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

Laure Murat

Proust's In Search of Lost Time is many things. It is a staggering achievement, an evocation of an elite milieu, a literary reckoning with memory; it is also a massive reading challenge, a book more abandoned than read. For Laure Murat - who first read The Search when she was twenty years old - it was a map to the world of the French aristocracy, the very world into which she had been born. The chateaux and balls of The Search were, for her, the backdrop of her family story, understood anew through Proust's eyes. 
 
In this beautiful book, Murat explores the fixity of the aristocratic life, which codifies everything from speech to dress to movement; and Proust's astonishing seven-volume novel, which, with fluidity and linguistic virtuosity, shifts focus from the codes for behaving to the experience of living. In Proust: A Family Affair, Murat celebrates the emancipating power of literature, and the honour of paying close attention to a text that may, in turn, provoke a close and loving attendance to the self.

Proust: A Family Affair

Katja Hoyer

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

Weimar

Life on the Edge of Catastrophe

Kimberlé 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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