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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'This is a rich, lively, profound book' ROWAN WILLIAMS 
 
A personal reckoning with grief, doubt, faith and poetry set to one of the most celebrated musical works of the twentieth century, from the award-winning poet and librettist. 
 
The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. 
 
Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet– having chanced upon it in a record shop in his late teens and fallen in love with its title - leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power. His fascination – at times frustration – with Messiaen’s vision opens into an exploration of grief, of personal faith and doubt, of the end of time and what may lie beyond it. Interwoven with poetry and wit, this book is an expansive evocation of music, loss, hope and time, seen through the lens of the Quartet's technicolour, apocalyptic vision. 
 
Quartet for the End of Time is a moving, intimate and unforgettable book, attentive to ways of listening – in our noisy world – to birdsong, music, poems and radio silence, and to the call and response that we may find. 
 
'A properly engrossing exploration of music, place, religion and what it is to be human' SARAH TARLOW, author of The Archaeology of Loss

Quartet for the End of Time

On Music, Grief and Birdsong

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

David Lodge

Bernard Walsh, agnostic theologian, has a professional interest in heaven. But when he travels to Hawaii with his reluctant father Jack, to visit Jack's dying, estranged sister it feels more like purgatory than paradise. 
 
Surrounded by quarrelling honeymooners, a freeloading anthropologist and assorted tourists in search of their own personal paradise, and with his father whisked off to hospital after an unfortunate accident, Bernard is beginning to regret ever coming to Haiwaii. Until, that is, he stumbles on something he had given up hope of finding: the astonishing possibility of love.

Paradise News

Linden MacIntyre

Father Duncan MacAskill has spent most of his priesthood as the 'Exorcist' - an enforcer employed by his bishop to discipline wayward clergy and suppress potential scandal. 
 
Hidden in a small rural parish to avoid an impending public controversy, Duncan must now confront the consequences of his past. Pushed to the breaking point by loneliness, tragedy and sudden self-knowledge, Duncan discovers how hidden obsessions and guilty secrets either find their way to the light of understanding, or poison any chance we have for love and spiritual peace. 
 
Winner of the 2009 Giller Prize, Canada's Premier Literary Prize.

The Bishop's Man

Murray Bail

What are The Pages? 
 
On a family sheep station in the interior of Australia, a brother and sister work the property while their reclusive brother, Wesley Antill, spends years toiling away in one of the sheds, writing a philosophy. 
 
Now he has died. Erica, a philosopher, is sent from Sydney to appraise his work. Accompanying her is Sophie, who needs a distraction from a string of failed relationships. Her field is psychoanalysis. These two women, each with different views of the world, face a situation they have not experienced before, with surprising results.

The Pages

Stephen Jay Gould

There aren't many scientists famous enough in their lifetime to be canonized by the US Congress as one of America's 'living legends'. Yet few would have grudged this accolade to Stephen Jay Gould, whose writings on history - both of the natural world and of the study of the natural world - had made him a household name by the time of his death in 2002. 
 
A committed Darwinian and robust critic of creationist myths, he nevertheless made major revisions to orthodox Darwinian theory, from his concept of punctuated equilibrium to his insistence on the importance of chance in the history of life on earth. And in addition, his trenchant attacks on scientific racism and the pretensions of sociobiology still resonate, nearly three decades after they were first written. 
 
In The Richness of Life, Steven Rose and Paul McGarr have selected from across the full range of Gould's writing, including some of the most famous of his essays and extracts from his major books. An introduction by Steven Rose sets both the essays, and Gould's life, in context.

The Richness of Life

A Stephen Jay Gould Reader

Derek Lundy

In this remarkable book, Belfast-born Derek Lundy uses the lives of three of his ancestors as a prism through which to examine what memory and the selective plundering of history has made of the truth in Northern Ireland. 
 
In Ulster the name 'Lundy' is synonymous with 'traitor'. Robert Lundy was the Protestant governor of Londonderry in 1688, just before it came under siege by the Catholic Irish army of James II. Robert Lundy ordered the city's capitulation. Crying 'No Surrender', hardline Protestants prevented it and drove him away in disgrace. William Steel Dickson's legacy is a little different. A Presbyterian minister born in the mid-eighteenth century, he preached with famous eloquence in favour of using whatever means necessary to resist the tyranny of the English. Finally there is 'Billy' Lundy, born in 1890, the embodiment of what the Ulster Protestants had become by the beginning of World War I - a tribe united in their hostility to Catholics and to the concept of a united Ireland. 
 
