Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Who owns language? In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngugi wa Thiong’o presents a series of essays that build on his vast wealth of work on language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. Intricate, nuanced and accessible, it reaffirms the revolutionary power of African languages to fight back against both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present.With immense relevance to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas is a brilliant distillation of the enduring themes of Ngugi’s work and a vital addition to the library of one of the world’s greatest and most provocative writers.

Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas

Graham Harman

How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.

Waves and Stones

On the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Lea Ypi

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we are transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and marry a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity explores what it means to survive in an age of extremes. It reveals the fragility of truth, both personal and political, and the cost of decisions made against the tide of history. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination, fact and fiction. Ultimately, she asks, what do we really know about the people closest to us? And with what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations?

Indignity

A Life Reimagined

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

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch's modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda's Tutsi minority: close to a million people murdered by their neighbours in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us an intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, vengefulness and forgiveness. 
 
 A powerful literary reckoning, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know is the culmination of twenty-five years of reporting. The book takes its title from a Rwandan adage that speaks to the uneasy trade-offs that reconciliation demands. Since the genocide, Rwanda has engaged in the most ambitious and sweeping process of accountability ever undertaken. 'Truth Heals' was the slogan. But truth also wounds. And truth is always contested. 
 
 As Gourevitch returns to the same families in one small hillside village, their accounts of killing and surviving inform and enlarge one another, illuminating the ways that we seek, individually and collectively, to negotiate our irreparable pasts. This moving book continuously invites us - as only great writing can - to think, and to think again.

You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know

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

Maria Alyokhina

2014: Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympics. Russia invades Crimea. Putin is re-elected president. Several political prisoners are amnestied and released early from prison.Maria Alyokhina is among them. She had spent two years in a penal colony after performing the punk prayer ‘Virgin Mary, Banish Putin’ with her friends in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. They had warned the rest of the world of the dangers of authoritarianism but the Russia she finds when she gets out of prison is even more oppressive.What can you do, she asks, when your country has been seized by all-powerful men who are waging war against another country and their own citizens?As Maria recounts her brave and colourful protests, we are drawn straight into the world of grassroots opposition and witness the absurd measures the Russian state takes to contain protest. And when the full-scale war against Ukraine starts and the Russian opposition is repeatedly silenced, Maria and her activist friends continue to resist despite the high stakes. They fight increasingly absurd cycles of detention and house arrest: sometimes with the smallest acts such as going for a walk or having a rainbow ice cream, until, faced with a new prison sentence, she escapes Russia in May 2022 dressed as a delivery food courier. Her story, like her life, is fiercely courageous, darkly funny and highly inspiring to anyone who wants to stand up for the truth.

Political Girl

Life and Fate in Russia

Edward White

For more than forty years, Diana, Princess of Wales, has been mythologized to the most extraordinary degree. Adored and lionized by some, ridiculed and traduced by others, Diana has always commanded a cultural presence unmatched by any other member of the royal family. 
 
In Dianaworld, Edward White offers both a portrait of the princess and a group portrait of those who existed in her orbit—from her royal in-laws, her servants, and the dilapidated ranks of the British aristocracy from which she rose, to drag performers, artists, Britain’s ethnic minorities, and the Gen Z superfans who maintain her status as a cultural icon. 
 
Drawing on a wide array of sources and perspectives, many never used in books about Diana or the royal family, White vividly recreates the world Diana lived in, explores the growth of her global reputation, and illuminates her lasting impact on the world she left behind.

Dianaworld

An Obsession

Neil Price

Almost everyone has heard of the Vikings: scouring the coasts of Europe in their longships, with plunder and pillage. Those raiders were real and deserved their reputation, but in fact they were only ever a small minority of the Scandinavians. ‘Viking’ comes from the Old Norse word for pirate, and while we may use that label for every Northerner of the eighth to eleventh centuries, in reality they followed many different callings. 
 
In his revelatory new book, archaeologist Neil Price takes us on a journey of individual encounters across the whole of the Norse world. From the beginning of the Viking Age to its end, the true diversity of their lives is brought out in vivid clarity from excavated evidence: we meet sea-kings and sorceresses; arctic hunters and shapeshifters; Sámi nomads and bears given burials; mercenaries and traders; the free and the enslaved; immigrants and diplomats; followers of many gods, and the worshippers of one; townsfolk and farmers; and yes, the real Vikings too. The time that bears their name will never seem so simple again.

The Sea-King and the Sorceress

Life and Death in the Viking Age

Toby Green

In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau? 
 
In The Heretic of Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness. 
 
Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. 
 
For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres’s case, we can see what this world was really like. The Heretic of Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived – its beliefs, values and people.

The Heretic of Cacheu

Struggles over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port

Jeremy Atherton Lin

A Book of the Year for The New Yorker and Electric Lit and a Time Out 10 Best Books of 2025 
 
It’s 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion shows, and East Village hotel rooms; eventually, finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco. 
 
What emerges is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. Deep House moves through the couple’s various domiciles while unlocking doors to a lineage of outsiders who came before them: hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subvert the system and activists who go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for their freedoms. Combining cultural history with radically intimate memoir, Deep House is at once a romp through the queer archives and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

Deep House

The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

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

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

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

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

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