Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail is a Brighton-based writer, illustrator and creative producer. Original storytelling has always been at the heart of Abigail's career and she has spent a decade leading social media campaigns for some of the biggest TV &amp; entertainment clients in the world. Abigail also used to perform stand-up comedy and won several tiny trophies for her onstage humour; which involved life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs and rambling stories about her family.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby.

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

Abilio Estévez

Abir Mukherjee is the bestselling author of the award-winning Wyndham &amp; Banerjee series of crime novels set in 1920s India and the British Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year 2025 Hunted. His books have been translated into sixteen languages and won various awards including the CWA Dagger for best Historical Novel, the Prix du Polar Européen, and the Wilbur Smith Award for Adventure Writing. 
 
 
He also co-hosts the popular Red Hot Chilli Writers podcast which takes a wry look at the world of books, writing, and the creative arts, tackling everything from bestsellers to pop culture. Abir grew up in Scotland and now lives in Surrey with his wife and two sons. 
 
 
Website: abirmukherjee.com Twitter, Threads &amp; Instagram: @radiomukhers Facebook: AuthorAbir

Abir Mukherjee

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Robin Kelley

Black Bodies Swinging

An American Postmortem

Hilton Als

Hilton Als grew up in a corner of Brooklyn scarred by riots, racial segregation and sexual prejudice. As a young teenager, he began to glimpse possibility in the different cultures and ways of being he encountered through high school; in the black men and white men who found ways to be together. As a burgeoning writer in a Manhattan pulsing with new culture - with hip hop, Basquiat, nightclubs and new wave - Hilton at last came together with the gay family he had longed for. The timing was not opportune: reports of a 'rare cancer' were beginning to trickle through the press. 
 
Part autobiography, part reportage, part cultural criticism, I Don't Remember weaves the impossible story of queer America in the age of the AIDs crisis. It is an elegy like no other for an unsung generation of gay men: of heroic lovers and friends, visionary makers, artists and creators. By turns lyrical, wry, and exquisite in its poetic, rapid-fire storytelling, it sings a song of the necessity of connection, and the grandness of human endeavor, especially when it comes to loving, and being loved, in the face of social limitations, stigma, and unspeakable tragedy.

I Don't Remember

An American Rhapsody

Joad Raymond Wren

Utopia is not somewhere you can go. But neither is it an idle fantasy. This book traces utopian ideas across the centuries, from Plato to Margaret Cavendish and Italo Calvino. It reveals the concerns – with the relationship between authority and freedom, law and morality, sex and the sexes, work and the good life – that have animated utopian thinkers from the very beginning. Utopia enabled them to explore the limits of thought, to go beyond what we know and interrogate the very foundations of our societies. 
 
The Uses of Utopia offers a beguiling tour not only of the remote islands, parallel realities and distant planets where this played out, but also places where those inspired by these visions of perfection attempted to bring them into being, from the humane, egalitarian communities devised by Vasco de Quiroga in colonial Mexico to Étienne Cabet’s disastrous attempt to realise socialism on the Mississippi. It is a book brimming with voices as well as ideas. Luminaries and radicals of all persuasions speak freely with one another – and also to us. Here, in the world utopians reject, utopia still challenges us to reconsider where we stand.

The Uses of Utopia

Travels to the Limits of Thought

Sarah O'Connor

Automation, we were told, was meant to do away with dull and dangerous tasks, freeing us to pursue more fulfilling work. But AI now threatens to turn even creative tasks into dehumanising labour. 
 
Investigative journalist Sarah O’Connor has spent the last few years gathering stories of burned-out Amazon warehouse workers, Orwellian employee surveillance softwares, AI job interviews, translators frantically trying to keep up with machines, and lorry drivers endlessly on the road. In Human Robots, she shows us that instead of robotizing our work, we may be robotizing ourselves. 
 
But our fear that machines will make us more robotic, O’Connor argues, is not new and has its origins in the industrial revolution, when workers fought against the expectation that they should toil like tireless machines. Inspired by campaigners from nineteenth-century English cotton mills to twenty-first century Swedish mines, O’Connor lays out a path where we can fight for work that is more respectful of our limits, and more worthy of the capacity of our minds.