The lives of Robert Lundy, William Steel Dickson and Billy Lundy encapsulate many themes in the Ulster past. In telling their stories, Derek Lundy lays bare the harsh and murderous mythologies of Northern Ireland and gives us a revision of its history that seems particularly relevant in today's world.

Men That God Made Mad

A Journey through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland

Chuck Palahniuk

'Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison' 
 
Meet Madison, whip-tongued daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off adopting more orphans. Madison dies of a marijuana overdose and awakes to find herself in Hell, sharing her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that's almost too good to be true. 
 
Welcome to the afterlife as only Palahniuk could imagine it - he makes eternal torment, well, simply divine.

Damned

Marie Phillips

Being immortal isn't all it's cracked up to be. Life's hard for a Greek god in the 21st century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn't respect you, and you're stuck in a delapidated hovel in north London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there's no way out... Until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives, and turn the world literally upside down. 
 
Gods Behaving Badly is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original first novel that satisfies the head and the heart.

Gods Behaving Badly

Alan Garner

A gripping time-slip novel by the author of the 2022 Booker Prize-longlisted Treacle Walker 
 
Here John Turner was cast away in a heavy snow storm in the night in or about the year 1755. The print of a woman's shoe was found by his side in the snow where he lay dead. 
 
So reads an enigmatic memorial stone, high on the bank of a prehistoric Pennine track in Cheshire, a mystery that lives on in the surrounding hill farms. 
 
John Turner was a packman. With his train of horses he carried salt and silk, travelling distances incomprehensible to his community. John brought ideas as well as gifts, from market town to market town, from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road. 
 
In the twenty-first century, two hundred and fifty years after John's life, Ian and Sal's world resounds with the echo John's death. Walking on the moor one day they slip between time and are lost somewhere between Jack's vanished world and their own. This poetic, fantastical novel is is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch. 
 
'Eerie and immaculately written' Olivia Laing, Observer

Thursbitch

From the author of the 2022 Booker longlisted Treacle Walker

Emmanuel Carrère

Read the definitive essay collection from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Adversary, dubbed 'France's greatest writer of non-fiction' (New York Times) 
 
'The most exciting living writer' Karl Ove Knausgaard 
 
Over the course of his career, Emmanuel Carrère has reinvented non-fiction writing. In a search for truth in all its guises, he dispenses with the rules of genre. For him, no form is out of reach: theology, historiography, reportage and memoir - among many others - are fused under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity and intellect that has made Carrère one of our most distinctive and important literary voices today. 
 
97,196 Words introduces Carrère's shorter work to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary texts written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère's creative life, the book shows a remarkable mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality and our shared humanity, exploring remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère's own. 
 
* A New York Times Notable Book *

97,196 Words

Essays

Peter Ackroyd

‘Droll, provocative and crammed to busting with startling facts’ Simon Callow, Guardian 
 
In this powerful Sunday Times bestseller Peter Ackroyd looks at London in a whole new way – through the history and experiences of its gay population. 
 
In Roman Londinium the city was dotted with lupanaria (‘wolf dens’ or public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and thermiae (hot baths). Then came the Emperor Constantine, with his bishops, monks and missionaries. And so began an endless loop of alternating permissiveness and censure. 
 
Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS. 
 
Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

Queer City

Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Kapka Kassabova

Set in the valley of the Mesta, one of the oldest inhabited river valleys in Europe and a nexus for wild plant gatherers, Elixir is an unforgettable exploration of the deep connections between people, plants and place 
 
'Uplifting and beautifully written' SPECTATOR 
'Dark and mysterious and beautiful' FINANCIAL TIMES 
'Exceptional' BBC WILDLIFE 
 
Over several seasons, Kassabova spends time with the people of this magical region. She meets women and men who work in a long lineage of foragers, healers and mystics. She learns about wild plants and the ancient practice of herbalism, and experiences a symbiotic system where nature and culture have blended for thousands of years. Through her captivating encounters we come to feel the devastating weight of the ecological and cultural disinheritance that the people of this valley have suffered. Yet, in her search for elixir, she also finds reasons for hope. The people of the valley are keepers of a rare knowledge, not only of mountain plants and their properties, but also of how to transform collective suffering into healing. 
 
