Andrew Smith

About Will Smith: Will Smith is an actor, producer, and musician, and an Academy Award, Grammy, and NAACP award winner, who has enjoyed a diverse career encompassing films, television shows, and multiplatinum albums. He holds many box office records, including the most consecutive $100 million-grossing movies (eight). He and his wife founded the Will &amp; Jada Smith Family Foundation to improve lives by providing invaluable resources to accelerate the growth of initiatives that focus on deepening individual and collective empowerment in the areas of arts and education, social empowerment, health and wellness, and sustainability. 
 
Instagram: @WillSmith

Will Smith

Ed Smith

Al Smith

About Ali Smith: Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Ali Smith

Lyn Smith

About Kim Smith: Kim Smith is the New York Times best-selling illustrator of over 30 picture books, including Boxitects, the Builder Brothers series, and the PopClassics picture book adaptations. Kim also works on children's video games, animation, and now children's non-fiction too. She lives in Calgary, Canada.

Kim Smith

Jim Smith

Ray Smith

Jan Smith

About Oli Smith: A freelance author turned games writer and producer, Oli Smith wrote a variety of books, audiobooks, video games and comic strips for the hit BBC show Doctor Who before joining indie games developers Mediatonic in central London. His novels include Doctor Who: System Wipe and Doctor Who: Decide Your Destiny: Judoon Monsoon, while his audiobooks include Doctor Who: Runaway Train. He has also written five reference books and contributed to several short story collections.

Oli Smith

Dale Smith

About Jean Smith: Jean Smith is a sought-after social and cultural anthropologist and flirting coach, who is dedicated to bringing a scientific approach to the art of flirting. She has appeared on television and radio (including BBC Breakfast, GMTV, This Morning, Woman's Hour and Daybreak) and contributes to and features in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including Marie Claire, Psychologies, the Times and The Sunday Express. 
 
Jean is a TedX speaker and has spoken everywhere from the Royal Society of Medicine and the Royal Festival Hall in London, to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Her Fearless Flirting Tours and Guardian Masterclasses regularly sell out and she works with brands, agencies and universities around the world. She is the founder of Flirtology and lives in London. 
 
www.flirtology.com

Jean Smith

About Emma Smith: Emma Smith was born and brought up in Leeds, went unexpectedly to university in Oxford, and never really left. She is now Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College and the author of the Sunday Times bestseller This is Shakespeare. She enjoys silent films, birdwatching, and fast cars.

Emma Smith

Fred Smith

Joan Smith

Jane Smith

Mark Smith

About Mark Smith: Mark Smith joined the Antiques Roadshow team in 2014 and quickly became a firm favourite with viewers. Like his father and grandfather, Mark Smith was born and bred in Walthamstow, East London. He started collecting British medals in 1969 and owns an extensive private collection that he has amassed over the years; a hobby which has become a life-long passion. He is a well-known expert on the Victoria Cross. He holds a degree in museum studies from UCL, is a Member of the Western Front Association and the Orders and Medals Research Society, he is also a well-known Battlefield Tour Guide.

Rich Smith

Paul Smith

About Neil Smith: Neil Smith is a French to English translator who lives in Montreal. His first book, the story collection Bang Crunch, was published around the world to critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by the Globe and Mail and the Washington Post. Boo is his first novel.

Neil Smith

About Olly Smith: Olly Smith is a multi award-winning drinks expert and broadcaster. He is the wine columnist for The Mail on Sunday, regular wine expert on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen, presenter on BBC Radio 2 and host of his own drinks podcast 'A Glass With’ featuring a dazzling array of celebrity guests including pop star P!NK, Sting, actor Sam Neill, Sir Michael Parkinson and Dawn French. 
 
 
 He has been named International Wine and Spirits Communicator of the Year, Drinks Writer of the Year at the 2017 &amp; 2016 Great British Food Awards and UK ambassador for the Food is Great campaign to China. He is listed in Debretts as one of the 500 most influential people in the UK. 
 
 
Olly is the celebrity Drinks Ambassador for the Ideal Home Show and appears at his own series of Three Wine Men events taking wine tasting on tour. 
 
