired and enraged, challenged and delighted many million men and women around the world. He lived almost entirely in the shadow of the British Raj, which for much of his life seemed a permanent fact, but which he did more than anyone else to destroy, using revolutionary and inspirational tactics. In a world defined by violence on a scale never imagined before and by ferocious Fascist and Communist dictatorship, he was armed with nothing more than his arguments and example. 
 
This magnificent book tells the story of Gandhi's life, from his departure from South Africa to his assassination in 1948. It is a book with a Tolstoyan sweep, both allowing us to see Gandhi as he was understood by his contemporaries and the vast, unbelievably varied Indian societies and landscapes which he travelled through and changed beyond measure. Drawing on many new sources and animated by its author's wonderful sense of drama and politics, the publication of Gandhi is a major event.

Gandhi 1914-1948

The Years That Changed the World

Neil MacGregor

Following the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, a panoramic exploration of peoples, objects and beliefs from the celebrated author of A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany 
 
'Riveting, extraordinary ... tells the sweeping story of religious belief in all its inventive variety. The emphasis is not on our differences, but on shared spiritual yearnings' Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, Books of the Year 
 
One of the central facts of human existence is that every society shares a set of beliefs and assumptions - a faith, an ideology, a religion - that goes far beyond the life of the individual. These beliefs are an essential part of a shared identity. They have a unique power to define - and to divide - us, and are a driving force in the politics of much of the world today. Throughout history they have most often been, in the widest sense, religious. 
 
Yet this book is not a history of religion, nor an argument in favour of faith. It is about the stories which give shape to our lives, and the different ways in which societies imagine their place in the world. Looking across history and around the globe, it interrogates objects, places and human activities to try to understand what shared beliefs can mean in the public life of a community or a nation, how they shape the relationship between the individual and the state, and how they help give us our sense of who we are. 
 
For in deciding how we live with our gods, we also decide how to live with each other. 
 
'The new blockbuster by the museums maestro Neil MacGregor ... The man who chronicles world history through objects is back ... examining a new set of objects to explore the theme of faith in society' Sunday Times

Living with the Gods

On Beliefs and Peoples

Tristram Hunt

'History writing at its compulsive best' A. N. Wilson 
 
This is a history of the ideas that shaped not only London, but Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, Sheffield and other power-houses of 19th-century Britain. It charts the controversies and visions that fostered Britain's greatest civic renaissance. 
 
Tristram Hunt explores the horrors of the Victorian city, as seen by Dickens, Engels and Carlyle; the influence of the medieval Gothic ideal of faith, community and order espoused by Pugin and Ruskin; the pride in self-government, identified with the Saxons as opposed to the Normans; the identification with the city republics of the Italian renaissance - commerce, trade and patronage; the change from the civic to the municipal, and greater powers over health, education and housing; and finally at the end of the century, the retreat from the urban to the rural ideal, led by William Morris and the garden-city movement of Ebenezer Howard.

Building Jerusalem

The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City

M. K. Gandhi

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in western India in 1869. He was educated in London and later travelled to South Africa, where he experienced racism and took up the rights of Indians, instituting his first campaign of passive resistance. 
 
 In 1915 he returned to British-controlled India, bringing to a country in the throes of independence his commitment to non-violent change, and his belief always in the power of truth. Under Gandhi's lead, millions of protesters would engage in mass campaigns of civil disobedience, seeking change through moral conversion of the colonizers. 
 
 For Gandhi, the long path towards Indian independence would lead to imprisonment and hardship, yet he never once forgot the principles of truth and non-violence so dear to him.Written in the 1920s, Gandhi's autobiography tells not only of his struggles and inspirations but also speaks frankly of his failures. It is a powerful and enduring account of an extraordinary life.

An Autobiography

150th Anniversary Edition with an Introduction by Pankaj Mishra

Or The Story of My Experiments With Truth

Claire Harman

On a spring morning in 1840, on an ultra-respectable Mayfair street, a household of servants awoke to discover that their unobtrusive master, Lord William Russell, was lying in bed with his throat cut so deeply that the head was almost severed. 
 