Immersive and enthralling, at its heart Elixir is a search for a cure to what ails us in the Anthropocene. It is an urgent call to rethink how we live - in relation to one another, to the Earth and to the cosmos.

Elixir

A Voyage into Alchemy

In the Valley at the End of Time

Blake Morrison

In his masterpiece of family literature, And When Did you Last See Your Father?, Blake Morrison's mother appears as an intriguing but mostly silent figure. This is her startling and touching story - and a son's search to discover the truth about the remarkable Kerry girl who qualified as a doctor in Dublin in 1942, worked in British hospitals throughout the war, and then reinvented herself again to adapt to a quieter post-war family life. At the heart of the book there's a passionate wartime love affair, seen through the frank, funny, furious letters his parents wrote during their courtship. It evokes a surprising picture of life and love in WWII. From the obstacles the lovers faced, to their moments of hilarity and joy Things My Mother Never Told Me is a revealing and poignant anatomy of family conflict, love, war, and finally marriage. Kim Morrison emerges quietly, magically from the shadows, a determined heroine for our times.

Things My Mother Never Told Me

Catherine Coldstream

‘Evocative’ Sarah Perry 
‘Immersive’ Katherine May 
‘Profoundly moving’ Mark Haddon 
 
Discover Catherine Coldstream’s compelling account of life as a nun in the 1990s, and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery. 
 
After the shock of her father’s death, and with the rest of her family scattered, Catherine was left grieving and alone at twenty-four. A search for meaning led her to the nuns of Akenside Priory. 
 
Here she found a tight-knit community of dedicated women and peace in an ancient way of life. But as she surrenders to her final vows, all is not as it seems behind the Priory’s closed doors. 
 
Catherine comes to realise that divine authority is mediated through flawed and all-too-human channels. She is faced with a dilemma: should she protect the serenity she has found, or speak out? 
 
‘Gripping… A rich memoir’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘Absorbing and beautifully written’ Financial Times

Cloistered

My Years as a Nun

Charlotte Higgins

Chris Ofili

In this spellbinding new collection, Charlotte Higgins reinterprets some of Greek mythology's most enduring stories. 
 
 'A great storyteller' Madeline Miller, author of Circe 
 
 Here are the myths of Heracles and Theseus, the Trojan war, Thebes and Argos and Athens. They are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, fantastical creatures and resourceful witches. 
 
 In this telling the female characters take centre stage as Athena, Helen, Circe, Penelope and others weave these stories into elaborate imagined tapestries. In Charlotte Higgins's thrilling new interpretation of these ancient stories, their tales combine to form a dazzling, sweeping epic of storytelling. 
 
 With a series of original drawings by Chris Ofili.

Greek Myths

A new retelling of your favourite myths that puts female characters at the heart of the story

A New Retelling, with drawings by Chris Ofili

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young

Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born with severe learning disabilities that caused teachers to label her as slow, stubborn - or worse. As a child, she read and wrote everything backwards, was physically uncoordinated and she continually got lost. But by relying on her formidable memory and iron will, she made her way to graduate school, where she chanced upon research that inspired her to invent cognitive exercises to 'fix' her own brain, which we now now as neuroplasticity. 
 
The Woman Who Changed Her Brain interweaves Barbara's personal story with riveting case histories from over thirty years of working with both children and adults at what became the Arrowsmith School in Toronto. This remarkable book by a brilliant pioneer deepens our understanding of how the brain works. Our brains may shape us, but this book offers clear and hopeful evidence of the corollary: that we can shape our brains. 
 
Foreword by Norman Doidge, M. D., author of The Brain that Changes Itself

The Woman who Changed Her Brain

How We Can Shape our Minds and Other Tales of Cognitive Transformation

Unlocking the Extraordinary Potential of the Human Mind

Yuval Noah Harari

A beautiful new hardback anniversary edition of the multi-million copy sensation 
 
INCLUDES A NEW AFTERWORD FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI 
 
What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? 
 
One of the world's preeminent historians and thinkers, Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us. 
 
In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we're going. 
 