Human Robots

The Fight for the Future of Work

Sebastian Mallaby

An intimate portrait of the world’s most brilliant tech visionary and his game-changing company DeepMind, from award-winning financial journalist and historian Sebastian Mallaby 
 
Even by the standards of an industry stacked with so-called visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. His journey to pursue the dream of super-human intelligence has taken him from working-class origins in North London to the founding of revolutionary AI company DeepMind to a Nobel Prize. Unlike many of his Silicon Valley peers, his goals are not money and power but scientific enlightenment. 
 
For the past several years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind. In The Infinity Machine, he offers an unrivalled window into the AI revolution, a transformation potentially more significant than any since we gained a capacity for abstract thought 70,000 years ago. DeepMind is locked in an arms race to build artificial general intelligence, and thereby to become the keeper of humanity’s future. But, like his rivals, Hassabis is haunted by the memory of Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the atom bomb. His goal is to build and control the technology. But the technology may ultimately control him—and humanity writ large.

The Infinity Machine

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence

Mariana Mazzucato

The crises that face us in the twenty-first century are global and interconnected: amongst many others, climate change exacerbates the water crisis, which in turn impacts health. Yet, as Mariana Mazzucato argues, we have failed to treat these as collective goals with shared agendas. This, she argues, is not by coincidence, but by design. 
 
In this ambitious and urgent new book, Mazzucato presents a systematic and scalable vision of successful government that creates value, addresses inequalities, and serves collective ends. Emphasizing a need to shift from reactively putting bandages on market failures to proactively shaping economies that actually work, she proposes a new economic theory of the common good. The book outlines five pillars of progressive government and demonstrates how they can help us tackle the most pressing challenges of our time. 
 
In critiquing the patchy version of the ‘public good’ and the ‘commons’ in economic theory—used by governments, civil society organizations and businesses worldwide, Mazzucato aims to radically change how ‘good’ is achieved. Building on her ‘mission-oriented’ approach and her influential rethinking of the role and nature of the ‘entrepreneurial state’, The Common Good Economy is a timely analysis and a manifesto for ensuring the welfare of both people and the planet.

The Common Good Economy

A New Compass

Andrea Wulf

The Traveller spreads out before us the life and times of George Forster, who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world, and whose radical ideas about humanity, equality and freedom challenged the worldviews of eighteenth-century Europe. 
 
Andrea Wulf paints a picture of a man of profound curiosity and brilliance. He joined Cook’s second voyage at the age of seventeen, an exploration of vast contrasts from the icy world of Antarctica to tropical islands of the South Pacific. Studying the diverse nature, peoples and cultures he encountered, he came back imbued with a deep belief in the equality of races – an understanding far ahead of his time. On his return he was feted in England, France, Germany and Poland, using his fame to advocate for freedom and women’s rights and against empire, racism and slavery. Wulf traces how Forster – inspired by the French Revolution – became a leader of the short-lived Republic of Mainz, before being declared an outlaw in Germany and forced into exile in Paris during the Reign of Terror. 
 
Vivid, engaging and drawing on Forster’s rich correspondence almost entirely unpublished in English, The Traveller recounts an extraordinary, passionate life largely forgotten by history.

The Traveller

The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity

Emmy van Deurzen

In this book, pioneering therapist, Emmy van Deurzen, harnesses over fifty years' experience to help us consider the world around and within us with fresh clarity, showing how we can take all that is good from the past, whilst being fully present in the moment and having a strong sense of direction for the future. 
 
Beginning to Live is a practical invitation to step back, look at the big picture and discover what really matters: in relationships with peers, friends and family, in solitude and creativity, and when dealing with dilemmas and difficulties of every kind. 
 
Whether you’re in therapy or prefer to find your own way through life’s struggles, van Deurzen offers a lifeline for rebuilding trust in the world, considering each of the four key aspects of our experience in turn: physical, social, personal and spiritual. This book is filled with wisdom and moving stories that show how, even when survival takes all you have, you can rekindle confidence in your own abilities and revitalize your capacity to relate to others, whilst finding a more engaged way of living that is purposeful, deliberate and buoyant.