The whole of London, from monarch to maidservants, was scandalized by the unfolding drama of such a shocking murder, but behind it was another story, a work of fiction. For when the culprit eventually confessed, he claimed his actions were the direct result of reading the best-selling crime-novel of the day. This announcement amazed the key literary figures of the time, from Thackeray to Dickens, and posed the question: can a work of fiction do real harm?

Murder by the Book

A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime

Daisy Dunn

Part of the ALL-NEW LADYBIRD EXPERT SERIES 
 
 - Was there really a Trojan War? 
 - What makes a Homeric hero? 
 - How did Odysseus defeat the Cyclops? 
 
 IMMERSE yourself in the epic adventures of the Ancient Greek gods and heroes. Filled with daring feats, mythical battles and terrifying monsters, the poems and the stories told within them raise complex questions about fate, death and forgiveness that are still debated today. 
 
 MIGHTY HEROES AND MEDDLING GODS 
 
 Daisy Dunn's Homer is a fascinating introduction to these ancient stories and their truly timeless themes.

Homer: A Ladybird Expert Book

Paul Kildea

Chopin's Piano begins in November 1838, when George Sand, her children and Frederick Chopin took a boat to Majorca for the winter. It describes their circumstances there, and how Chopin completed one of the most revolutionary works in the history of music - his Preludes - on 'a small Mallorquin piano' which he picked up when they arrived and carted up to the monastery in the mountains where he and Sand lodged. Kildea traces the history of the Preludes, their pianists, their interpretations, and the history of the Mallorquin piano itself, to find an unexpected path through the history of romantic music - via Wanda Landowska in Berlin in 1913, Paris in 1940-41 when the Nazis seized the piano, down to the end of romantic music. It is an astonishing narrative and detective story, an unclassifiable and thrilling book, which explores in an original way the changing meaning of music through time.

Chopin's Piano

A Journey through Romanticism

Tom Nancollas

Lighthouses are striking totems of our relationship to the sea. For many, they encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose was much more utilitarian than that. Today we still depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland which form a ring of twenty towers built between 1811 and 1904, so-called because they were constructed on desolate rock formations in the middle of the sea, and made of granite to withstand the power of its waves. 
 
Seashaken Houses is a lyrical exploration of these singular towers, the people who risked their lives building and rebuilding them, those that inhabited their circular rooms, and the ways in which we value emblems of our history in a changing world.

Seashaken Houses

A Lighthouse History from Eddystone to Fastnet

David Gilmour

The British in this book lived in India from shortly after the reign of Elizabeth I until well into the reign of Elizabeth II. They were soldiers, officials, businessmen, doctors and missionaries of both sexes, planters, engineers and many others, together with children, wives and sisters. This book describes their lives, their work and their extraordinarily varied interactions with the native populations; it also records the very diverse roles they played in the three centuries of British-Indian history. Gilmour writes of people who have never been written about before, men and women who are presented here with humanity and often with humour. The result is a magnificent tapestry of life, an exceptional work of scholarly recovery which reads like a great nineteenth-century novel. It makes a highly original and engaging contribution to a long an important period of British and Indian history.

The British in India

Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience

David Christian

How did we get from the Big Bang to today's staggering complexity, in which seven billion humans are connected into networks powerful enough to transform the planet? And why, in comparison, are our closest primate relatives reduced to near-extinction? 
 
Big History creator David Christian gives the answers in a mind-expanding cosmological detective story told on the grandest possible scale. He traces how, during eight key thresholds, the right conditions have allowed new forms of complexity to arise, from stars to galaxies, Earth to homo sapiens, agriculture to fossil fuels. This last mega-innovation gave us an energy bonanza that brought huge benefits to mankind, yet also threatens to shake apart everything we have created. 
 
This global origin story is one that we could only begin to tell recently, thanks to the underlying unity of modern knowledge. Panoramic in scope and thrillingly told, Origin Story reveals what we learn about human existence when we consider it from a universal scale.

