Anita Desai

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Joya Chatterji

This book tells the story of South's Asia's twentieth century in eight chapters. Unlike standard narrative histories of the subcontinent that concentrate exclusively on politics, here nature, objects, technologies, cultures, and people's changing relationships to them and to each other, are central preoccupations. 
 
The structure of the book is unorthodox. Unusually for a work of this kind, it is thematic rather than chronological. Chapters address specific questions that might arise in the minds of a 'lay', but thoughtful, reader; but each chapter is chronological within itself, analysing change over a century in one particular sphere. This format allows the reader to explore particular issues - say, the changing character of nationalism, migration or consumption - over time and in depth. 
 
Shadows at Noon is a bold and innovative work that pushes back against standard narratives of 'inherent' differences between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The purpose of the book is to make contemporary South Asia intelligible, while sharing with the reader its infinite colour and excitement. The book does not 'talk down' to the reader or attempt, in facile ways, to simplify the history of a vast, and almost mythically intricate, society.

Shadows At Noon

The South Asian Twentieth Century

Caroline Moorehead

Discover the life of one of the twentieth century's most significant and notorious war correspondents, and the third wife of Ernest Hemingway. 
 
Martha Gellhorn's journalism tracks many of the flashpoints of the twentieth century; as a young woman she witnessed the suffering of the American Depression and risked her life in the Spanish Civil War. Her dispatches from the front made her a legend, yet her private life was often messy and volcanic. 
 
 Her determination to be a war correspondent - and her conspicuous success - contributed to the breakdown of her infamously stormy marriage to Ernest Hemingway. In this mesmerising biography of a life that spanned the twentieth century, Moorehead reveals how passionately Martha fought against injustice, and how determined she was to catch the human story. 
 
'A deeply sympathetic portrait... [it shows] an overwhelming sense of what it is to be human' Daily Telegraph

Martha Gellhorn

A Life

Michael Wolff

From the author of the Sunday Times Number One Bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House 
 
Rupert Murdoch is one of the greatest deal-makers alive. His companies possess extraordinary political and cultural power. Whether it is the Sun and the rise of Thatcher, BSkyB and the transformation of football, or Fox News and the war on terror, we have been living in the age of Murdoch since the late seventies. But who is he? What drives him? 
 
With unprecedented access to Murdoch and his inner circle, Michael Wolff chronicles the astonishing growth of the mogul’s giant media kingdom. Drawing upon hundreds of hours of interviews he offers us a portrait of a Machiavellian titan; overbearing, but loving, father; love-struck husband; and a cynical and brilliant newsman. The resulting book is unrivalled in its intimacy and candour and tells a tale of business that is both the story of a man’s life, and the story of our times.

The Man Who Owns the News

Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

A.L. Kennedy

Nathan Staples is consumed by loathing and love in roughly equal measures. Frustrated by his life and the way he lives it, he is sustained only by his passionate devotion for his estranged wife and their teenage daughter, Mary. When Nathan contrives to have Mary invited to the island where he lives in retreat, he sets in motion the possiblity of telling her he is her father, and becoming whole and complete and alive again.

Everything You Need

Edward W Said

From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the World Trade Centre bombing, the West has been haunted by a spectre called 'Islam'. As portrayed by the news media - and by a chorus of government, academic and corporate experts - 'Islam' is synonymous with terrorism and religious hysteria. At the same time, Islamic countries use Islam to justify unrepresentative and often oppressive regimes. 
 
In this landmark work, for which he has written a new introduction, one of our foremost public thinkers examines the origins and repercussions of the media's monolithic images of Islam. Combining political commentary with literary criticism, Edward Said reveals the hidden assumptions and distortions of fact that underlie even the most 'objective' coverage of the Islamic world.

Covering Islam

How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (Fully Revised Edition)

Clive Stafford Smith

Shortlisted for the 2013 Orwell Prize. 
THE STORY CONTINUES: TWO NEW CHAPTERS FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION 
 
In 1986, Kris Maharaj, a British businessman living in Miami, was arrested for the brutal murder of two ex-business associates. His lawyer did not present a strong alibi; Kris was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. 
 