Beginning to Live

The Art of Existential Freedom

Jan-Werner Müller

Building requires power and resources – then, once created, our environment structures how we relate to each other. But what would a distinctly democratic built environment look like? Should we prioritize an inclusive process by which as many citizens as possible can decide how a building is designed? Or is it about how architecture and urban spaces can best represent democracy to citizens – and how building and city planning can concretely facilitate democratic action by citizens?In Street, Palace, Square, political theorist Jan-Werner Müller offers an elegant new account of architecture and democracy that draws on examples from Washington DC to Dhaka, Cairo to Berlin. Ranging widely across political philosophy, history and design, he shows that bringing architecture and democracy together has an unexpected benefit. As we reflect on spaces and symbols on the one hand and our understandings of democracy on the other, we might see possibilities we did not see before: how to create spaces for citizens to make politics their own.

Street, Palace, Square

The Architecture of Democratic Spaces

Thomas W. Laqueur

Long before the phrase ‘man’s best friend’ became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In The Dog’s Gaze, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories. 
 
Dogs have been ubiquitous in the worldmaking of visual artists as far back as the Palaeolithic age. Looking across the western tradition, from Giotto to Goya and Rubens to Rego, Laqueur shows what their presence – as hunting partners, beloved friends and even conduits to the afterlife – reveals about our own ways of seeing and how we want to be remembered. Far from being mere motifs, dogs are an integral and intentional element of the images in which they appear: they provide narrative coherence; they look out and bear witness, often on the artist’s behalf; they illuminate our understanding of morality and melancholy and some, like us, become celebrities. Indeed, as the author shows, dogs in art are our social doppelgängers, our companions in looking and being. 
 
Richly illustrated and lovingly written, The Dog’s Gaze is a unique visual history that examines the shared social history of our two species and offers fresh insights into the human condition through the eyes of our canine companions.

The Dog's Gaze

A Visual History

Katja Hoyer

Weimar looms large in German history: a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. This ancient town nestled in the heart of the country was home to some of Europe's greatest thinkers, Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche among them. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest. 
 
Weimar shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new archival research, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler's regime. We encounter a vividly drawn cast of characters, from bookbinder Carl Weirich and hotel owners Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, to Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Here are fascists and socialists, artists and workers, politicians and citizens, who, as the events of history swept them up, became witnesses, perpetrators, victims and bystanders. 
 
An unforgettable picture of lives and choices in extraordinary circumstances, Weimar takes us deep into the heart of the storm – to the town that dreamt of a better world, and woke up to tyranny.

Weimar

Life on the Edge of Catastrophe

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Backtalker

Jeffrey A. Winters

The wealthy and powerful few have dominated the masses throughout most of human history. This is starkly visible now more than ever—today, the gulf between oligarchs and the average citizen is larger than any gap that existed during European serfdom or the slave society of Imperial Rome. We have arrived at the most blatant version of oligarchy that most modern states have endured, with politicians bought and paid for across the political spectrum. 
 
The strange thing is: we aren’t in open revolt against this system. In fact, we keep voting to prop it up. Why? 
 
In The Blind Spot, political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters delivers an urgent, incisive account of how we reached this era of in-your-face oligarchy, exposing how modern democracy was developed to protect the interests of the ultra-rich. By tracing the evolution of oligarchy across the globe and through modern history, he demonstrates how the rule of the wealthy isn’t just a flaw in our democracy, it has been built into its very foundations. Now, in an extraordinary paradox, we exist in a state of “participatory inequality”: a world in which 99.99% of us participate openly and freely—democratically, even—in our own ongoing exclusion and disenfranchisement. 
 
But powerful change can begin when we have a clear understanding of where we are, and where we deserve to be. As well as shining a light just how bad our political reality has become, The Blind Spot introduces bold ideas for how we might shift the balance of power. While the rich and powerful do not cede power quietly, this period of shocking inequality is, Winters shows, an opportunity for transformation.