Origin Story

A Big History of Everything

Niall Ferguson

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot. Call it what you like, it matters now more than ever. In The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is the foundation of all human progress and the lifeblood of history. From the cash injection that funded the Italian Renaissance to the stock market bubble that sparked the French Revolution, from the bonds that fuelled Britain's war effort to the Wall Street Crash and today's meltdown, this is the story of boom and bust as it's never been told before. Whether you're scraping by or rolling in it, there's no better time to understand the ascent of money.

The Ascent of Money

A Financial History of the World

Christopher Andrew

The history of espionage stretches back over millennia, yet it has largely been forgotten. This book sets out to recover that lost history, to demonstrate the role of intelligence in global events, and to challenge histories which have so overlooked the intelligence dimension. The Secret World is a gripping account of spies, secrets and espionage through the centuries, tracing the shift in the ancient world from divination to the gathering of real intelligence in the conduct of military operations, and charting its development in statecraft through, amongst others, Renaissance Venice, Elizabethan England, Ancien Régime France, Revolutionary America and Tsarist Russia - right up to the sophisticated modern activities of which Christopher Andrew is the world's leading historian. What difference have security and intelligence operations made to course of history? Why have they so often forgotten by later practitioners? This fascinating book provides the answers.

The Secret World

A History of Intelligence

Daniel Levitin

Dividing the sum total of human musical achievement, from Beethoven to The Beatles, Busta Rhymes to Bach, into just six fundamental forms, Levitin illuminates, through songs of friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion and love, how music has been instrumental in the evolution of language, thought and culture. And how, far from being a bit of a song and dance, music is at the core of what it means to be human. 
 
A one-time record producer, now a leading neuroscientist, Levitin has composed a catchy and startlingly ambitious narrative that weaves together Darwin and Dionne Warwick, memoir and biology, anthropology and a jukebox of anecdote to create nothing less than the ' soundtrack of civilisation' .

The World in Six Songs

How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

Simon Jenkins

Europe has for two millennia been a remarkably successful continent. In this dazzling new history, bestselling author Simon Jenkins tells the story of its evolution from a battlefield of warring tribes to peace, wealth and freedom - a story that twists and turns from Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, Reformation and French Revolution, to the two World Wars and the present day. 
Jenkins embraces individuals from Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc, to Wellington and Angela Merkel, as well as cultural figures from Aristotle to Shakespeare and Picasso. Tracing themes down the ages, from youthful ambition and religious conflict to geographical constraints and invasion, he brings together the key forces and dominant periods into one chronological narrative - all with his usual insight, colour and authority. 
Despite the importance of Europe's politics, economy and culture, there has not been - until now - a concise book to tell this story. Covering the key events, eras and individuals, Jenkins' portrait of the continent could not be more timely - or more masterful.

A Short History of Europe

From Pericles to Putin

Helen Parr

Our Boys brings to life the human experiences of the paratroopers who fought in the Falklands, and examines the long aftermath of that conflict. It is a first in many ways - a social and cultural history of a regiment with an elite and aggressive reputation; a study of close-quarters combat on the Falkland Islands; and an exploration of the many legacies of this short and symbolic war. Told through the experiences of people who lived through it, Our Boys shows how the Falklands conflict began to change Britain's relationship with its soldiers. It is also the story of one particular soldier: the author's uncle, who was killed during the conflict, and whose fate has haunted both the author and his fellow paratroopers ever since.

Our Boys

The Story of a Paratrooper

Michael Pollan

'It's as if we made entering gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets!' 
 
When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

How to Change Your Mind

The New Science of Psychedelics

T. M. Devine

Eighteenth-century Scotland is famed for generating many of the enlightened ideas which helped to shape the modern world. But there was in the same period another side to the history of the nation. Many of Scotland's people were subjected to coercive and sometimes violent change: traditional and customary relationships were overturned and replaced by the 'rational' exploitation of land use. The Scottish Clearances is a superb and highly original account of this sometimes terrible process, which changed the Lowland countryside forever, as it also did, more infamously, the old society of the Highlands. 
 
Based on an extensive use of original sources, this pioneering book is the first to chart this tumultuous saga in one volume, with due attention to evictions and loss of land in both north and south of the Highland line. In the process, old myths are exploded and familiar assumptions undermined. With many fascinating details and the sense of an epic human story, The Scottish Clearances is an evocative memorial to all whose lives were irreparably changed in the interests of economic efficiency.