It wasn't until a young lawyer working for nothing, Clive Stafford Smith, took on his case that strong evidence began to emerge that the state of Florida had got the wrong man on Death Row. So far, so good - except that, as Stafford Smith argues here so compellingly, the American justice system is actually designed to ignore innocence. Twenty-six years later, Maharaj is still in jail. 
 
Step by step, Stafford Smith untangles the Maharaj case and the system that makes disasters like this inevitable. His conclusions will act as a wake-up call for those who condone legislation which threatens basic human rights and, at the same time, the personal story he tells demonstrates that determination can challenge the institutions that surreptitiously threaten our freedom.

Injustice

Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America

Sophie Heawood

'Deftly explores expectations of modern womanhood . . . Full of adventure and awe' Dolly Alderton 
 
People always said I'd find love where I least expected it. I always said they were idiots. 
 
I had no idea how to commit to another human being. 
 
I could barely commit to reading a magazine, and I wrote for magazines for a living. My specialist subject was celebrities, and my own relationships made their marriages look eternal. 
 
I'd never paid a household bill that didn't mention bailiffs, and my idea of exercise was to go and stand outside a famous person's house and stare until I'd convinced myself that I lived in it. 
 
 But my life in LA was happy; free of care and consequence. That was, until I came down to earth - with a bump. 
 
 So this is the story of how I staggered from partying in Hollywood to bringing up a baby in Piss Alley, Dalston; how I never did find a copy of What To Expect When You Weren't Even Fucking Expecting To Be Expecting, and why paternity testing is not a good topic for a first-date conversation. 
 
**AN EVENING STANDARD AND COSMOPOLITAN BEST BOOK OF 2020** 
**AN OBSERVER NON-FICTION BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2020** 
___________________ 
 
Praise for THE HUNGOVER GAMES: 
'Funny, dark and true' Caitlin Moran 
'A deeper, funnier, realer, more poignant Bridget Jones' Philippa Perry 
'Sharply observed and funny' Guardian 
'Frank and fearless' Red 
'Outrageously entertaining' David Nicholls 
'This is the first time I've read anything about motherhood that didn't bore me' Sara Pascoe

The Hungover Games

The gloriously funny Sunday Times bestselling memoir of motherhood

Farida Khalaf

Andrea C. Hoffmann

Our world as it once was 
 
In August 2014, Farida was, like any ordinary teenager, enjoying the last days of summer before her final year at school. However, her peaceful mountain village in northern Iraq was an ISIS target as their genocide against the Yazidi people began. 
 
The catastrophe 
 
ISIS murdered the men and boys in the village, including Farida's father and brother, and took the women hostage. Farida was one of them. She was held in a slave camp, in the homes of ISIS members and finally in a desert training camp. Continually she struggled, resisted and fought against her captors, showing unimaginable strength and bravery. 
 
This is my story 
 
Eventually, Farida managed to plot her escape and fled into the desert with five young girls in her care, but defeating ISIS was just the first step in her journey. In this book she tells her remarkable and inspiring story.

The Girl Who Escaped ISIS

Farida's Story

Neil Chenoweth

In the summer of 2000, Rupert Murdoch is weeks away from realising his life's dream. Three years ago, he set out to challenge every media group in America and he failed. Now unexpectedly the last wave of the tech stockmarket boom has given him a second chance.  Murdoch's gamble is to change the way the world communicates. His plan will establish himself as the most powerful media figure on the planet and put him in direct conflict with Bill Gates. With time running out, Murdoch must beat Gates to the Premier League television rights, then float the world's biggest satellite platform on Wall Street before the market falls over. Battling cancer, his family fraying while the empire falters, Murdoch will do whatever he must to make this final, greatest gamble work.