The Blind Spot

How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies

Benoit Denizet-Lewis

As obsessed as we are with change, we’re also often wildly suspicious of those who claim to have pulled it off. 
 
In You’ve Changed, Benoit Denizet-Lewis shows how so much of what we think we know about self-transformation is wrong. Profound change is often less self-reinvention than self-discovery, and personal change isn’t always so personal — it’s better understood as a hazardous team sport. 
 
Drawing on insights from psychologists, neuroscientists and spiritual teachers, Denizet-Lewis confronts our ambivalent relationship with change by taking us inside the lives of people who’ve transformed themselves — or say they have. From psychedelic reality benders to political converters, from a seemingly transformed murderer to a bully-turned-Buddhist, Denizet-Lewis brings curiosity, empathy and humour to this compelling investigation of the many ways we try to reimagine ourselves — and what’s at stake when we do. 
 
You’ve Changed challenges us to think more deeply about how real transformation happens and is essential reading for anyone who’s ever wanted to change something meaningful about themselves, or someone they love.

You’ve Changed

The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation

Roderick Beaton

What do we think we mean by ‘Europe’? If it cannot be defined by geography alone, is it bound by history, by its politics, by a shared culture? In this perception-changing book, historian Roderick Beaton reconfigures the entire history of Europe, from its distant beginnings to today, as the story of an idea. 
 
Since its birth in ancient Greece, Europe has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments over 2,500 years, ending with the war in Ukraine. His focus is not on regions or nation states, but always on the continent as a whole, so that it appears in the sharpest outline. Throughout, Europe: A New History draws on original sources to allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves. 
 
The story of Europe’s people is, Beaton shows us, as much about shared, and changing, identities as about great or wicked deeds, pitched battles, invasions or revolutions. Exploring the multilayered identities that have always come with being European, this wise, vital work places the Europe of today in the long arc of history, and lets us see it anew.

Europe

A New History

Rachel Zoffness

What if everything you thought you knew about pain was wrong? 
 
We are in the middle of a pain epidemic. Yet for decades, we’ve misunderstood what pain actually is. The result? Millions stuck in a cycle of suffering. But what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions? 
 
In this provocative, paradigm-shifting book, pain psychologist Dr Rachel Zoffness radically reframes the way we understand pain. Drawing on fascinating case studies from her own practice and the latest scientific research, she explains why pain isn’t simply a symptom of injury — it’s shaped by your thoughts, your past, your stress levels, your relationships, even your expectations. With cutting-edge neuroscience, psychology and game-changing concepts, she demonstrates that pain is not simply a sign of damage; it’s a protective mechanism designed by your brain. And this is good news: because if the brain can change, pain can change. 
 
Whether you live with chronic pain or know someone who does, this book offers more than insight — it offers an empowering way forward.

Tell Me Where It Hurts

The Science of Pain and How to Heal

Adrian Wooldridge

We live in an age of extremes: populist leaders are setting the agenda, autocracies are on the march, and the liberal establishment is a bewildered blob, devoid of new ideas or fresh solutions. Having once powered progress in the form of democracy, mass welfare and defeating totalitarianism, liberals have the power to save the world again – but only if they rediscover the lost genius of their creed. 
 
Guiding us skilfully and entertainingly through the intellectual, cultural and political histories of liberalism, this book lays out a centrist agenda for today’s problems. It reminds us of the dynamism and fixed principles that have shaped the successes of liberalism and warns us against splitting into sub-groups that fail to grapple with the common good. Wooldridge proposes that, as well as reviving social mobility, liberals today need to be much more critical of big business – particularly if it makes money by manipulating choices and spreading misinformation – and rethink the laissez-faire approach to immigration, social disorder, and substance abuse. 
 
A powerful call to action, Centrists of the World Unite! shows us how liberals of all parties and none can come together in defending the values of liberal civilization from enemies without and within.

Centrists of the World Unite!

