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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In a country recovering from a brutal and divisive civil war, a young boy, Jamie, is knocked off his bike and dies in a city street. His father agrees to allow one of Jamie's lungs to be removed and flown over the border for a transplant. 
 
As the night unfolds and the plane travels across the war-ravaged country, we see the drama from three different perspectives: the father, grieving for the son he perhaps never knew well enough; the lung's recipient, an old man fighting for breath; and in the turbulent sky between them, the young pilot who is closest to Jamie - or at least to his breath, his spirit, his voice.

Breath

Michael Ignatieff

Charlie Johnson is a veteran war correspondent who thinks he has seen it all - until he makes one rash expedition into a war zone in the Balkans. Horrified, he watches as a woman who sheltered him is set on fire. As he tries to save her, he too is caught in the deadly fire that engulfs her. From then on, his life is consumed by the mission to find the man who did it - caught on film by his friend and cameraman Jacek- and once he is set on his journey of revenge, nothing and no one can stop him. 
 
Drawing on his own experience of war zones, Michael Ignatieff probes into the damage that blights Charlie's life and threatens to destroy his humanity.

Charlie Johnson In The Flames

Marina Warner

Inspired by The Tempest, Indigo traces the scars of colonialism across continents, family blood-lines and three centuries. Rich, sensual and magical in its use of myths and fairytales Indigo explores the intertwined histories of the Everard family and the imaginary Caribbean island where Ariel, Caliban, and his mother, the healer and dyer of indigo, Sycorax once lived.

Indigo Or Mapping The Waters

Deborah Baker

Winner of the Kekoo Naoroji Award for Mountain Literature 2019 
 
An engrossing story of passion and exploration that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order. 
 
John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalayas. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers – W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender – achieved literary fame, they vied for a place on an expedition that would finally conquer Everest. To this rivalry was added another: their shared love for a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine each man’s wartime loyalties. 
 
From Calcutta to pre-war London to Everest itself, The Last Englishmen tracks a generation obsessed with a romantic ideal. With a cast including writers, artists, political rogues and spies, this is narrative history at its most engaging and illuminating. 
 
'Wholly original... It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that there is something Tolstoyan to Baker's vast project... Remarkable' Neel Mukherjee 
 
 ‘An exuberant, scene-changing, shapeshifting group biography’ Spectator

The Last Englishmen

Love, War and the End of Empire

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

Ruth Scurr

'Glorious... Scurr is one of the most gifted non-fiction writers alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times 
 
A revelatory portrait of Napoleon written for our own time, exploring his love of nature and the gardens that gave his revolutionary life its light and shade. 
 
Napoleon's gardens range from his childhood olive groves in Corsica, to Josephine's menageries in Paris, to the walled garden of Hougoumont at the battle of Waterloo, and ultimately to St Helena, where he could sit and scan the sea in his final months. 
 
In this innovative biography, Ruth Scurr follows the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon's life through the land he cultivated and that offered him retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Seen through the eyes of those who knew him in the shade of his gardens, Napoleon emerges a giant figure made human - both as the Emperor hunting for glory and the man in an old straw hat, leaning on his spade. 
 
'Immensely satisfying and captivating... Charming and intelligent' Andrew Roberts, TLS 
 
'Grippingly original' The Times 
 
'A delight to read' Daily Telegraph 
 
* A Book of the Year in The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Sunday Telegraph and History Today * 
 
Winner of a Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award 2022

Napoleon

A Life in Gardens and Shadows

Michael Booth

'The next Bill Bryson' New York Times 
 
Two tigers cannot share the same mountain - Chinese proverb 
 
Despite geographical proximity, cultural similarities, and shared status as highly powerful nations, China, Korea and Japan love to hate each other. Why? 
 
In search of an answer, Michael Booth journeys across East Asia to explore the mutual animosity that frequently threatens to draw the world into all-out war. From misjudged cake decorations to electoral meddling, contradictory origin myths to territorial disputes, this deeply researched and hugely entertaining book shows that no conflict is too small to keep the fires of neighbourly hostility burning. 
 
'A fine summary of East Asian cultures and conflicts...useful, fact-packed and readable' Spectator

Three Tigers, One Mountain

A Journey through the Bitter History and Current Conflicts of China, Korea and Japan

Nicholas Shakespeare

A fascinating and dramatic investigation into the events that led to Winston Churchill becoming Prime Minister against the odds. 
 
