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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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

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

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

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

One of most influential thinkers today offers a deeply engaging story of justice and power in America 
 
When Kimberlé Crenshaw was five years old in Ohio during the civil rights era, she was the only girl denied a lead role in her nursery play. Puzzled by her teacher's behaviour, she spoke up - and never stopped. That instinct to question power, to challenge what others accepted as fair, would shape not only her own life but the way we now understand race and gender. 
 
In Backtalker, Crenshaw traces her journey from a spirited girl in Canton, Ohio to one of the most influential legal thinkers today. Through childhood lessons and painful reckonings - a boyfriend’s violence in college, a back door at Harvard Law, the silencing of women in the civil rights movement - Crenshaw learned to see the patterns others missed, refusing to stay behind the lines the world drew for her. 
 
Out of those experiences came two ideas that changed everything: intersectionality, the recognition that race, gender, and class overlap to create unique forms of discrimination; and critical race theory, the argument that racism is structural. Crenshaw’s voice has since echoed through some of the most charged moments in recent history - from Anita Hill’s testimony to the rise of Black Lives Matter - insisting that true justice means seeing the whole picture. 
 
Backtalker is both a memoir of awakening and the origin story of a transformative mind. Crenshaw’s story is ultimately about fairness and power - and the enduring battle for America’s soul.

Backtalker

A Memoir

Sergio Luzzatto

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

The First Fascist

The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès

Andrew Roberts

In 1804, immediately after his coronation as Emperor, Napoleon created the Marshalate, the supreme martial rank of the empire. Over the next decade, he elevated to it some of his most outstanding generals, who played leading roles in his extraordinary campaigns – including the brave Ney, the flamboyant Murat, the vain Massena, the iron Davout and the logistics master Berthier. 
 
Some of them were son of aristocrats, others of innkeepers or coopers, but all carried the baton of a Marshal of France. Andrew Roberts masterfully captures their personalities and ambitions, capacities and rivalries. But unlike Lincoln, who forged a team of rivals, Napoleon created a nest of vipers whose lust for glory descended into destructive competitiveness and mutual recrimination. For all his inspiring qualities as a leader, he manipulated and controlled those whose loyalty he most needed to survive, and ultimately only two of them rode beside him at Waterloo. 
 
This dramatic and hugely enjoyable book by one of Britain's most admired historians is by far the fullest account of these brilliant figures and their fiery relationships with their master.

Napoleon and his Marshals

Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal

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