 
Olly presents Ale Trails for Food Network and Travel Channel and his new drinks series with Warner Bros takes him around the world exploring the history of How Beer Changed the World. With his own award-winning chain of Glass House wine bars aboard P&amp;O Cruises, author of 4 books, extensive knowledge of all things booze, the only thing Olly is more enthusiastic about than a glass of the good stuff, is sharing it. 
 
www.ollysmith.com

Olly Smith

About Olly Smith: Olly Smith is the UK’s best-loved wine expert, with 18 years’ presenting wine on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen. He has written about wine for the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mail for 17 years and has six award-winning Glass House wine bars across P&amp;O Cruises fleet. He has won countless awards in the wine industry, including International Wine and Spirits Communicator of the Year and Drinks Writer of the Year, and tours the UK every year as one of the Three Wine Men. Olly has appeared on primetime shows including Celebrity Mastermind, Bridge of Lies and House of Games. He has hosted more than 80 episodes of his hit drinks podcast ‘A Glass With’ featuring a dazzling array of celebrity guests. Olly is also patron of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. He is the author of Home Cocktail Bible (2021) and World Cocktail Atlas (2023).

About Matt Smith: Matthew Smith is a celebrated novelist and Dredd comics writers. Smith, also the editor of 2000 AD, has written two previous novels for Abaddon and Black Flame and the comics series Dredd Year One for IDW.

Matt Smith

Lane Smith

About Keri Smith: Keri Smith is an author/illustrator turned guerilla artist. She is the author of several bestselling books about creativity, including This Is Not a Book, How to be an Explorer of the World, and Wreck this Journal. She conducts workshops based on her books, and has illustrated for various journals, including the Washington Post and the New York Times. Keri spends her days playing with her husband and son, and divides her time between western Massachusetts and the countryside of Canada.

Keri Smith

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David Nasaw

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

Andrew Carnegie

For British children the Second World War was a terrifying time of deprivation, uprootings and separation. But many also endured intense air raids or found themselves, shockingly, caught up in the action. 
 
Young Voices tells how British children across the globe lived in the days before and during the fighting. Meet nine-year-old Jean Greaves, whose father was taken by the Nazis for helping Jewish people; schoolboy Derek Bech who clung to a raft in heavy seas after his ship was torpedoed; baker's boy Ron Hurford in occupied Guernsey who stole German flour for his family; teenager and messenger Peter Izard who dodged a falling doodlebug; Manila internee Jacqueline Towell who couldn't walk for malnutrition; and many others who survived adversity and danger. 
 
Through the breathtaking stories of over one hundred contributors, Lyn Smith has written an extraordinary history of the war as seen through child's eyes.

Young Voices

British Children Remember the Second World War

'A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn't encountered before' Val McDermid, The Times 
 
Most of what we say about books is really about the words inside them: the rosy nostalgic glow for childhood reading, the lifetime companionship of a much-loved novel. But books are things as well as words, objects in our lives as well as worlds in our heads. And just as we crack their spines, loosen their leaves and write in their margins, so they disrupt and disorder us in turn. All books are, as Stephen King put it, 'a uniquely portable magic'. Here, Emma Smith shows us why. 
 
Portable Magic unfurls an exciting and iconoclastic new story of the book in human hands, exploring when, why and how it acquired its particular hold over us. Gathering together a millennium's worth of pivotal encounters with volumes big and small, Smith reveals that, as much as their contents, it is books' physical form - their 'bookhood' - that lends them their distinctive and sometimes dangerous magic. From the Diamond Sutra to Jilly Cooper's Riders, to a book made of wrapped slices of cheese, this composite artisanal object has, for centuries, embodied and extended relationships between readers, nations, ideologies and cultures, in significant and unpredictable ways. 
 
Exploring the unexpected and unseen consequences of our love affair with books, Portable Magic hails the rise of the mass-market paperback, and dismantles the myth that print began with Gutenberg; it reveals how our reading habits have been shaped by American soldiers, and proposes new definitions of a 'classic'-and even of the book itself. Ultimately, it illuminates the ways in which our relationship with the written word is more reciprocal - and more turbulent - than we tend to imagine.

