Michael Symmons Roberts’s fourth book of poetry, Corpus, was the winner of the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, and the Griffin International Prize. His sixth collection, Drysalter, was the winner of both the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize in 2013. He collaborated with Paul Farley on Edgelands (Cape/Vintage) and will do so again in The Deaths of the Poets (Cape, 2017). He has also worked many times with the composer James MacMillan. He has published two novels, and is Professor of Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Michael Symmons Roberts

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Andrew Hodges

The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley 
 
Alan Turing was the mathematician whose cipher-cracking transformed the Second World War. Taken on by British Intelligence in 1938, as a shy young Cambridge don, he combined brilliant logic with a flair for engineering. In 1940 his machines were breaking the Enigma-enciphered messages of Nazi Germany’s air force. He then headed the penetration of the super-secure U-boat communications. 
 
But his vision went far beyond this achievement. Before the war he had invented the concept of the universal machine, and in 1945 he turned this into the first design for a digital computer. 
 
Turing's far-sighted plans for the digital era forged ahead into a vision for Artificial Intelligence. However, in 1952 his homosexuality rendered him a criminal and he was subjected to humiliating treatment. In 1954, aged 41, Alan Turing took his own life.

Alan Turing: The Enigma

The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

Ian Jack

In this selection from over twenty years of reporting and writing, Ian Jack sets out to deal with contemporary Britain - from national disasters to football matches to obesity - but is always drawn back in time, vexed by the question of what came first. 
 
In 'Women and Children First', watching the film Titanic leads into an investigation into the legend of Wallace Henry Hartley, the famous band leader of the doomed liner, while 'The 12.10 to Leeds', a magnificent report on the Hatfield rail crash, begins its hunt for clues in the eighteenth century in the search for those responsible. Further afield, he finds vestiges of a vanished Britain in the Indian subcontinent, meeting characters like maverick English missionary and linguist William Carey, credited with importing India's first steam engine. 
 
Full of the style, knowledge and intimacy that makes his work so special, this collection is the perfect introduction to the work of one of the country's finest writers.

The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

Timothy Garton Ash

'A moving love letter to Europe' Lea Ypi, author of Free 
 
Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history, reporting and memoir by our greatest writer about Europe. 
 
Drawing on half a century of travel and thinking, Homelands tells the story of Europe since its emergence from wartime hell in 1945: how it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole, free and at peace'. And then faltered. 
 
Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying Europe. Highly personal and deeply felt, this book is also full of vivid experiences, encounters and anecdotes: from his father's memories of D-Day to interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo, and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents in the UK, Europe and the US. 
 
Homelands is both a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. At its heart, this book is an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

Homelands

A Personal History of Europe - Updated with a New Chapter

A Personal History of Europe

Tim Parks

In Hell and Back, Tim Parks reminds us just how exciting the essay form can be - turning his attention to classic authors like Dante, Borges and Leopardi, as well as various contemporary writers including Vikram Seth, W.G. Sebald and Salman Rushdie.

Hell And Back

Jeffrey Sachs

One of the world's most brilliant economists and the bestselling author of The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, Jeffrey Sachs has written a book that is essential reading for everyone. 
 
In this time of crisis, The Price of Civilization sets out a bold and provocative, yet responsible and achievable, plan; and reveals why we must - and how we can - change our economic culture in this time of crisis. 
 
This is a masterful roadmap for prosperity, a programme designed to bridge divides and provide a way forward that we - and our leaders - ignore at our peril.

The Price of Civilization

Economics and Ethics After the Fall

Jean Sprackland

'A refreshingly original meditation... I wish I had written it myself' Literary Review 
 
Graveyards are oases: places of escape, peace and reflection. Liminal sites of commemoration, where the past is close enough to touch. Yet they also reflect their living community - how in our restless, accelerated modern world, we are losing our sense of connection to the dead. 
 
Jean Sprackland - the prize-winning poet and author of Strands - travels back through her life, revisiting her once local graveyards. In seeking out the stories of those who lived and died there, remembered and forgotten, she unearths what has been lost.

These Silent Mansions

A life in graveyards

Misha Glenny

The extraordinary real stories that inspired the major BBC series 
 
Have you ever illegally downloaded a DVD? Taken drugs? Fallen for a phishing scam? 
 
Organised crime is part of all our worlds - often without us even knowing. McMafia is a journey through the new world of international organised crime, from gunrunners in Ukraine to money launderers in Dubai, by way of drug syndicates in Canada and cyber criminals in Brazil. 
 
This edition comes with a new introduction and epilogue from author Misha Glenny.

McMafia

Seriously Organised Crime

Minouche Shafik

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 FT / McKinsey BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 
 
One of the world's most influential economists sets out the basis for a new social contract fit for the 21st century. 
 