Virtual Murdoch

Reality Wars on the Information Highway

Lindsey Hilsum

The gripping life story of the great war correspondent Marie Colvin told by one of her closest friends 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK AWARD 
 
Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. She reported from the most dangerous places in the world and her anecdotes about encounters with figures like Colonel Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat were incomparable. She was much admired, and as famous for her wild parties as for the extraordinary lengths to which she went to tell the story. 
 
Fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum draws on unpublished diaries and interviews with friends, family and colleagues to produce a story of one of the most daring and inspirational women of our times. 
 
A Sunday Times Book of the Year 
'A stunningly good biography' WILLIAM BOYD

In Extremis

The Life of War Correspondent Marie Colvin

Isabel Buchanan

Winner of the Saltire Society First Book Award 2016 
An Economist Book of the Year 2016 
A Spectator Book of the Year 2016 
 
In 2011, Isabel Buchanan, a twenty-three-year-old Scottish lawyer, moved to Pakistan to work in a new legal chambers in Lahore. The chambers was run by a determined thirty-three-year-old Pakistani lawyer, Sarah Belal, who had finally found her calling in defending inmates on Pakistan’s death row. 
 
Belal and Buchanan struck up an unlikely friendship, forged through working in a system that was instinctively hostile to newcomers – and doubly so if they were female. At Sarah’s side, and with the help of Nasar, the firm’s legendary clerk, Buchanan plunged into the strange and complex world of Pakistan’s justice system. The work was arduous, underfunded, and dangerous. But for a young Scottish lawyer like Buchanan it was an unparalleled education, offering a window onto a much-misunderstood country and culture. Filled with beautifully drawn characters, she creates a narrative brimming with ideas and bursting with humanity. It is a story of Pakistan, but it is also a universal story of the pursuit of justice in an uncertain world.

Trials

On Death Row in Pakistan

Zahra Hankir

'Fascinating' Nigella Lawson 
'Awe-inspiring' Funmi Fetto 
'A treat to read' Kassia St Clair 
 
A Sunday Times Style Barometer and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Pick 
 
For centuries, humans have been drawn to lining our eyes. The aesthetic trademark of icons from Nefertiti to Amy Winehouse, eyeliner is one of our most enduring cosmetic tools: ancient royals and Gen Z influencers alike have harnessed its power. 
 
Through Zahra Hankir&rsquo;s kohl-lined eyes, this ubiquitous product becomes proof of the stunning variety among cultures across time and space. Exploring intimate conversations &ndash; with Chadian nomads, Japanese geisha, Indian dancers, New York&rsquo;s drag queens and more &ndash; Eyeliner embraces the profound significance of its namesake, especially among communities of colour. 
 
What emerges is a delightful and unexpectedly moving journey through streets and stages around the world, and a stirring reclamation of a key piece of our collective history. 
 
Featuring stunning portrait illustrations by Mercedes deBellard

Eyeliner

A Cultural History

Michael Booth

'The next Bill Bryson.’ New York Times 
 
Michael Booth has had his fill of celebrity chefs and their 'on the table in five minutes' recipes. He wants to learn how to cook properly, so he burns his cookery books and, together with his young family, heads for a new life in Paris - reasoning that, if anyone can be trusted to make food complicated, it's the French. 
 
Embarking on the ultimate foodie's fantasy, he enrols at the world's most famous cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu, where wise and battle-scarred French chefs commence their transformation of him into a professional cook. 
 
Along the way Booth shares the insider tips and secret techniques of classical cuisine. His odyssey takes him from trauma to triumph, ending in the white-hot heat of the Michelin-starred kitchen of the greatest chef in France.

Doing without Delia

Tales of Triumph and Disaster in a French Kitchen

Annalena McAfee

Tamara Sim, a ruthlessly ambitious young journalist, is thrilled when she is sent to interview veteran war correspondent Honor Tait. Finally - a chance for Tamara to prove that there's more to her than forged expenses claims and the 'what's in/what's out' column she churns out for her tabloid. But Honor isn't an easy subject; cold and evasive to the point of rudeness, it's almost as if she has something to hide. And when Tamara starts to do some digging (not all of it strictly legal) she makes a discovery which has devastating consequences for them both... 
 