The Lost Genius of Liberalism

Imani Perry

Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with another colour: blue. In daily life, it is evoked in countless ways. Blue skies and blue water offer hope for a life beyond the current conditions. But blue is also the colour of deep melancholy and heartache, echoing Louis Armstrong’s question, ‘What did I do to be so Black and blue?’ In Black in Blues, celebrated author Imani Perry uses the world’s favourite colour as a springboard for a riveting emotional, cultural, and spiritual journey—an examination of race and Blackness that transcends politics or ideology. 
 
Drawing deeply from her own life as well as from art and history, Perry traces both blue and Blackness from their earliest roots to their many embodiments of contemporary culture: The dyed indigo cloths of West Africa that were traded for human life in the 16th century. The mixture of awe and aversion in the old-fashioned characterisation of dark-skinned people as ‘Blue Black’. The fundamentally American art form of blues music, sitting at the crossroads of pain and pleasure. The blue flowers she plants in memory of a loved one. 
 
Attuned to both the harrowing and the sublime aspects of the human experience, Black in Blues is a poignant, spellbinding, and utterly original work from one of our greatest thinkers.

Black in Blues

How a Colour Tells the Story of My People

Odd Arne Westad

If there are lessons from history, now is the time when we need to heed them, so that we do not end up in another Great Power war because of the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity that set off the first major war of the 20th century. 
 
The great majority of people alive today have come of age in a world of remarkable stability, presided over by either one or two superpowers. This is not to say the world has been peaceful; but it has to an extent been predictable. As an increasing number of Great Powers now jostle for regional supremacy our world has become more fragile, unpredictable – and combustible. 
 
To understand the threats that face us in this complex new terrain, we must look to the lessons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a time when Great Powers clashed and sought regional dominance, when nationalism and populism were on the rise, and many felt that globalization had failed them: a time, in other words, that carries eerie parallels with our own.

The Coming Storm

Power, Conflict and Warnings from History

Tom Feiling

No sex. No kids. No future? 
 
When Tom Feiling moved to Tokyo as a student in the early nineties, Japan was a beacon of the future: a rising superpower, a technology giant, and a global symbol of prosperity, civility and success. When he returned twenty-four years later, the country was still a sign of things to come – but, he began to realize, it was no longer a beacon. It was a warning. 
 
This book offers a unique portrait of life in contemporary Japan, from the quiet of its furthest flung villages to the dynamism of its megacities. It tells the story of how, from the mid-seventies onwards, Japanese society unknowingly embarked on a vast, silent process of transformation that is still unfolding today. The country is still peaceful; it is still prosperous. But the population is shrinking. As things stand, it will fall by a third with each new generation. 
 
Travelling through shrines and bars, rice fields and mango farms, coffee shops and old peoples’ homes, Feiling meets those affected by, and driving, this transformation. Through countless interviews and extensive research, he weaves together a powerful account of how and why men and women are ceasing to pair off and have kids. He reveals how sexual appetites and behaviours are both shaped by, and reshaping the evolving economy, and considers the risks – and the opportunities – of the rise in solo living in Japan, and beyond. 
 
Clear-sighted and surprising, Alone in Japan is a portrait of love, sex and death in contemporary Japan that should provoke and engage us all. It is an electrifying portrait of a nation on the brink by one of the most original reporters working today.

Alone in Japan

A Journey to the Future

Jane Rogoyska

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. 
 
In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. 
 
Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.

Hotel Exile

Paris in the Shadow of War

Fay Bound Alberti

What’s in a face? 
 
The face is the only part of the body where all the senses come together and, over the course of human history, has come to represent who we are as individuals. We unlock our phones with facial recognition; we have our faces stamped in our passports; and although our faces may change over the course of our lives – whether through ageing, accident, illness or lifestyle – they remain a foundational marker of identity. 
 
In The Face, cultural historian Fay Bound Alberti explores the ways humans have interpreted faces and how they have shaped our ideas of morality, social hierarchy, psychology and so much more, revealing some of the biases that inform our everyday lives. She charts how new technologies and cultural innovations have transformed our conception of selfhood over time – from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century developments, such as digital avatars and face transplants. 
 
Bringing together a wealth of fascinating research, interviews and illuminating personal narratives, Bound Alberti probes beneath the surface to ask what our faces really say about us.