'Excellent... Shafik points us toward...a hopeful framework for social, economic and political renewal' Michael J. Sandel 
 
____________ 
 
What does society owe each of us? And what do we owe in return? 
 
Our answer to these inescapable questions - known as the social contract - shapes our politics, economic systems and every stage of life, from raising children and going to school to finding work and growing old. Yet today, many believe that this contract is not working for them. 
 
Economist Minouche Shafik examines societies across the world and demonstrates that the urgent challenges of technology, demography and climate require a major shift in priorities. This vision-changing book shows us the way to a new model that provides mutual security and opportunity - a social contract fit for the twenty-first century. 
 
____________ 
 
'Intelligent and lucid' Martin Wolf, Financial Times 
 
'A powerful and persuasive moral argument...rigorous and specific enough to help readers think practically about the policies needed' Melinda Gates 
 
'A necessary contribution at a turning-point in history... A must-read' Ursula von der Leyen 
 
A PROSPECT MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF 2021

What We Owe Each Other

A New Social Contract

Lizzie Collingham

'A wholly pleasing book, which offers a tasty side dish to anyone exploring the narrative history of the British Empire' Max Hastings, Sunday Times 
 
WINNER OF THE GUILD OF FOOD WRITERS BOOK AWARD 2018 
 
The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader… Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit… Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry… 
 
In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, reshaping landscapes and culinary tastes. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globe’s edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. 
 
Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

The Hungry Empire

How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

Stephen Jay Gould

Completed shortly before his death, this is the last work of science from the most celebrated popular science writer in the world. 
 
In characteristic form, Gould weaves the ideas of some of Western society's greatest thinkers, from Bacon to Galileo to E. O. Wilson, with the uncelebrated ideas of lesser-known yet pivotal intellectuals. He uses their ides to undo an assumption born in the seventeenth century and continuing to this day, that science and the humanities stand in opposition. Gould uses the metaphor of the hedgehog - who goes after one thing at a measured pace, systematically investigating all; the fox - skilled at many things, intuitive and fast; and the magister's pox - a censure from the Catholic Church involved in Galileo's downfall: to illustrate the different ways of responding to knowledge - in a scientific, humanistic or fearful way. He argues that in fact each would benefit by borrowing from the other.

The Hedgehog, The Fox And The Magister's Pox

Mending and Minding the Misconceived Gap Between Science and the Humanities

Patrick Bringley

** THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ** 
 
A revelatory portrait of a great museum and the moving story of one guard's quest to find solace and meaning in art 
 
'Who would have thought that the outstanding art book of you would have been written not by a curator or an art historian or even an artist - but by a museum guard?' Sunday Times 
 
When Patrick’s older brother dies at twenty-six, all he wants is to retreat. So, he does. He quits his job and seeks refuge in the most beautiful place he can think of: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. 
 
All the Beauty in the World recounts Patrick’s time as a museum guard, keeping quiet vigil over some of our greatest treasures and uncovering the Met’s innermost secrets. As his connection to the art and the life that swirls around it grows, so does Patrick – and gradually he emerges transformed by heartbreak, community and the power of art to illuminate life in all its pain, pleasure and hope. 
 
'As luminous as the old masters paintings' Daily Mail 
'Consoling and beautiful' Guardian 
'Marvellous' Daily Telegraph 
'A beautiful tale about beauty. It is also a tale about grief, balancing solitude and comradeship, and finding joy in both the exalted and the mundane' Washington Post 
 
*New York Times bestseller, Nov 24

All the Beauty in the World

A Museum Guard’s Adventures in Life, Loss and Art

Paul Mason

Globalisation has created a whole new working class - and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s through its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s and up to today's anti-globalisation movement. 
 
Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today's front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London's Docklands - and how they're being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot. 
 
It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Live Working or Die Fighting

How The Working Class Went Global

Matthew Battles

Through the ages, libraries have not only accumulated and preserved, but shaped, inspired and obliterated knowledge. Matthew Battles takes us on a fascinating journey from Boston to Baghdad, from classical scriptoria to medieval monasteries, from the Vatican to the British Library. 
 
The library has been a battleground of competing notions of what books mean to us, from the clay-tablet collections of ancient Mesopotamia to the legendary libraries of Alexandria, from the burned scrolls of the Qing Dynasty to the book-pyres of the Hitler Youth, from the Dewey Decimal System to the Internet. Battles explores how the library has served two contradictory impulses: to exalt canons of literature, to secure and celebrate the best writing; and the desire to contain all forms of human knowledge - to keep all the books. In its custody of books and the words they contain, the library has confronted and tamed technology, the forces of change and the power of princes time and again.