In The Spoiler, the former literary editor of the Financial Times and the Guardian offers a first hand glimpse into the world of British journalism.

The Spoiler

Margaret Forster

In 1831 John Dodgson Carr, son of a Quaker grocer, set off to walk from his home in Kendal to Carlisle, determined to launch a great enterprise. Within 15 years, Carr's of Carlisle had become one of the largest baking businesses in the world -and is a by-word for biscuits to this day. Following his trail to Carlisle (where she herself was born and grew up), Margaret Forster brings 19th-century daily life into vivid focus and charts the rise and rise of a middle-class family like the Carrs, ambitious, innovative yet sternly religious. This is history as it was lived by the men and women both above and below stairs - from the shop floor to the comfortable bourgeois homes of the paternalistic Carrs. We see the conflict between religion and profit, the family feuds and the changing face of a city through this compelling historical narrative, told with Margaret Forster's characteristic blend of scholarship, readability and marvellous attention to the texture of everyday life.

Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin

A Family and Their Times 1831-1931

Colin Grant

Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey 
 
 'Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable' Guardian 
 
 At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the 'black Moses' and merely 'a Negro with a hat', he masterminded the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, began the Universal Negro Improvement Association and captivated audiences with his powerful speeches and audacious 'Back to Africa' programme. But he was to end his life in penury, ignominy and friendless exile, after serving jail time in both the US and Jamaica. 
 
With masterful skill, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey's extraordinary life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is the dramatic cautionary tale of a man who articulated the submerged thoughts of an awakening people. 
 
'Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research ...Grant show's Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity and his paradoxes' Independent on Sunday

Negro with a Hat: Marcus Garvey

Carmen Callil

'A triumphant family memoir' Hallie Rubenhold 
'Powerfully told...an impressive work' The Times 
'Oh Happy Day gives a voice to the voiceless' Australian Book Review 
 
In this remarkable book, Carmen Callil discovers the story of her British ancestors, beginning with her great-great grandmother Sary Lacey, born in 1808, an impoverished stocking frame worker. Through detailed research, we follow Sary from slum to tenement and from pregnancy to pregnancy. We also meet George Conquest, a canal worker and the father of one of Sary's children. George was sentenced - for a minor theft - to seven years' transportation to Australia, where he faced the extraordinary brutality of convict life. 
 
But for George, as for so many disenfranchised British people like him, Australia turned out to be his Happy Day. He survived, prospered and eventually returned to England, where he met Sary again, after nearly thirty years. He brought her out to Australia, and they were never parted again. 
 
A miracle of research and fuelled by righteous anger, Oh Happy Day is a story of Empire, migration and the inequality and injustice of nineteenth-century England. 
 
'A remarkable tale...drawing chilling parallels to the inequalities of our times' Observer

Oh Happy Day

Those Times and These Times

Emily P Webber

The story of the last generation of British miners: fathers and sons, brothers and comrades, big hitters and broken men, strikers and scabs. 
 
'A compelling, unflinching account…full of tales of tragedy, gallows humour and camaraderie’ The Times 
 
What happened to Britain's last generation of miners? Combining new personal interviews with extensive archival research, Emily P. Webber illuminates the extraordinary history of the industry once considered the backbone of Britain. 
 
By situating the miners’ strike of 1984–85 in a longer history of the coalfields, we can understand why miners and their families fought so hard against pit closures, and what happened after the pit wheels stopped turning. Vivid, evocative and richly alive with minute detail, Mining Men explores what the mining industry once meant to its workers and their communities, and what Britain lost when it was gone. 
 