Portable Magic

A History of Books and their Readers

P. D. Smith

It was the weapon to end all weapons: the doomsday device. A huge nuclear bomb so powerful that it could envelop the entire planet in a cloud of radioactive dust, and bring about instant extinction. 
 
This is the untold story of the Cold War&rsquo;s most insane plan, the men behind it and how it nearly happened. It is also the history of humanity&rsquo;s nightmare vision of a superweapon, showing how popular culture, from the stories of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne to films such as Planet of the Apes, Mad Max and Dr Strangelove itself have both shaped and reflected our darkest dreams.

Doomsday Men

The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon

Colin Smith

Churchill's description of the fall of Singapore on 15 February 1942, after Lt-Gen Percival's surrender led to over 100,000 British, Australian and Indian troops falling into the hands of the Japanese, was no wartime exaggeration. The Japanese had promised that there would be no Dunkirk in Singapore, and its fall led to imprisonment, torture and death for thousands of allied men and women. With much new material from British, Australian, Indian and Japanese sources, Colin Smith has woven together the full and terrifying story of the fall of Singapore and its aftermath. Here, alongside cowardice and incompetence, are forgotten acts of enormous heroism; treachery yet heart-rending loyalty; Japanese compassion as well as brutality from the bravest and most capricious enemy the British ever had to face.

Singapore Burning

Heroism and Surrender in World War II

Andrew Gordon

Winner of the Longman's History Today Book of the Year Award and the inaugural Westminster Medal for Military Literature 
 
More than a century had gone by since the Battle of Trafalgar. Generation after generation of British naval captains had been dreaming ever since of a 'new' Trafalgar - a cataclysmic encounter which would decisively change a war's outcome. At last, in the summer of 1916, they thought their moment had come... 
 
Andrew Gordon's extraordinary, gripping book brilliantly recreates the atmosphere of the British navy in the years leading up to Jutland and gives a superb account of the battle itself and its bitterly acrimonious aftermath.

The Rules of the Game

Jutland and British Naval Command

Andrew Hussey

Paris is the city of light and the city of darkness - a place of ceaseless revolution and reinvention that for two thousand years has drawn those with the highest ideals and the lowest morals to its teeming streets. 
 
In Andrew Hussey's wonderful book we encounter the myriad citizens whose stories have shaped Paris: the nineteenth-century flaneurs aimlessly wandering Haussman's new streets; survivors and victims of ravaging plagues; the builders of Notre Dame Cathedral; those who turned the River Seine red with blood on St Bartholomew's Day; and the many others whose lives have imprinted themselves on a city that has always aroused strong emotions.

Paris

The Secret History

Rupert Smith

UPDATED WITH TWO NEW CHAPTERS 
 
'One of the most provocative and startling books ever written by a British commander ... an update of the two great thinkers on war and peace, Clausewitz and Sun Tsu, for our time ... it is for anyone interested in the well-being of our world' Robert Fox, Evening Standard 
 
Why do we try to use military force to solve our political problems? And why, when our forces win the military battles does this still fail to solve those problems? It is because the force lacks utility. From Iraq to the Balkans, and from Afghanistan to Chechneya, over the past fifteen years there has been a steady stream of military interventions that have not delivered on their promise for peace, or even political resolution. The Utility of Force explains this anomaly at the heart of our current international system. 
 
'Britain's outstanding soldier of modern times ... a book that will assure his reputation as a serious and original thinker among soldiers and strategists' Sir John Keegan, Daily Telegraph 
 
'It is hard to overstate the devastating nature of this book as an indictment of almost everything the West has done in recent years, and is doing today' Sir Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph

The Utility of Force

Updated with two new chapters

The Art of War in the Modern World

Graham Smith

They say Britain should be proud to have the mother of parliaments, a shining beacon of democracy and an example to other nations. But there's an elephant in the room. 
 
At the heart of power is a single family. They weren't elected but they live off the public purse. They aren't accountable to anyone, and yet between them they are privy to more government secrets than many cabinet ministers. Divinely appointed using a special hat, the head of the family is your superior, you his subject. Apparently he is guardian of our constitution - but we're also told he wouldn't dream of interfering in politics. 
 