The Scottish Clearances

A History of the Dispossessed, 1600-1900

Antony Beevor

The Normandy Landings that took place on D-Day involved by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. The scale of the undertaking was awesome and what followed was some of the most cunning and ferocious fighting of the war. As casualties mounted, so too did the tensions between the principal commanders on both sides. Meanwhile, French civilians caught in the middle of these battlefields or under Allied bombing endured terrible suffering. Even the joys of Liberation had their darker side. 
 
Antony Beevor's inimitably gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war. He lands the reader on the beach alongside the heroes whose stories he so masterfully renders in their full terrifying glory.

D-Day

75th Anniversary Edition

The Battle for Normandy

Michael McFaul

In 2008, when Michael McFaul was asked to leave his perch at Stanford and join an unlikely presidential campaign, he had no idea that he would find himself at the beating heart of one of today's most contentious and consequential international relationships. As President Barack Obama's adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the United States' policy known as "reset" that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries. And then, as U.S. ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency. 
 
This riveting inside account combines history and memoir to tell the full story of U.S.-Russia relations from the fall of the Soviet Union to the new rise of the hostile, paranoid Russian president. From the first days of McFaul's ambassadorship, the Kremlin actively sought to discredit and undermine him, hassling him with tactics that included dispatching protesters to his front gates, slandering him on state media, and tightly surveilling him, his staff, and his family. 
 
From Cold War to Hot Peace is an essential account of the most consequential global confrontation of our time.

From Cold War to Hot Peace

The Inside Story of Russia and America

Paul Rouse

In 1882, a letter was published in the Irish Times, lamenting the decline of hurling. The game was now played only in a few isolated rural pockets, and according to no fixed set of rules. It would have been absurd to imagine that, within five years, an all-Ireland hurling championship would be underway, under the auspices of a powerful national organization. 
 
The Hurlers is a superbly readable account of that dramatic turn of events, of the colourful men who made it happen, and of the political intrigues and violent rows that marked the early years of the GAA. From the very start, republican and ecclesiastical interests jockeyed for control, along with a small core of enthusiasts who were really in it for the sport. Paul Rouse shows how sport, culture and politics swirled together in a heady, often chaotic mix.

The Hurlers

The First All-Ireland Championship and the Making of Modern Hurling

Operation Market Garden, the plan in 1944 to end the war by capturing the bridges leading to the Lower Rhine and beyond, was a bold concept: the Americans thought it unusually bold for Field Marshal Montgomery. It was the greatest demonstration of paratroop power ever seen - but the cost of failure was horrendous, above all for the Dutch who risked everything to help. German reprisals were cruel and lasted until the end of the war. 
 
The British fascination for heroic failure has clouded the story of Arnhem in myths, not least that victory was even possible. Antony Beevor, using many overlooked and new sources from Dutch, British, American, Polish and German archives, has reconstructed the terrible reality of this epic clash. Yet this book, written in Beevor's inimitable and gripping narrative style, is about much more than a single dramatic battle. It looks into the very heart of war.

Arnhem

The Battle for the Bridges, 1944: The Sunday Times No 1 Bestseller

Department Q

Detective D.D. Warren

Detective Elin Warner Series

Detective Harriet Blue Series

Detective Inspector Antonia Hawkins

Detective Inspector Helen Grace

Detective Kamil Rahman

Detective Konrad

Detective Luc Moncrief Series

Dexter Procter

Diary of a Submissive

The adventures of wise-cracking middle school student Greg Heffley who must somehow survive the scariest time of anyone's life: middle school. The hilarious and internationally bestselling Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

Diddly Squat

Dino Dad

Dino Racers

Dinosaur Train

Discworld Graphic Novel Universe

The Discworld is undoubtedly Sir Terry Pratchett's most famous creation. A universe teeming with dwarves, trolls, witches, and social and cultural issues that parallel those in our own world, all wrapped up in Pratchett's inimitable comic delivery. This iconic series will make you laugh, then make you think.

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