The Face

A Cultural History

Michael Pollan

When it comes to consciousness, there is one point scientists, philosophers and artists all agree on: that it feels like something to be ourselves. And yet, the fact that each and every one of us has a subjective experience of the world continues to be one of the greatest mysteries in nature. How is it that our mental operations are accompanied by feelings, thoughts and a sense of self? What would studying the inner life scientifically even look like?What began for Michael Pollan as a startling awareness of his own consciousness soon evolved into a deeper fascination with this strange and elusive phenomenon. In A World Appears, Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness from several radically different perspectives – scientific, philosophical, spiritual, historical and psychedelic – to see what each has to teach us about this fundamental fact of our lives. 
 
Here Pollan ventures beyond the brain labs attempting to find neural explanations for our felt reality, and discovers the latest cutting-edge advances in the field. He introduces us to plant neurobiologists studying nature’s surprisingly complex intelligence; neuroscientists and psychoanalysts attempting to engineer feeling into AI; and novelists recreating our slippery stream of consciousness.Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness uncovers a world far deeper than our everyday reality – and perhaps even beyond it.

A World Appears

A Journey Into Consciousness

Hélène Landemore

Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with re-election. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing and keep the game rigged in their favour. But what can we do? 
 
With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern, not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good. 
 
When regular citizens come together in this way, they make smarter, fairer, more forward-thinking decisions, often bringing out the best in one another. Witnessing this process firsthand, Landemore has learned that democracy should be like a good party where even the shyest guests feel welcome to speak, listen, and be heard. With sharp analysis and real-world examples, drawing from her experience with deliberative processes in France and elsewhere, Landemore shows us how to move beyond democracy as a spectator sport, embracing it as a shared practice — not just in the voting booth but in shaping the laws and policies that govern our lives. 
 
If you’ve ever felt powerless, Politics Without Politicians will show you how we can take back democracy.

Politics Without Politicians

The Case for Citizen Rule

Sergio Luzzatto

In nineteenth-century France, the first fascist was born. Decades before Mussolini, the Marquis de Morès became the first populist and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he tore France apart with his inflammatory media rhetoric and violent stunts. Who was this man, who both anticipated and propelled the fascist politics that erupted in the twentieth century? 
 
Drawing on a wealth of original sources, award-winning historian Sergio Luzzatto explores the forgotten story of a father of fascism. He shows how, after losing aristocratic status in modern, democratic France, Morès led an adventurous life cattle ranching on the American frontier and building a railway in the jungles of Indochina – yet found all his schemes dogged by failure. He follows in Morès’s footsteps, as, blaming supposed Jewish machinations for his defeats, he returned to France and soon controlled a large, violent militia of disgruntled workers. Even when his rapid political rise was torpedoed by a highly publicized financial scandal, his shadow continued to loom. In Vichy France, as Jewish people were being deported to Auschwitz, officials would gather to celebrate Morès’s memory. Vivid and unsettling, The First Fascist is an engrossing exploration of the roots of our present discontent.

The First Fascist

The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès

Mark B. Smith

With Stalin's death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place. Yet it also became one that was more predictable for its citizens, and made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s. 
 
Mark B. Smith's original and evocative book recreates the day-to-day life of this vast state, the largest ever to exist. What was life like in a country which made such absolute claims for the future, which claimed to be on its way to creating a people's utopia and which, like the USA, owned enough atomic weapons to end human life on Earth? 
 
Exit Stalin is filled with extraordinary stories about those who lived in the USSR and the distinctive and functioning civilization that they built. Many of them embraced its values, understood its goals and could not imagine life outside such a vastly ambitious and progressive project. The shortages, coercion and incompetence that underlay the USSR - and which by the late 1980s would doom it - have to be understood alongside the acceptance it always had from many of its citizens. And this in turn is a crucial issue for understanding Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century.

Exit Stalin

The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991

Ali Cross

Alice-Miranda

Alien Invaders

Alistair Fury

All Quiet on the Western Front

Alms for Oblivion

Alpha Force

Amazing Spaces

Amsterdam Quartet with Inspector Jaap Rykel

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