If you accept the monarchy, you must accept the moral compromise that comes with it, from its erosion of the principle of equality to the secret interference in our laws. But the good news is that we don't have to accept it. True democracy is within our reach.

Abolish the Monarchy

Why we should and how we will

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts's magnificent new biography portrays George as intelligent, benevolent, scrupulously devoted to the constitution of his country and (as head of government as well as head of state) navigating the turbulence of eighteenth-century politics with a strong sense of honour and duty. He was a devoted husband and family man, a great patron of the arts and sciences, keen to advance Britain's agricultural capacity ('Farmer George') and determined that her horizons should be global. He could be stubborn and self-righteous, but he was also brave, brushing aside numerous assassination attempts, galvanising his ministers and generals at moments of crisis and stoical in the face of his descent - five times during his life - into a horrifying loss of mind. 
 
The book gives a detailed, revisionist account of the American Revolutionary War, persuasively taking apart a significant proportion of the Declaration of Independence, which Roberts shows to be largely Jeffersonian propaganda. In a later war, he describes how George's support for William Pitt was crucial in the battle against Napoleon. And he makes a convincing, modern diagnosis of George's terrible malady, very different to the widely accepted medical view and to popular portrayals. 
 
In presenting this fresh view of Britain's most misunderstood monarch, George III shows one of Britain's premier historians at his sparkling best.

George III

The Life and Reign of Britain's Most Misunderstood Monarch

Andrew Tierney

In 1849, a woman called Ellen Langley died in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. She was the wife of a prosperous local doctor. So why was she buried in a pauper's coffin? Why had she been confined to the grim attic of the house she shared with her husband, and then exiled to a rented dwelling-room in an impoverished part of the famine-ravaged town? And why was her husband charged with murder? 
 
Following every twist and turn of the inquest into Ellen Langley's death and the trial of her husband, The Doctor's Wife is Dead tells the story of an unhappy marriage, of a man's confidence that he could get away with abusing his wife, and of the brave efforts of a number of ordinary citizens to hold him to account. Andrew Tierney has produced a tour de force of narrative nonfiction that shines a light on the double standards of Victorian law and morality and illuminates the weave of money, sex, ambition and respectability that defined the possibilities and limitations of married life. It is a gripping portrait of a marriage, a society and a shocking legal drama.

The Doctor's Wife Is Dead

The True Story of a Peculiar Marriage, a Suspicious Death, and the Murder Trial that Shocked Ireland

'A Napoleonic triumph of a book, irresistibly galloping with the momentum of a cavalry charge' Simon Sebag Montefiore 
'Simply dynamite' Bernard Cornwell 
 
From Andrew Roberts, author of the bestsellers The Storm of War and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon. 
 
Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'état he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful 'Empire style' in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died and his Empire began to unravel. 
 
More than any other modern biographer, Andrew Roberts conveys Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. He has walked 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields, and has absorbed the gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, which allows a complete re-evaluation of this exceptional man. He overturns many received opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Josephine: she took a lover immediately after their marriage, and, as Roberts shows, he had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged. 
 
Of the climactic Battle of Leipzig in 1813, as the fighting closed around them, a French sergeant-major wrote, 'No-one who has not experienced it can have any idea of the enthusiasm that burst forth among the half-starved, exhausted soldiers when the Emperor was there in person. If all were demoralised and he appeared, his presence was like an electric shock. All shouted "Vive l'Empereur!" and everyone charged blindly into the fire.' 
 
The reader of this biography will understand why this was so.

Napoleon the Great

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

The Storm of War

A New History of the Second World War

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 
A SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, ECONOMIST, DAILY TELEGRAPH, EVENING STANDARD, OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR 
 
'Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times 
 
A magnificently fresh and unexpected biography of Churchill, by one of Britain's most acclaimed historians 
 
Winston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British history. By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1965, many thought him to be the greatest man in the world. 
 