'Fascinating... An engaging history of post-war British mining' Daily Telegraph 
 
'Absorbing and enjoyable...an illuminating peek into the lives of those who risked everything to warm our hearths' The Herald

Mining Men

Britain’s Last Kings of the Coalface

Paul Vigna

Michael J. Casey

‘If the word ‘blockchain’ makes you want to call a plumber, or you think Satoshi is some kind of raw fish, you need to read Cryptocurrency today. If you're already a bit-convert, you'll still learn a lot’ Niall Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money 
 
1988 saw the birth of the internet. 2008 gave us bitcoin. Today, cybercurrencies are changing the world we live in. What would a world without banks, credit cards or national currencies look like for all of us? 
For centuries, the system that governs how money works has stayed the same. Now there’s an alternative, and it puts us on the cusp of a revolution that could reshape our world. At the heart of this lie, cryptocurrencies, a technology with the transformative potential of the printing press or the internet. They bypass the elites and cut out the gatekeepers. Unlike traditional money, they don’t have a nationality, they’re digital and democratic. They are also lawless. 
 
 From Silicon Valley to the streets of Beijing, this is a book about a revolution in the making, a story of human invention, and a guide to the future. 
 
‘Fascinating’ The Times 
 
 ‘Not only demystifies and explains bitcoin, but shows where it fits into the cultural zeitgeist and where it's pointed, and what that may mean for our financial system’ John Mauldin, New York Times bestselling author 
 
‘I can think of no better guide to what the future holds’ Eswar Prasad, author of The Dollar Trap

Cryptocurrency

The ultimate go-to guide for the Bitcoin curious

Afua Hirsch

Our bodies tell our story. 
 
Upon turning forty, Afua Hirsch had an encounter that forever altered her preconceived notions of ancestry and body image, making her question everything from body-modification rituals such as tattoos and piercings to the foundations of sexuality. 
 
Decolonising My Body charts her year-long journey of radical unlearning. Bringing together global scholarship, on-the-ground reportage, personal anecdotes and interviews with beauty experts, practitioners and service users, Hirsch reassesses notions of body image beyond those of the colonial, patriarchal gaze. Taking us from puberty to end-of-life, she shows us that the ways in which we adorn and present ourselves have spiritual implications and shape the possibilities we see for ourselves in the world.

Decolonising My Body

On Ancestry, Tradition and Cultural Reinvention

A radical exploration of rituals and beauty

Lady Hale

Lady Hale is an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and for the causes she has championed. Spider Woman is her story. 
 
 As 'a little girl from a little school in a little village in North Yorkshire', she only went into the law because her headteacher told her she wasn't clever enough to study history. She became the most senior judge in the country but it was an unconventional path to the top. 
 
 How does a self-professed 'girly swot' get ahead in a profession dominated by men? Was it a surprise that the perspectives of women and other disadvantaged groups had been overlooked, or that children's interests were marginalised? A lifelong smasher of glass-ceilings, who took as her motto 'women are equal to everything', her landmark rulings in areas including domestic violence, divorce, mental health and equality were her attempt to correct that. 
 
 As President of the Supreme Court, Lady Hale won global attention in finding the 2019 prorogation of Parliament to be unlawful. Yet that dramatic moment was merely the pinnacle of a career throughout which she was hailed as a pioneering reformer. 
 
 Wise, warm and inspiring, Spider Woman shows how the law shapes our world and supports us in crisis. It is the story of how Lady Hale found that she could overcome the odds, which shows that anyone from similar beginnings will find that they can cope too.

Spider Woman

A Life – by the former President of the Supreme Court

Nicky Haslam

Nicky Haslam has always been at the centre of things wherever he is - at parties, opening nights, royal weddings - and has stories to tell of crossing paths, and more, with the cultural icons of our time: Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, Diana Cooper, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe to name but a few. Redeeming Features is an exuberantly told and stunningly crafted memoir: a compelling and wholly singular document of our times.

Redeeming Features

A Memoir

Selina Hastings

'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph 
 
Sybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. 
 
Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art. 
 