 
‘A gripping story of Churchill’s unlikely rise to power’ Observer 
 
 London, May 1940. Britain is under threat of invasion and Neville Chamberlain’s government is about to fall. It is hard for us to imagine the Second World War without Winston Churchill taking the helm, but in Six Minutes in May Nicholas Shakespeare shows how easily events could have gone in a different direction. 
 
 It took just six minutes for MPs to cast the votes that brought down Chamberlain. Shakespeare moves from Britain’s disastrous battle in Norway, for which many blamed Churchill, on to the dramatic developments in Westminster that led to Churchill becoming Prime Minister. Uncovering fascinating new research and delving into the key players’ backgrounds, Shakespeare gives us a new perspective on this critical moment in our history. 
 
 
‘Totally captivating. It will stand as the best account of those extraordinary few days for very many years’ 
 Andrew Roberts 
 
 
‘Superbly written… Shakespeare has a novelist’s flair for depicting the characters and motives of men’ 
 The Times 
 
 
‘Utterly wonderful… It reads like a thriller’ 
 Peter Frankopan 
 
 SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA NON-FICTION CROWN 2018 
 
*** Selected as a 2017 Book of the Year in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Observer and The Economist ***

Six Minutes in May

How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister

Dennis Potter

Dennis Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean- a 'strange and beautiful place', as he described it in the last interview before his death, 'rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape, a heart- shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England... with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me.' It was a childhood which informed all his television work, from his first documentary to such classic dramas as The Singing Detective. 
 
The Changing Forest, first published in 1962, is Potter's deeply personal study of that small area- its people, traditions, ceremonies and institutions- at a time of profound cultural and social change in the late 1950s and early '60s. With extraordinary precision and feeling he describes the fabric of a world whose old ways are yielding to the new: habits altering; expectations growing; work, leisure, language itself changing under the impact of the new television, of commercial jingles and the early Elvis. And, with powerful sympathy and wit, he asks whether the gains of modernity have, for the individuals and society he so marvellously evokes, been worth the loss. 
 
Part autobiography of one of this century's greatest writers, part elegy for a vanishing way of life, part testament to the abiding humanity that underlies all Potter's work, this exquisite, passionate and brillinat book is a classic of its kind.

Changing Forest

Rich Cohen

Once upon a time, back in the 20s and 30s, in Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who exist now only in legend and in the memories of a few old men. Their names were Louis Lepke, Abe Reles, Bugsy Segel, Dutch Shultz, Meyer Lansky, and they were Jewish gangsters: Jews with Guns; tough, fearles Jews who roamed the streets in a time when a Jewish boy could fashion a future that was murderous and daring and wide open. Rich Cohen's father grew up in that world; his family owned the diner where the gangsters known as Murder Incorporated hung out. In TOUGH JEWS he tells their stories and brilliantly evokes their world - a world of street corners and bars and nightclubs; a world where murder was better than cowerdice; where killings were planned and executed with precision and finesse; a world of feuds, wars, schemes, where living into middle age was akind of victory; a world in which for a brief moment, Jews were among the most important criminals in America.

Tough Jews

Hester Grant

The enthralling story of an eighteenth-century family and their extraordinary achievements. 
 
Four brothers, three sisters. Brought up in a Northumberland rectory and in the close of Durham Cathedral, the Sharps would achieve exalted positions at the heart of British society. In 1781, the celebrated painter Johan Zoffany put the final brush strokes on the luminous portrait that immortalised the siblings’ rise, and their remarkable unity and passion for life. 
 
Ambitious, free-thinking and courageous, the Sharps were pioneers in the major movements that defined the eighteenth century – from political reform and philanthropy to medicine and industry. John, an eminent priest, established a model welfare state at Bamburgh Castle and commissioned the world’s first lifeboat; William became surgeon to George III; while James was a visionary inventor, canal promoter and engineer. Most famously of all, Granville, the youngest son, battled tirelessly as Britain’s first great campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade. Despite the social strictures of their day, Elizabeth, Judith and Frances claimed significant independence, and played key roles in hosting the Sharps’ famous musical parties on barges on the Thames. 
 
In this vivid, moving biography, Hester Grant charts the siblings’ shared journey to prominence, and explores the values and enduring bonds that inspired their success. The Good Sharps brings to life not just these men and women who realised that the future could be different, but also the new world they created.