There have been over a thousand previous biographies of Churchill. Andrew Roberts now draws on over forty new sources, including the private diaries of King George VI, used in no previous Churchill biography to depict him more intimately and persuasively than any of its predecessors. The book in no way conceals Churchill's faults and it allows the reader to appreciate his virtues and character in full: his titanic capacity for work (and drink), his ability see the big picture, his willingness to take risks and insistence on being where the action was, his good humour even in the most desperate circumstances, the breadth and strength of his friendships and his extraordinary propensity to burst into tears at unexpected moments. Above all, it shows us the wellsprings of his personality - his lifelong desire to please his father (even long after his father's death) but aristocratic disdain for the opinions of almost everyone else, his love of the British Empire, his sense of history and its connection to the present. 
 
During the Second World War, Churchill summoned a particular scientist to see him several times for technical advice. 'It was the same whenever we met', wrote the young man, 'I had a feeling of being recharged by a source of living power.' Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's emissary, wrote 'Wherever he was, there was a battlefront.' Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Churchill's essential partner in strategy and most severe critic in private, wrote in his diary, 'I thank God I was given such an opportunity of working alongside such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.'

Churchill

Walking with Destiny

Masters and Commanders describes how four titanic figures shaped the grand strategy of the West during the Second World War. Each was exceptionally tough-willed and strong minded, and each was certain that he knew best how to win the war. Yet each knew that he had to win at least two of the others over in order to get his strategy adopted. The book traces the mutual suspicion and admiration, the rebuffs and the charm, the often explosive disagreements and wary reconciliations which resulted.

Masters and Commanders

The Military Geniuses Who Led The West To Victory In World War II

Andrew Chaikin

'Through the windows of the slowly turning spacecraft they looked out at the place where the sun had once been, and there was the moon: a huge, magnificent sphere bathed in the eerie blue light of earthshine, each crater rendered in ghostly detail.' 
 
The race to the moon was won spectacularly by Apollo 11 on 20 July 1969. When astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their 'giant step' across a ghostly lunar landscape, they were watched by some 600 million people on Earth 250,000 miles away. 
 
A Man on the Moon is the definitive account of the heroic Apollo programme: from the tragedy of the fire in Apollo 1 during a simulated launch, through the euphoria of the first moonwalk, to the discoveries made by the first scientist in space aboard Apollo 17. Drawing on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with the astronauts and team, this is the story of the twentieth century's greatest human achievement, minute-by-minute, in the words of those who were there. 
 
'Impressive and illuminating' -Tom Hanks

A Man on the Moon

The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts

Mark B. Smith

Russia is an exceptional country, the biggest in the world. It is both European and exotic, powerful and weak, brilliant and flawed. Why are we so afraid of it? 
 
Time and again, we judge Russia by unique standards. We have usually assumed that it possesses higher levels of cunning, malevolence and brutality than other countries. Yet it has more often than not been a crucial ally, not least against Napoleon and in the two world wars. We admire its music and its writers. We lavish praise on the Russian soul. And still we think of Russia as a unique menace. What is it about this extraordinary country that consistently provokes such excessive responses? And why is this so dangerous? 
 
Mark B. Smith's remarkable new book is a history of this 'Russia Anxiety'. Whether Russia has been ally or enemy, superpower or failing state, it has always had a exceptional status in our imagination.

The Russia Anxiety

And How History Can Resolve It

Andrew Borowiec

In the autumn of 1944, 16-year-old Andrew Borowiec, wearing two left shoes and bleeding from numerous shrapnel wounds, limped into a German prisoner-of-war camp. 
 
Andrew was one of the youngest boy soldiers who fought in the Warsaw Rising, witnessing the worst street fighting since Stalingrad. Wounded in the leg, he emerged from the sewers and gave himself up, taking a chance as a prisoner of war. 
 
In the prison camp he secretly kept a diary on toilet paper, and this became the basis of his extraordinary tale of survival and defiance.

Warsaw Boy

A Memoir of a Wartime Childhood

Andrew Hindmoor

Vladimir Lenin, an occasional resident of North London who went on to other things, has been credited with once saying that there are decades where nothing happens but weeks when decades happen. The first two and a half decades of this century in Britain have had plenty of those weeks. Indeed, our recent history has at times resembled an episode of Casualty, the long-running BBC hospital drama in which every hedge trimmer slips, every gas pipe leaks, every piece of scaffolding collapses and everyone ends up in intensive care. 
 