'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year 
 
'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator 
 
'An extraordinary story' The Times 
 
'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the Year

Sybille Bedford

An Appetite for Life

Adam Smyth

The Book-Makers is a celebration of 550 years of the printed book, told through the lives of eighteen extraordinary men and women who took the book in radical new directions: printers and binders, publishers and artists, paper-makers and library founders. This is a story of skill, craft, mess, cunning, triumph, improvisation, and error.Some of these names we know. We meet jobbing printer (and American Founding Father) Benjamin Franklin. We watch Thomas Cobden-Sanderson conjure books that flicker between the early twentieth century and the fifteenth. Others have been forgotten. We don't remember Sarah Eaves, wife of John Baskerville, and her crucial contribution to the history of type. Nor Charles Edward Mudie, populariser of the circulating library – and the most influential figure in book publishing before Jeff Bezos. Nor William Wildgoose, who meticulously bound Shakespeare’s First Folio, and then disappeared from history.The Book-Makers puts people back into the story of the book. It takes you inside the print-shop as the deadline looms and the adrenaline flows – from 1492 Fleet Street to 2023 New York. It’s a story of contingencies and quirks, of successes and failures, of routes forward and paths not taken. The Book-Makers is a history of book-making that leaves ink on your fingers, and it shows why the printed book will continual to flourish.

The Book-Makers

A History of the Book in 18 Remarkable Lives

Gordon Brown

Former Prime Minister and the country’s longest-serving Chancellor, Gordon Brown has been a guiding force for Britain and the world over three decades. This is his candid, poignant and deeply relevant story. 
 
In describing his upbringing in Scotland as the son of a minister, the near loss of his eyesight as a student and the death of his daughter within days of her birth, he shares the passionately-held principles that have shaped and driven him, reminding us that politics can and should be a calling to serve. Reflecting on the personal and ideological tensions within Labour and its successes and failures in power, he describes how to meet the challenge of pursuing a radical agenda within a credible party of government. 
 
He explains how as Chancellor he equipped Britain for a globalised economy while swimming against the neoliberal tide and shows what more must be done to halt rising inequality. In his behind-the-scenes account of the financial crisis and his leading role in saving the world economy from collapse, he addresses the question of who was to blame for the crash and why its causes and consequences still beset us. 
 
From the invasion of Iraq to the tragedy of Afghanistan, from the coalition negotiations of 2010 to the referendums on Scottish independence and Europe, Gordon Brown draws on his unique experiences to explain Britain’s current fractured condition. And by showing us what progressive politics has achieved in recent decades, he inspires us with a vision of what it might yet achieve today. 
 
Riveting, expert and highly personal, this historic memoir is an invaluable insight into our times.

My Life, Our Times

Gavin Knight

The Penwith Peninsula in Cornwall is where the land ends. In The Swordfish and the Star Gavin Knight takes us into this huddle of grey roofs at the edge of the sea at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 
 
He catches the stories of a whole community, but especially those still working this last frontier: the Cornish fishermen. These are the dreamers and fighters who every day prepare for battle with the vast grey Atlantic. Cornwall and its seas are brought to life, mixing drinking and drugs and sea spray, moonlit beaches and shattering storms, myth and urban myth. The result is an arresting tapestry of a place we thought we knew; the precarious reality of life in Cornwall today emerges from behind our idyllic holiday snaps and picture postcards. Even the quaint fishermen’s pubs on the quay at Newlyn, including the Swordfish and its neighbour the Star, turn out to be places where squalls can blow up, and down again, in an instant. 
 
Based on immersive research and rich with the voices of a cast of remarkable characters, this is an eye-opening, dramatic, poignant account of life on Britain’s most dangerous stretch of coast. 
 
Praise for Hood Rat 
'A gripping novelistic immersion' Louis Theroux 
'A must-read' Owen Jones 
'Britain's Gomorrah' Independent

The Swordfish and the Star

Life on Cornwall's most treacherous stretch of coast

Christopher Andrew

Julius Green

A vastly entertaining and unique history of the interaction between spying and showbiz, from the Elizabethan age to the Cold War and beyond. 
 