Library

An Unquiet History

Toni Morrison

“She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words.” - Oprah Winfrey 
 
A vital non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered American writers 
 
Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence. 
 
The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. 
 
She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisitsThe Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers. 
 
Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all. It celebrates Morrison’s extraordinary contribution to the literary world.

Mouth Full of Blood

Essays, Speeches, Meditations

Fatima Manji

A fresh perspective on British history from award-winning broadcaster Fatima Manji 
 
Why was there a Turkish mosque adorning Britain's most famous botanic garden in the eighteenth century? How did a pair of Persian-inscribed cannon end up in rural Wales? And who is the Moroccan man depicted in a long-forgotten portrait hanging in a west London stately home? 
 
 Throughout Britain's museums, civic buildings and stately homes, relics can be found that reveal the diversity of pre-twentieth-century Britain and expose the misconceptions around modern immigration narratives. In her journey across Britain exploring cultural landmarks, Fatima Manji searches for a richer and more honest story of a nation struggling with identity and the legacy of empire. 
 
'A timely, brilliant and very brave book' Jerry Brotton, author of This Orient Isle

Hidden Heritage

Rediscovering Britain’s Relationship with the Orient

Rediscovering Britain’s Lost Love of the Orient

Charles Emmerson

‘If Downton Abbey still colours your impression of what Britain was like on the cusp of the First World War, 1913 could be a useful corrective’ Scotsman 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the Great War. What was the year before the war really like? 
 
1913 is usually seen as little more than the antechamber to apocalypse. Our images of the times are too often dominated by last summers of upper-class indulgence or by a world rushing headlong into the abyss of an inevitable war. 
 
 1913: The World before the Great War proposes a strikingly different portrait: told through the stories of twenty-three cities – Europe’s capitals at the height of their global reach, the emerging metropolises of America, the imperial cities of Asia and Africa, the boomtowns of Australia and the Americas – Charles Emmerson presents a panoramic view of a world crackling with possibilities, from St Petersburg to Shanghai and from Los Angeles to Jerusalem. What emerges is a rich and complex world, more familiar than we expect, connected as never before, on the threshold of events which would change the course of global history. 
 
‘A masterful, comprehensive portrait of the world at that last moment in its history…’ Spectator

1913

The World before the Great War

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

Yuval Noah Harari

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite all our discoveries, inventions and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. International and political tensions are rising. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI – an alien information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive? 
 
Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has brought us here. Taking us from the Stone Age through the canonisation of the Bible, the invention of print, the rise of mass media and the recent resurgence of populism, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how systems like the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. 
 
Information is not the raw material of truth, nor is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes and, in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Nexus

A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Zareer Masani

Thomas Macaulay always inspired both admiration and hostility. He introduced English education to India, creating a class of westernised Indians often reviled as ‘Macaulay’s children’, but today many former ‘Untouchables’ literally worship him as their liberator from caste tyranny. 
 
This biography gives a vivid insight into one of the towering intellects of Victorian Britain: a brilliant, complex, self-made man, who rose from middle-class origins to the highest circles of the world’s largest empire. We follow his meteoric journey from child prodigy to Whig parliamentary orator, then imperial administrator and liberal reformer in India, and later Cabinet minister, revered elder statesman and famed historian back in Britain. 
 
Zareer Masani reclaims Macaulay as a pioneer of globalisation based on the English language and Western values. A strong advocate of liberal interventionism across the globe, he was the ideological precursor of today's Western military interventions in the world’s trouble-spots.

Macaulay

Britain’s Liberal Imperialist

Caroline Criado Perez

*THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER* 
*OVER A MILLION COPIES SOLD* 
 
Discover the shocking gender bias that affects our everyday lives in this groundbreaking gift of a book. 
 
'Nothing delights me more than a well-written and well-researched book that teaches you and never bores you' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 
 
'HELL YES. This is one of those books that has the potential to change things - a monumental piece of research' Caitlin Moran 
 
Imagine a world where... 
 
· Your phone is too big for your hand 
· Your doctor prescribes a drug that is wrong for your body 
· In a car accident you are 47% more likely to be injured. 
 
If any of that sounds familiar, chances are you're a woman. 
 
From government policy and medical research, to technology, workplaces, and the media. Invisible Women reveals how in a world built for and by men we are systematically ignoring half of the population, often with disastrous consequences. Caroline Criado Perez brings together for the first time an impressive range of case studies, stories and new research from across the world that illustrate the hidden ways in which women are forgotten, and the profound impact this has on us all. 
 
Find out more in Caroline's podcast, Visible Women. 
 