In Haywire Andrew Hindmoor makes sense of the deluge of events which have rained down on Britain since 2000, from the Iraq War to financial collapse, austerity to Brexit, as well as more easily forgotten moments such as the MP’s expenses scandal. He shows not simply how one crisis has quickly followed another, but how each crisis has compounded the next, so that disaster feels like the new normal. Has Britain simply been the victim of a particularly prolonged run of bad luck which will, sooner or later, come to an end? No. Hindmoor argues that the way the British state is organised has, time and again, made a crisis out of a drama – and that it is time to find an alternative before we all go haywire.

Haywire

A Political History of Britain since 2000

Kehinde Andrews

Malcolm X is a titanic figure in political history, but he is also one of the most misunderstood. So much of what we know about his life and politics is from books, films and documentaries that are all guilty of peddling the Malcolm myth for their own nefarious interests. Forever known as the violent Yang to Martin Luther King’s Yin, in the years since his death he has been co-opted into the American project, punished by his enemies for his radicalism, and marginalised by decades of governments, academics and activists. 
 
But here, for the first time, Malcolm is rediscovered. On the centenary of his birthday, in a world shaken by decades of injustice and racism, Malcolm’s political mission is more urgent than ever. In Nobody Can Give You Freedom, Kehinde Andrews reveals his real revolutionary programme. Malcolm’s activism was his philosophy, and paying attention to it reveals the true cultural icon – who, if he were alive today, would tell us to pick up the mantle, and overturn this wicked system for good.

Nobody Can Give You Freedom

The Real Mission of Malcolm X

Take a step through the looking-glass to a strange land, one where Piers Morgan is a voice worth listening to about race, where white people buy self-help books to help them cope with their whiteness, where Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are seen by the majority of the population as 'the right (white) man for the job'. Perhaps you know it. All the inhabitants seem to be afflicted by serious delusions, like that racism doesn't exist and if it does it can be cured with a one-hour inclusion seminar, and bizarre collective hallucinations, like the widely held idea that Britain's only role in slavery was to abolish it. 
 
But there is a serious side too. Black and brown people suffer from a greater number of mental health difficulties, caused in no small part by living in a racist society. But being Black and brown has itself been pathologized by the young field of psychology. Society cannot face up to the racism at its heart and in its history, so the delusions, irrationalities and hallucinations it conjures up to avoid doing so can only best be described as a psychosis, and the costs are being borne by the sons and daughters of that racist history. 
 
Kehinde Andrews is your piercing, wry and not a little funny guide back to sanity, unpicking the absurd and outrageous lies society tells to keep up the status quo and The Psychosis of Whiteness is your lifeboat out of this topsy-turvy world.

The Psychosis of Whiteness

Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World

Andrew Rawnsley

'Downing Street is said to be 'furious' at this book - and it is easy to understand why. It is the first meticulous chronicle of all that has happened since that bright May Day three years ago which first brought the Blair government to office'  Anthony Howard, Sunday Times

Servants of the People

The Inside Story of New Labour

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

The New Age of Empire

How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World

Tracy K. Smith

Even the men in black armor, the ones 
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else 
 
Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade 
Sizing up the heart's familiar meat? 
 
In Wade in the Water, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith's signature voice - inquisitive, lyrical and wry - turns over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence. The various connotations of the title, taken from a spiritual once sung on the Underground Railroad which smuggled slaves to safety in 19th-century America, resurface throughout the book, binding past and present together. Collaged voices and documents recreate both the correspondence between slave owners and the letters sent home by African Americans enlisted in the US Civil War. Survivors' reports attest to the experiences of recent immigrants and refugees. Accounts of near-death experiences intertwine with the modern-day fallout of a corporation's illegal pollution of a major river and the surrounding land; and, in a series of beautiful lyrical pieces, the poet's everyday world and the growth and flourishing of her daughter are observed with a tender and witty eye. Marrying the contemporary and the historical to a sense of the transcendent, haunted and holy, this is a luminous book by one of America's essential poets.

