Neil MacGregor was Director of the National Gallery, London from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, and Chair of the Steering Committee of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin from 2015 to 2018. His previous books include A History of the World in 100 Objects, Shakespeare's Restless World and Germany: Memories of a Nation, all available in Penguin and now between them translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he was made a member of the Order of Merit, the UK's highest civil honour. In 2015 he was awarded the Goethe Medal and the German National Prize. In 2018 the radio series Living with the Gods received the Sandford Saint Martin Award for Religious Broadcasting.

Neil MacGregor

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Fitzroy MaClean

The Highlands of Scotland, and more specifically the clans that inhabit them, have a romantic resonance and mystery. Fitzroy Maclean recounts their extraordinary history, from their Celtic origins to Robert the Bruce, the wars of independence and Bannockburn, from Flodden, Mary Queen of Scots to the Jacobite Risings of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth-century Clearances and the modern day. 
 
Highlanders sheds light on the motivation and character of the clans, bringing vividly to life their highly dramatic stories. Never before has there been such a thorough and well-balanced view of Highland history.

Highlanders

A History of the Highland Clans

Martín Cullen

The Estancia is the story of a young boy growing up in the upper classes of the Argentine in the 1950s, set against the turbulent backdrop of Peronist rule. Revealing a now vanished society of the families of the great houses of Buenos Aires, their fin-de-siècle lifestyle, and the estancias which fed them, it is an autobiographical novel based on the author’s life. 
Narrated through the voice of Martín, a precocious. ten-year-old boy, it explores his intense and suffocating upbringing. After a childhood trapped and seduced in a domineering household of multiple mothers and an emotionally absent father, Martin believes he has finally escaped when taken on a cruise to Europe by his elderly great aunt. However, despite being freed from the steamy bathroom rituals of his family, the past continues to confront him and a secret surrounding his birth is revealed. 
Accompanying him on his journey of self-discovery, this vividly described panorama of the old New World explores the demise of high society and the incarceration of anyone showing disrespect for the government. Interspersed with flashbacks of his ancestor Ramos Mejia, who lived among the Pampa Indians and settled in the first estancia lands of the region, it is a poignant memoir of a truly unique life.

The Estancia

Felix Yusupov

In this extraordinary memoir Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov recounts the early, heady days of the 20th century and his plot to kill the 'mad monk' Rasputin in gruesome, thrilling prose. 
 
After a glamorous life in England, partying with the rich and famous at Oxford and London he eventually returned to Russia where he married Princess Irina of Russia, the Tsar's only niece, only to realise that his beloved Russia was on the verge of catastrophe, blaming Rasputin for his disastrous influence on the Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina. 
 
On the night of 30th December 1916, Yusupov murdered Rasputin, an event relayed in chilling detail in these memoirs.

Lost Splendour and the Death of Rasputin

Adrian Sykes

From the end of the last Ice Age (10,000 years ago) to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965,Adrian Sykes narrates the history and achievements of these islands,their inhabitants and their origins,through the stories of some 3000+ men &amp; women who have shaped not just our history but the modern world. The story is interspersed with countless inventions,deeds of daring do and wickednesses,as well as the origins of innumerable words and phrases,often surprisingly early, 
from Nosey Parker - Elizabeth I of her Archbishop of Canterbury,to mayonnaise - the battle of Mahon,which the victorious French admiral celebrated by inventing mayonnaise and after which we hanged Admiral Byng who lost it "to encourage the others",as Voltaire put it. Sykes astonishes on every page, whether with the origin of everyday phrases or nursery rhymes or the countless inventions of the British, from the lead pencil (1568), the tin can, the bicycle, screw propeller and jet engine to DNA, LCD crystals, cement, the electric kettle, the vacuum cleaner and Marmite. 
Beautifully illustrated and with maps of exceptional clarity,this is a book hard to put down in which you learn something very surprising on every page.

Made in Britain

The Men and Women Who Shaped the Modern World

Mark Getty

This is a story – like all stories – about love and hate, friendship and betrayal, life and death, and above all, the kind of world we want to build. 
 
Like Wildfire Blazing is the debut novel by Mark Getty – and is an enigmatic look at the way power is exercised, ominously paralleling our current political landscape. Written in a unique, poetic style, imbued with wit and laden with references to ancient Greek and Roman history, this is unlike anything else you will read this year. 
 