'A book that changes the way you see the world' Sunday Times 
 
'Revelatory, frightening, hopeful' Jeanette Winterson

Invisible Women

the Sunday Times number one bestseller exposing the gender bias women face every day

Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Edith Hall

‘Wonderful and timely … Hugely recommended’ STEPHEN FRY 
 
What do you and an ancient philosopher have in common? It turns out much more than you might think… 
 
 Aristotle was an extraordinary thinker yet he was preoccupied by an ordinary question: how to be happy. In this handbook to his timeless teachings, Professor Edith Hall shows how ancient thinking is precisely what we need today, even if you don’t know your Odyssey from your Iliad. In ten practical lessons you can learn how to make good decisions, how to ace an interview, how to choose a partner and how to face death. This is advice that won’t go out of fashion. 
 
‘A beguiling cross between Mary Beard and Mary Poppins’ Observer

Aristotle’s Way

Ten Ways Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life

Roger Penrose

‘One of the most important works…of the twentieth century’ The Times 
 
Shadows of the Mind is a profound exploration of what modern physics has to tell us about the human mind. 
 
A visionary description of what a new physics - one that is adequate to account for our extraordinary brain - might look like. It is also a bold speculation on the biological process that makes consciousness what it is. 
 
 
In this illuminating book Penrose provides powerful arguments to support his conclusion that there is something in the conscious activity of the brain that transcends computation – something that can’t be explained by present-day science.

Shadows Of The Mind

A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness

Noam Chomsky

'Arguably the most important intellectual alive' New York Times 
 
An indispensable collection of Noam Chomsky’s talks on the past, present and future of the politics of power 
 
 Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the world’s leading intellectuals of the modern era. Now, for the first time, Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the politics of power. With an eye to political activism and the media’s role in popular struggle, as well as US foreign and domestic policy, Chomsky reinterprets the events of the past three decades, from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. Highlighting America’s myriad of social inequalities and political issues while offering timely advice for much needed change, Understanding Power is definitive Chomsky. 
 
 ‘Chomsky ranks with Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible as one of the ten most quoted sources in the humanities’ Guardian 
 
‘Powerful and timely...his analysis is fair, meticulously researched and fascinating’ Observer

Understanding Power

The Indispensable Chomsky

David Quammen

Read this gripping, timely book about the transmission of deadly viruses from animal to human populations, and how we can fight the current Covid-19 pandemic. 
 
WITH A NEW AFTERWORD ON CORONAVIRUS 
 
As globalization spreads and as we destroy the ancient ecosystems, we encounter strange and dangerous infections that originate in animals but that can be transmitted to humans. Diseases that were contained are being set free and the results are potentially catastrophic. 
 
In a journey that takes him from southern China to the Congo, from Bangladesh to Australia, David Quammen tracks these infections to their source, and asks what we can do to prevent some new pandemic spreading across the face of the earth. 
 
As we continue to feel the global impact of Covid-19, discover the book that predicted this viral disaster and the science that could stop the next one in its tracks. 
 
'A tremendous book...this gives you all you need to know and all you should know' Sunday Times 
 
'Chilling... [A] brilliant, devastating book' Daily Mail 
 
'A frightening and fascinating masterpiece of science reporting that reads like a detective story' Walter Isaacson

Spillover

the powerful, prescient book that predicted the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic

Jonathan Powell

Making peace in Northern Ireland was the greatest success of the Blair government, and one of the greatest achievements in British politics since the Second World War. In Jonathan Powell's masterly account we learn just how close the talks leading to the Good Friday agreement came to collapse and how the parties finally reached a deal. 
 
Pithy, outspoken and precise, Powell, Tony Blair's chief of staff and chief negotiator, gives us that rarest of things, a true insider's account of politics at the highest level. He demonstrates how the events in Northern Ireland have valuable lessons for those seeking to end conflict in other parts of the world and shows us how the process of making peace is sometimes messy and often blackly comic.

Great Hatred, Little Room

Making Peace in Northern Ireland

Alison Weir

Fascinating and authoritative of Britain's royal families from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria, by leading popular historian Alison Weir 
 
'George III is alleged to have married secretly, on 17th April, 1759, a Quakeress called Hannah Lightfoot. If George III did make such a marriage…then his subsequent marriage to Queen Charlotte was bigamous, and every monarch of Britain since has been a usurper, the rightful heirs of George III being his children by Hannah Lightfoot...' 
 
 Britain's Royal Families provides in one volume, complete genealogical details of all members of the royal houses of England, Scotland and Great Britain - from 800AD to the present. Drawing on countless authorities, both ancient and modern, Alison Weir explores the crown and royal family tree in unprecedented depth and provides a comprehensive guide to the heritage of today's royal family – with fascinating insight and often scandalous secrets. 
 
'Staggeringly useful... combines solid information with tantalising appetisers.’ Mail on Sunday

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