The Good Sharps

The Eighteenth-Century Family that Changed Britain

The Brothers and Sisters Who Remade Their World

Robert K Massie

A gripping chronicle of the personal and political rivalries from the birth of Queen Victoria to the unification of Germany during the decades leading up to WW1 from Pulitzer Prize winner Robert K. Massie 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the end of the First World War. How did it all begin? 
 
With the biographer's rare genius for expressing the essence of extraordinary lives, Massie brings to life a crowd of glittering figures: the young, ambitious Winston Churchill; the ruthless, sycophantic Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow; Britain's greatest twentieth-century Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; and Jacky Fisher, the eccentric admiral who revolutionised the British Navy and brought forth the battleship, H.M.S. Dreadnought. Their story, and the story of the era, filled with misunderstanding and tensions, missed opportunities, and events leading to unintended conclusions, unfolds like a Greek tragedy in this powerful narrative. Intimately human and dramatic, Dreadnought is history at its most riveting. 
 
‘History at its best, a fantastic mix of anecdote, observation and intelligent thinking’ Dan Snow, Daily Express

Dreadnought

Britain,Germany and the Coming of the Great War

In this fascinating history of two turbulent centuries in an apparently idyllic place, Shakespeare effortlessly weaves the history of this unique island with a kaleidoscope of stories featuring a cast of unlikely characters from Errol Flynn to the King of Iceland, a village full of Chatwins and, inevitably, a family of Shakespeares. But what makes this more than a personal quest is Shakespeare's discovery that, despite the nineteen century purges, the Tasmanian Aborigines were not, as previously believed, entirely wiped out.

In Tasmania

Adventures at the End of the World

Roger Moorhouse

A new and definitive account of the German invasion of Poland that initiated WWII in 1939, written by a historian at the height of his abilities. 
 
'Deeply researched, very well-written... This book will be the standard work on the subject for many years to come' - Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny 
 
The Polish campaign is the forgotten story of the Second World War. 
 
The war began on 1 September 1939, when German tanks, trucks and infantry crossed the Polish border, and the Luftwaffe began bombing Poland's towns and cities. The Polish army fought bravely but could not withstand the concentrated attack. When the Red Army invaded from the east, the country's fate was sealed. 
 
This is the first history of the Polish war for almost half a century. Drawing on letters, memoirs and diaries from all sides, Roger Moorhouse's dramatic account of the military events is entwined with a human story of courage and suffering, and a dark tale of diplomatic betrayal. 
 
'Important... Moorhouse has a wonderful knack for reminding us about the parts of the Second World War that we are in danger of forgetting' Dan Snow 
 
** Shortlisted for the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History 2020 **

First to Fight

The Polish War 1939

Philip Roth

It's the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic. 
 
 Decent, athletic twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground - child by helpless child - Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain. 
 
 'The genius of Philip Roth...back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale... The eloquence of Roth's storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works' Daily Mail 
 
 'Cantor is one of Roth's best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned' Sunday Telegraph 
 
 'Very fine, very unsettling' Douglas Kennedy, The Times

Nemesis

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

Martin Amis

Tod. T. Friendly is living his life backwards. 
 
Doctor Friendly has just died, but after weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colour existence in suburban America. 
 
From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then the boat back to war-torn Europe, Friendly carries with him a secret. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly’s consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor’s most ambitious project yet – the final solution. 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 
 
'Amis's most daring and ambitious novel' Daily Telegraph

Time's Arrow

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1991

Martin Pugh

The suffragettes outraged Victorian society but their personal lives were just as dramatic as their public actions. In this gripping and incisive account of the Pankhursts, Martin Pugh reveals the full story behind this unique family: Emmeline, the domineering mother; Christabel, the favourite daughter, who became an Adventist and admirer of Mussolini; Sylvia, the 'scarlet woman'; adn Adela, banished to Australia after a bitter rift. 
 
The result is a narrative that reads like a novel, and a brilliant insight into the history of a family that changed the face of British society for ever.

The Pankhursts

The History of One Radical Family

Phoebe McIntosh

'A must-read... compulsively timely novel' Stylist 
 
When Layla and Andy first meet, they can't believe they have the same surname. It feels like fate… 
 
Sera, Layla’s best friend, has her doubts about Andy. As the couple fall deeper in love, Sera becomes more and more vocal about Layla settling down with a white boy. And then, only a few weeks before their wedding, Layla makes a devastating discovery – could their families be linked in the worst possible way? 
 