PRAISE FOR SAPIENS: 
 
'Interesting and provocative... It gives you a sense of how briefly we've been on this Earth' Barack Obama 
 
'Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last... It may be the best book I've ever read' Chris Evans 
 
'Startling... It changes the way you look at the world' Simon Mayo 
 
'I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who's interested in the history and future of our species' Bill Gates 
 
 
Yuval Noah Harari's books have sold over 2 million copies sold since publication [Nielsen BookScan UK, Circana BookScan US, April 2024]

Sapiens

A Brief History of Humankind (10 Year Anniversary Edition)

THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLER

A Brief History of Humankind

Michel Houellebecq

As the 2022 French Presidential election looms, two candidates emerge as favourites: Marine Le Pen of the Front National, and the charismatic Muhammed Ben Abbes of the growing Muslim Fraternity. Forming a controversial alliance with the political left to block the Front National’s alarming ascendency, Ben Abbes sweeps to power, and overnight the country is transformed. This proves to be the death knell of French secularism, as Islamic law comes into force: women are veiled, polygamy is encouraged and, for our narrator François – misanthropic, middle-aged and alienated – life is set on a new course. 
 
 Submission is a devastating satire, comic and melancholy by turns, and a profound meditation on faith and meaning in Western society.

Submission

Salman Rushdie

From the author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children comes an unflinchingly honest and fiercely funny account of a life turned upside-down. 
 
On Valentine’s Day, 1989, Salman Rushdie received a telephone call from a BBC journalist that would change his life forever: Ayatollah Khomeini, a leading Muslim scholar, had issued him with a death sentence. This is his own account of how he was forced to live in hiding for over a decade; at once intimate and explosive, this is the personal tale behind the international story. 
 
How does a man live with the constant threat of murder? How does he continue to work when deprived of his freedom? How does he sustain friendships, or fall in and out of love? How does he fight back? For over a decade, Salman Rushdie dwelt in a world of secrecy and disguise, a world of security guards and armoured cars, of aliases and code names. 
 
In Joseph Anton, Rushdie tells the remarkable story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. 
 
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize

Joseph Anton

A Memoir

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

Jeanette Winterson

'This book is a deep, sensual plunge, a worship of the body, inside and out' The Times 
 
 
In a quiet English suburb, a love affair ignites. For our nameless narrator, Louise is the last in a long line of explosive passions, but the first to have broken their heart. With Louise's husband, Elgin, blocking love's course, their affair is doomed to unravel - until, that is, a terrible choice must be made. 
 With its witty and masterful prose, Written on the Body takes the reader on a beguiling and defying exploration of love and its physical forms. 
 
'An ambitious work, at once a love story and a philosophical meditation on the body' Sunday Telegraph

Written on the Body

Robert M Sapolsky

What if free will is an illusion? In Determined one of the world’s greatest scientists of human behaviour overturns one of our most powerful beliefs – that we are the authors of our own actions – and sets out the disturbing yet liberating implications of accepting this fact. 
 
As Robert Sapolsky shows, everything we think and do is caused by the luck of our biology and the influence of our environment, and ultimately both are beyond our control. In a world without free will, we must completely rethink what we mean by choice, responsibility, morality and justice. Sapolsky’s extraordinary book does exactly this, guiding us toward a profoundly fairer, more humane way of living together.

Determined

The Science of Life Without Free Will

Life Without Free Will

Stephen Greenblatt

A riveting, exemplary tale of the great cultural &quot;swerve&quot; known as the Renaissance. 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2012 
 
Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and it changed the course of history. 
 
He found a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas &ndash; that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin, and Einstein. 
 
An innovative work of history by one of the world&rsquo;s most celebrated scholars and a thrilling story of discovery, The Swerve details how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it. 
 
&lsquo;Superbly readable... An exciting story, and Greenblatt tells it with his customary clarity and verve&rsquo; Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Daily Telegraph

The Swerve

How the Renaissance Began

Robert Martineau

A spellbinding travel book, exploring the psychology of walking, pilgrimage, solitude and escape. 
 
'An extraordinary, dreamlike journey through West Africa' Adharanand Finn 
 
At the age of twenty-seven and afraid of falling into a life he doesn't want, Robert Martineau quits his office job, buys a flight to Accra and begins to walk. He walks 1,000 miles through Ghana, Togo and Benin, to Ouidah, an ancient spiritual centre on the West African coast. 
 
As he travels alone across rainforest, savannah and mountains, Martineau meets shamans, priests, historians, archaeologists and kings. Through the process of walking each day, and the lessons of those he encounters, Martineau starts to build connections with the natural world and the past - and, at last, to find the meaning he craves. 
 