Wade in the Water

Andrew Feinstein

Pulling back the curtain on the secretive world of the global arms trade, Andrew Feinstein reveals the corruption and the cover-ups behind weapons deals ranging from the largest in history - between the British and Saudi governments - to BAE's controversial transactions in South Africa, Tanzania and eastern Europe, and the revolving-door relationships that characterise the US Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex. He exposes in forensic detail both the formal government-to-government trade in arms and the shadow world of illicit weapons dealing - and lays bare the shocking and inextricable links between the two. 
 
The Shadow World places us in the midst of the arms trade's dramatic wheeling and dealing, ranging from corporate boardrooms to seedy out-of-the-way hotels via far-flung offshore havens, and reveals the profound danger this network represents to all of us.

The Shadow World

Inside the Global Arms Trade

Andrew Wheatcroft

The Habsburgs have been described at one extreme as demons &ndash; responsible for a &lsquo;long history of atrocities&rsquo;; and, at the other, as dodos &ndash; living fossils unable to adapt to the modern world. In reality, the flamboyant royal family appear, in many ways, to have behaved much like most other monarchies. Their story, however, is none the less enthralling for that. It is populated by such unforgettable figures as mad Queen Juana, progressing through Spain with her husband&rsquo;s decaying body; the &lsquo;heroically fertile&rsquo; Maria Theresa, and the quixotic Maximilian, &lsquo;Emperor&rsquo; of Mexico.

The Habsburgs

Embodying Empire

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

The second sensational volume of 'One of the biggest intelligence coups in recent years' (The Times) 
 
When Vasili Mitrokhin revealed his archive of Russian intelligence material to the world it caused an international sensation. The Mitrokhin Archive II reveals in full the secrets of this remarkable cache, showing for the first time the astonishing extent of the KGB's global power and influence. 
 
'The long-awaited second tranche from the KGB archive ... co-authored by our leading authority on the secret machinations of the Evil Empire' Sunday Times 
 
'Stunning ... the stuff of legend ... a unique insight into KGB activities on a global scale' Spectator 
 
'Headline news ... as great a credit to the scholarship of its author as to the dedication and courage of its originator' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'There are gems on every page' Financial Times

The Mitrokhin Archive II

The KGB in the World

To mark the centenary of its foundation, the British Security Service, MI5, has opened its archives to an independent historian. The Defence of the Realm, the book which results, is an unprecedented publication, It reveals the precise role of the Service in twentieth-century British history, from its foundation by Captain Kell of the British Army in October 1909 to root out 'the spies of the Kaiser' up to its present role in countering Islamic terrorism. It describes the distinctive ethos of MI5, how the organization has been managed, its relationship with the government, where it has triumphed and where it has failed. In all of this, no restriction has been placed on the judgements made by the author. 
 
The book also casts new light on many events and periods in British history, showing for example that though well-placed sources MI5 was probably the pre-war department with the best understanding of Hitler's objectives, and had a remarkable willingness to speak truth to power; how it was so astonishingly successful in turning German agents during the Second World War; and that it had much greater roles than has hitherto been realized during the end of the Empire and in responding to the recurrent fears of successive governments (both Conservative and Labour) and or Cold War Communist subversion. It has new information about the Profumo affair and its aftermath, about the 'Magnificent Five' and about a range of formerly unconfirmed Soviet contacts. It reveals that though MI5 had a file on Harold Wilson it did not plot against him, and it describes what really happened during the failed IRA attack in Gibraltar in March 1988.

The Defence of the Realm

The Authorized History of MI5

Andrew Ross Sorkin

In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfolded—one of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin. 
 
With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivety in an endless boom led to wreckage. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today’s world—where markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again. 
 
This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that “this time is different.” It’s about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late. 
 
Hailed as a landmark book, Too Big to Fail reimagined how financial crises are told. Now, with 1929, Sorkin delivers an immersive, electrifying account of the most pivotal market collapse of all time—with lessons that remain as urgent as ever. More than just a history, 1929 is a crucial blueprint for understanding the cycles of speculation, the forces that drive financial upheaval, and the warning signs we ignore at our peril. 
 
*The Atlantic Monthly

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