What seemed like a fairy-tale romance is rapidly derailed as Layla begins to uncover parts of her history and identity that she had never imagined – or, perhaps, had simply learnt to ignore. 
 
And now, she faces an impossible choice. 
 
**A STYLIST UNMISSABLE BOOK FOR 2024** 
 
‘A warm, sweet love story, and a thought-provoking examination of the British slave trade and its legacy’ MARIAN KEYES 
 
'I loved this book' JACQUELINE CROOKS, author of Fire Rush 
 
'So kind and smart and clear-eyed' HOLLY GRAMAZIO, author of The Husbands 
 
READERS LOVE DOMINOES: 
‘Tender, thought-provoking and hard-hitting’ 
‘Kept me second guessing how things would turn out until the very end’ 
‘Incredibly thought-provoking’ 
‘Such an important novel’ 
‘I laughed, I cried, I learned A LOT’ 
‘So much more than a love story’

Dominoes

Daniel Lee

The gripping account of one historian's hunt for answers as he delves into the surprising life of an ordinary Nazi officer. 
 
'Totally exhilarating' Philippe Sands 
 
It began with an armchair. It began with the surprise discovery of a stash of personal documents covered in swastikas sewn into its cushion. 
 
The SS Officer's Armchair is the story of what happened next, as Daniel Lee follows the trail of cold calls, documents, coincidences and family secrets, to uncover the life of one Dr Robert Griesinger from Stuttgart. As Lee delves deeper, Griesinger emerges as at once an ordinary man with a family and ambitions, and an active participant in the Nazi machinery of terror whose choices continue to reverberate today. 
 
'Gripping, it unfolds like a detective story as an obscured past emerges into the light' Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass 
 
'An absorbing work of historical detection... Riveting' Evening Standard

The SS Officer's Armchair

In Search of a Hidden Life

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

Ben Shephard

How did the human brain evolve? Why did it evolve as it did? What is man’s place in evolution? In the final decades of the nineteenth century, these questions began to occupy scientists. With Darwin’s theory of evolution now accepted, modern neuroscience began. 
 
Headhunters traces the intellectual journey of four men who met at Cambridge in the 1890s and whose lives interlinked for the next three decades – William Rivers, Grafton Elliot Smith, Charles Myers and William McDougall. It follows their voyages of discovery, taking the reader from anthropological field studies in Melanesia and archaeological excavations in Egypt to the psychiatric wards of the First World War. Their work ranged across fields that today carry a variety of labels – neurology, psychology, psychiatry, zoology – but which for these men formed part of the same enquiry: the search for a science of the mind. 
 
A narrative-driven work of intellectual history and a compelling biographical study, Headhunters explores the big ideas about the brain, the nervous system and man’s place in history. In the process the book reveals how science actually works – the passions, the irrational flashes, the moments of insight; the big ideas that work – and the big ideas that turn out to be wrong. Acclaimed historian Ben Shephard takes the reader on an extraordinary intellectual journey – and arrives at some very modern destinations.

Headhunters

The Pioneers of Neuroscience

The Search for a Science of the Mind

THE NOVEL THAT INSPIRED THE OSCAR WINNING FILM 
 
Amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, German officer, Angelus Thomsen, has found love. 
 
But unfortunately for Thomsen, the object of his affection is already married to his camp commandant, Paul Doll. 
 
As Thomsen and Doll&rsquo;s wife pursue their passion &ndash; the gears of Nazi Germany&rsquo;s Final Solution grinding around them &ndash; Doll is riven by suspicion. With his dignity in disrepute and his reputation on the line, Doll must take matters into his own hands and bring order back to the chaos that reigns around him. 
 
&lsquo;It is exceptionally brave&hellip;. Shakespearean&hellip;. It&rsquo;s exciting; it&rsquo;s alive; it&rsquo;s more than slightly mad. As the title suggests, it is dreadfully interesting.&rsquo; Sunday Times

The Zone of Interest

Rory Stewart

Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister &ndash; before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. 
 
Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow and inadequate our democracy and government had become. Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict. 
 
Politics On the Edge invites us into the mind of one of the most interesting actors on the British political stage. Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, this is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life. Instantly praised as a new classic, it is an astonishing portrait of our turbulent times.

Politics On the Edge

Walt Bogdanich

Michael Forsythe

**A TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022** 
 
An explosive exposé of a firm whose work has made your world more unequal, more corrupt and more dangerous. 
 