'Marvellous... A book about how to travel' Jay Griffiths, author of Wild 
 
'[Martineau's] story, beautifully written, of how his pilgrimage of sorts changed him forever' Evening Standard

Waypoints

A Journey on Foot

Sarah Bakewell

Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 
 
Paris, near the turn of 1932-3. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking… 
 
‘It’s not often that you miss your bus stop because you’re so engrossed in reading a book about existentialism, but I did exactly that... The story of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger et al is strange, fun and compelling reading. If it doesn’t win awards, I will eat my copy’ Independent on Sunday 
 
‘Bakewell shows how fascinating were some of the existentialists’ ideas and how fascinating, often frightful, were their lives. Vivid, humorous anecdotes are interwoven with a lucid and unpatronising exposition of their complex philosophy… Tender, incisive and fair’ Daily Telegraph 
 
‘Quirky, funny, clear and passionate… Few writers are as good as Bakewell at explaining complicated ideas in a way that makes them easy to understand’ Mail on Sunday

At The Existentialist Café

Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Gertrude Himmelfarb's elegant and wonderfully readable work, The Roads to Modernity, reclaims the Enlightenment from historians who have downgraded its importance and from scholars who have given preeminence to the Enlightenment in France over concurrent movements in England and in America. 
 
Himmerlfarb demonstrates the primacy and wisdom of the British, exemplified in such thinkers as Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke, as well as the unique and enduring contributions of the American Founders. It is their Enlightenments, she argues, that created a social ethic - humane, compassionate and realistic - that still resonates strongly today.

The Roads to Modernity

The British, French and American Enlightenments

Lyndsey Stonebridge

This bold new take on the life and ideas of political philosopher Hannah Arendt explores her lessons for living in an age of uncertainty 
 
'Compelling and original' OBSERVER 
 
'An absorbing new biography... Admirable' ECONOMIST 
 
'Invigorating and insightful' FINANCIAL TIMES 
 
The violent unease of today's world would have been all too familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration, the banality of evil: she had lived through them all. 
 
Born in the first decade of the last century, Arendt escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of the world's most influential - and controversial - public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all about freedom. Questioning - thinking - was her first defence against tyranny. In place of the forces of darkness and insanity, she pitched a politics of plurality, spontaneity and defiance. Loving the world, Arendt taught, meant finding the courage to protect it. 
 
Written with passion and authority, Lyndsey Stonebridge's We Are Free to Change the World illuminates Arendt's life and work and its urgent dialogue with our troubled present. It calls on each of us to think our way, as Hannah Arendt did - unflinchingly, lovingly and defiantly - through our own unpredictable times.

We Are Free to Change the World

Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience

Michael Taylor

Impossible Monsters is the captivating story of the discovery of the dinosaurs and how it upended our understanding of the origins of the world. 
 
‘An astonishing book about an extraordinary subject' PETER FRANKOPAN 
'As thrilling as it is sweeping' TOM HOLLAND 
'This book dazzles in its originality . . . a triumph’ SATHNAM SANGHERA 
 
In 1811, a twelve-year-old girl uncovered some strange-looking bones in Britain’s southern shoreline - and so sparked a crisis that would engulf science and religion for the next six decades. By its end, the literal reading of the Bible had been overturned, science had been liberated from religion and the secular age had begun. Impossible Monsters takes us into the lives and minds of the extraordinary men and women whose discovery of the dinosaurs revolutionised our understanding of the world, as well as those who resisted them and those, like Charles Darwin, who took great risks to construct a new account of the earth’s and mankind’s origins. It is the riveting story of a group of people who dared to think impossible things and then showed them to be true. 
 
‘Truly marvellous ... an intellectual thriller’ RICHARD HOLMES 
‘A stunning work ... of surprises and revelations’ STEVE BRUSATTE

Impossible Monsters

How the Discovery of Dinosaurs Changed the World

Dina Nayeri

Dina Nayeri's wide-ranging, groundbreaking new book combines deep reportage with her own life experience to examine what constitutes believability in our society. Intent on exploring ideas of persuasion and performance, Nayeri takes us behind the scenes in emergency rooms, corporate boardrooms, asylum interviews and into her own family, to ask - where lies the difference between being believed and being dismissed? What does this mean for our culture? 
 
As personal as it is profound in its reflections on language, history, morality and compassion, Who Gets Believed? investigates the unspoken social codes that determine how we relate to one another.

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