"We know that tonight we may not see dusk, and that from tomorrow’s dawn our homes may never house us again. But now, right now, we are here in this world of trees, and sun, and wind, and rivers that run to seas, and seas that rise and fall like a beating heart …. We have good and bad and great and small; we have me for now, we have you, forever, I pray. But above all, we have hope. Tomorrow can wait." 
 
This book is a strikingly beautiful publication that evokes the quality of a private press publication of another era.

Like Wildfire Blazing

Rosemary Shrager

Rosemary Shrager is mostly self taught, she has worked for Pierre Koffmann and Jean-Christophe Novelli. Now, in more than a hundred recipes, she shows us how to produce the very greatest cuisine at home.

Rosemary Castle Cook

Steven Spurrier

This is the story of Steven Spurrier’s rich and eventful life in and around wine. 
 
From being inspired by a glass of Cockburn 1908 Vintage Port at thirteen years old, Steven Spurrier joined London’s oldest wine merchant in 1964; he bought a wine shop in Paris (“Your wine merchant speaks English”), and organised what became known as the Judgement of Paris, when, at a blind tasting, nine of the best tasters in France placed Californian wines, both white and red, above the greatest French wines, changing the wine world forever. 
 
Steven Spurrier was 2017 Decanter Man of the Year, a title generally reserved for the greatest of the world’s wine makers, and is currently President of the Wine &amp; Spirit Education Trust. He has recently planted a vineyard in Dorset to produce sparkling wine.

Wine – A Way of Life

Tim Sainsbury

This business book-cum-political and cultural memoir, which gives a behind-the-scenes look at the revolution of one of the great retail dynasties of the world, will resonate with readers questioning our current malaise. 
 
As a fourth generation Sainsbury, Tim was the director responsible for the company's development programme from 1962 to 1974, a key period during which the radical change from counter service to self-service supermarkets took place. His retail insight and reflections, including on competition, management and remuneration, and the role of Government, will be especially relevant as we witness a new retail revolution and crisis on our high streets. 
Sainsbury's second calling was as a politician. This book has a foreword by Michael Heseltine, in which he writes that: 'Of particular interest to the political student will be Tim's reflections on the changes he lived through in Parliament itself. The working conditions there are unacceptable, there are too many MPs, and the increasing social pressures particularly from the internet are making it increasingly difficult to attract men and women of the calibre ministerial responsibility demands.' 
 
In Among the Supporting Cast, Sainsbury tells this story with warmth, wisdom and a self-deprecating sense of humour.

Among the Supporting Cast

Reminiscences and Reflections on Three Careers

Peter Ashley

More from Unmitigated England is just that. Even more from the pen and camera of Peter Ashley, whose bestselling Unmitigated England prompted A. N. Wilson in his Daily Telegraph column to call it 'an absolutely stunning illustrated book'. This new volume promises more of Peter Ashley's very English passions, including breweries, paintings, children's books, canals and Christmas; with everything illustrated from the author's seemingly inexhaustive collections of photographs, watercolours and scrapbook items. And once again with an irreverent and often funny commentary that reminds us of an England that is both in the past and waiting to be discovered.

More From Unmitigated England

Stanley Weiss

A skinny Jewish kid from Philadelphia training to fight and likely die in the U.S. invasion of Japan in 1945, Stanley Weiss came home to the death of his loving but weak father, who left his mother penniless. Vowing on the spot not to let his insecurities limit him as they had his father, Weiss pledged that his mother would never have to worry. Later, a humiliation suffered at the hands of his wealthy girlfriend’s famous father ignited in him a determination to better himself in every way and live life to the fullest. 
Inspired by a Humphrey Bogart movie, Weiss moved to a foreign country to hunt for treasure—where Rule Number One was ‘’Don’t Die.’’ Along the way, his zest for living has taken him from the company of legendary artists and poets in Mexico, to writers and beatniks in 1960s San Francisco and Hollywood; from drunken nights with a notorious spy to friendships with three of the men who played James Bond; from glamorous parties in Gstaad and Phuket to power politics in London and Washington, DC. A story of growth, tenacious focus, and good humor, it stretches from the days of ‘’Don’t Die’’ to Weiss’s response when asked why business executives were interested in preventing nuclear war: ‘’Being dead is bad for business.’’ 
For those who believe the world is shaped by ordinary people who push themselves to do extraordinary things, Stanley Weiss’s story will inspire and surprise while reminding us all that being dead is bad for business—and being boring is bad for life. 
Stanley

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