'A treasure trove of human ingenuity' The Times 
 
Written by two experts in their fields, Stars and Spies is the first history of the extraordinary connections between the intelligence services and show business. 
 
We travel back to the golden age of theatre and intelligence in the reign of Elizabeth I. We meet the writers, actors and entertainers drawn into espionage in the Restoration, the Ancien Régime and Civil War America. And we witness the entry of spying into mainstream popular culture throughout the twentieth century and beyond - from the adventures of James Bond to the thrillers of John le Carré and long-running TV series such as The Americans. 
 
'Thoroughly entertaining' Spectator 
 
'I found it extremely difficult to put this book down' Daily Telegraph

Stars and Spies

The Astonishing History of Espionage and Show Business

The story of Intelligence Operations…

Charles Rangeley-Wilson

‘A wonderful and important book, that from its first pages draws the reader along on a fascinating, gripping, often funny journey.’ Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland. 
 
An idiosyncratic history of our island story told through five iconic fish 
 
 On these rain-swept islands in the North Atlantic man and fish go back a long way. Fish are woven through the fabric of the country’s history: we depend on them – for food, for livelihood and for fun – and now their fate depends on us in a relationship which has become more complex, passionate and precarious in the sophisticated 21st Century. 
 
 
In Silver Shoals Charles Rangeley-Wilson travels north, south, east and west through the British Isles tracing the histories, living and past, of our most iconic fish – cod, carp, eels, salmon and herring – and of the fishermen who catch them and care for them. 
 
 
In the company of trawlermen, longshoremen, conservationists and anglers Charles goes to sea in a trawler, whiles away hot afternoons setting eel nets, tries to bag his first elusive carp and drifts for herring on Guy Fawkes night as fireworks starburst the sky. 
 
 
Underscoring this journey is a fascinating historical exploration of these creatures that have shaped our island story. We learn how abundant and valued these fish were centuries before our current crisis of over-fishing: we learn how eels built our monasteries, how cod sank the Spanish Armada, how fish and chips helped us through two World Wars. 
 
 
Of course there is a deeper environmental dimension to the story, but Charles' optimistic perspective is this: no one is more invested in fish than the fishermen whose lives depend on them. If we can find a way to harness that passion then the future of fish and fishermen in Britain could be as extraordinary as its past.

Silver Shoals

Five Fish That Made Britain

Jeremy Lewis

Few newspaper editors are remembered beyond their lifetimes, but David Astor is a great exception to the rule. Growing up surrounded by astonishing wealth (the family home was so large it included a miniature railway to transport meals to the dining room) Astor’s early life was far from idyllic. At Oxford he suffered the first of the bouts of depression that were to blight his life, and he became a lost soul for much of the Thirties but when he took the Observer on in 1948 he converted a staid Sunday paper into essential reading. Employing the likes of Kim Philby, Vita Sackville-West, Clive James and Patrick O’Donovan (who became famous for writing his report on Bobby Kennedy’s funeral before it had taken place) he doubled the circulation and created a paper envied and admired.

David Astor

Rachel Maddow

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Oil. 
 
Corrupt? Yes. 
 
 Unimaginably lucrative? Of course. 
 
 But, the enemy of democracy? 
 
 Blowout is the oil and gas industry as we've never seen it before, as told by America's most incisive political journalist, Rachel Maddow. A blackly comic journey from Washington to Siberia, to deep within the earth's crust and the icy Arctic seas, it reveals is not just the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas but why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. 
 
 This is our final wake-up call: to stop subsidizing oil and gas, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry before it destroys our democracy 
 
 'It takes enormous talent to balance brutal honesty with scorching wit. Rachel Maddow has it in spades... Each page in Blowout is a revelation into the depth of corruption and greed that is infused into the international economy' David Lammy, MP

Blowout

Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

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Here, from Anita Desai to Salman Rushdie, are five books about families, India, marriage and the rest, to keep you going as the series moves on.

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