McKinsey & Company have earned billions consulting almost every major corporation in the world - and countless governments, including our own. Shielded by NDAs, their practices have remained vague - until now. 
 
In this propulsive investigation, prize-winning journalists Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe reveal the jaw-dropping reality. McKinsey's work includes ruthless cost-cutting in the NHS, troubleshooting for Big Oil, executing Trump's immigration policies (the ones that put children in cages) as well as advising some of the world's most unsavoury despots. 
 
'A story of secrecy, delusion and untold harm' OBSERVER 
 
'Makes you so angry...the evidence the authors winkle out is astonishing' SUNDAY TIMES 
 
'Panoramic, meticulously reported and ultimately devastating' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE 
 
'A harrowing account of decades of dishonourable exploits' ECONOMIST

When McKinsey Comes to Town

The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm

Christopher Koch

A leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, Robert Devereux is an Irish gentleman who is prepared to hazard a life of privilege in the fight for his country's freedom. 
 
Transported to Van Diemen's Land as a political prisoner, he enters a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman. 
 
Through Kathleen O'Rahilly he comes to know the people he's long romanticised; but his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go.

Out Of Ireland

Howard Marks

21ST ANNIVERSARY EDITION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY IRVINE WELSH 
 
He was Britain's most wanted man. He spent seven years in America's toughest penitentiary. You'll like him. 
 
During the mid 1980s Howard Marks had forty three aliases, eighty nine phone lines and owned twenty five companies throughout the world. 
 
At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons of marijuana, and had contact with organisations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA and the Mafia. Following a worldwide operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency, he was arrested and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison at the Terre Haute Penitentiary, Indiana. He was released in April 1995 after serving seven years of his sentence. 
 
Told with humour, charm and candour, Mr Nice is his own extraordinary story. 
 
'The story of a remarkable life, lived by the very brilliant and exceptionally wonderful Mr Nice' 
Irvine Welsh 
 
'Frequently hilarious, occasionally sad, and often surreal' 
GQ 
 
'A man who makes Peter Pan look like a geriatric' 
Loaded 
 
'A folk legend' 
Daily Mail

Mr Nice

21st Anniversary Edition

The Incredible Story of an Unconventional Life

Leanda de Lisle

A myth-busting biography of Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I, which retells the dramatic story of the civil war from her perspective 
 
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ELIZABETH LONGFORD PRIZE 
 
Henrietta Maria, Charles I's queen, is the most reviled consort in British history. Condemned as the 'Popish brat of France' and a 'notorious whore', she remains in popular memory the woman who turned the king Catholic - so causing a civil war - and a cruel and bigoted mother. 
 
Leanda de Lisle unpicks these myths to reveal a very different queen. We meet a new bride who enjoyed annoying her uptight husband, who was a passionate advocate for the female voice in public affairs and who, when civil war came, proved crucial to Charles's campaign. The image of the Restoration queen as an irrelevant crone is replaced with Henrietta Maria as an influential 'phoenix queen'. It is time to look again at this despised queen and judge if she is not in fact one of our most remarkable. 
 
 
'Brilliantly written, mesmerising, superb scholarship and totally immersive... A total game changer' KATE WILLIAMS, author of Rival Queens 
 
'This is revisionist history at its absolute best' ANDREW ROBERTS author of Churchill 
 
'Beautifully written and endlessly fascinating' ALEXANDER LARMAN author of The Crown in Crisis 
 
'Popular history of the finest kind' RONALD HUTTON author of The Witch

Henrietta Maria

Conspirator, Warrior, and Phoenix Queen – the true story of Charles I’s wife

Conspirator, Warrior, Phoenix Queen

Eric Lomax

During the Second World War Eric Lomax was forced to work on the notorious Burma-Siam Railway and was tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio. 
 
Left emotionally scarred and unable to form normal relationships, Lomax suffered for years until, with the help of his wife, Patti Lomax, and of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, he came terms with what happened. Fifty years after the terrible events, he was able to meet one of his tormentors. 
 
The Railway Man is a story of innocence betrayed, and of survival and courage in the face of horror.

The Railway Man

Koba the Dread is the successor to Amis's celebrated memoir, Experience. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by Western intellectuals. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best one hundred pages ever written about Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. 
 
The author's father, Kingsley Amis, was 'a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and later in life his closest friend, was Robert Conquest, whose book The Great Terror was second only to Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. 
 
Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere 'statistic'. Koba the Dread, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.

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