A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

Aaron Shapiro

PublicationStatus

Brand

Format

AgeRange

Series

Imprint

CategoryLabel

Jerry White

Jerry White's London in the Twentieth Century, Winner of the Wolfson Prize, is a masterful account of the city’s most tumultuous century by its leading expert. 
 
In 1901 no other city matched London in size, wealth and grandeur. Yet it was also a city where poverty and disease were rife. For its inhabitants, such contradictions and diversity were the defining experience of the next century of dazzling change. 
 
In the worlds of work and popular culture, politics and crime, through war, immigration and sexual revolution, Jerry White’s richly detailed and captivating history shows how the city shaped their lives and how it in turn was shaped by them.

London in the Twentieth Century

A City and Its People

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World is widely recognised to be the fullest and most brilliant account ever written of Shakespeare's life, his work and his age. 
 
Shakespeare was a man of his time, constantly engaging with his audience's deepest desires and fears, and by reconnecting with this historic reality we are able to experience the true character of the playwright himself. Greenblatt traces Shakespeare's unfolding imaginative generosity - his ability to inhabit others, to confer upon them his own strength of spirit, to make them truly live as independent beings as no other artist has ever done. 
 
Digging deep into the vital links between the playwright and his world, Will in the World provides the fullest account ever written of the living, breathing man behind the masterpieces.

Will In The World

How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Walter Benjamin

Illuminations contains the most celebrated work of Walter Benjamin, one of the most original and influential thinkers of the 20th Century: 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', ‘The Task of the Translator’ and 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', as well as essays on Kafka, storytelling, Baudelaire, Brecht's epic theatre, Proust and an anatomy of his own obsession, book collecting. 
 
This now legendary volume offers the best possible access to Benjamin’s singular and significant achievement, while Hannah Arendt’s introduction reveals how his life and work are a prism to his times.

Illuminations

Sarah B Pomeroy

‘The classic, groundbreaking account of women’s lives in Greece and Rome’ Mary Beard 
 
For centuries, half the ancient world remained invisible -- until Sarah Pomeroy’s pioneering history, which at last revealed the women of antiquity to modern eyes. 
 
What did daily life hold for women in ancient Greece and Rome? How many women read the great histories of Herodotus and Thucydides? Did Socrates’ wife, Xanthippe, debate with her husband on issues of beauty and truth? Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves is a foundational work of feminism, reconstructing the lives of these lost women of antiquity in order that we might better understand the roots of our own classically influenced society today.

Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves

Women in Classical Antiquity

John Keegan

The Face of Battle is military history from the battlefield: an imperishable account of the direct experience of individuals at 'the point of maximum danger'. 
 
 It examines the physical conditions of fighting, the particular emotions and behaviour generated by battle, as well as the motives that impel soldiers to stand and fight rather than run away. 
 
 In this stunningly vivid reassessment of three battles, John Keegan conveys their reality for the participants, whether facing the arrow cloud of Agincourt, the levelled muskets of Waterloo or the steel rain of the Somme.

The Face Of Battle

A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme

M R D Foot

SOE, the Special Operations Executive, was a small, tough British secret service, a dirty tricks department established in July 1940 and encouraged by Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’. 
 
Recruited from remarkably diverse callings, the men and women who were members of this most secret agency lived in great and constant danger. Their job – as saboteurs, informers, partisans, couriers or secret agents – was to support and stimulate resistance behind enemy lines; their credentials fortitude, courage, immense patience and a devotion to freedom. 
 
In this classic study M.R.D. Foot, sheds light on the heroism of individual SOE agents across the world and provides us with a spellbinding account of the Executive’s crucial wartime work. 
 
With an introduction by David Stafford.

S.O.E.

An outline history of the special operations executive 1940 - 46

Frances A Yates

This unique and brilliant book is a history of human knowledge. 
 
Before the invention of printing, a trained memory was of vital importance. Based on a technique of impressing 'places' and 'images' on the mind, the ancient Greeks created an elaborate memory system which in turn was inherited by the Romans and passed into the European tradition, to be revived, in occult form, during the Renaissance. 
 
Frances Yates sheds light on Dante’s Divine Comedy, the form of the Shakespearian theatre and the history of ancient architecture; The Art of Memory is an invaluable contribution to aesthetics and psychology, and to the history of philosophy, of science and of literature.

The Art of Memory

John Sugden

The Sword of Albion concludes the most comprehensive and intimate life of Nelson ever written, one that teems with a glittering array of sailors and civilians, heroes and villains, husbands, wives and lovers. 
 
 Here are Nelson's famous victories at the battles of the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar as well as his lesser-known yet equally gripping campaigns. But behind the military prowess is a man riven with paradoxes and schisms: the fighting admiral and the glory-hunter, the national hero and the indigent commoner, the family man and the adulterer. 
 
 This is an epic, triumphant and tragic life, and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

Nelson

The Sword of Albion

The definitive account of the Great War and a national bestseller from eminent military historian John Keegan 
 
2018 marks the centenary of the First World War – the war that created the modern world. It destroyed a century of relative peace and prosperity and saw a continent at the height of its success descend into slaughter. It unleashed both the demons of the twentieth century - political hatred, military destruction and mass death - and the ideas which continue to shape our world today: modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, and radical ideas about economics and society. 
 
By the end of the war, three great empires – the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman – had collapsed. But as Keegan expertly shows, the devastation extended over the entirety over Europe and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. Pertinent, authoritative and gripping, this panoramic account of WW1 is regarded as a world history classic. 
 
‘The best and most approachable introduction to the war’ Guardian 
 
‘Nobody describes a battle as Keegan does, vividly relating the unfolding events to the contours of the field of combat... This book is a kind of war memorial. As first-hand memory fades, The First World War honours the dead as only true history can’ Sunday Times

The First World War

Norman Davies

Europe – and the question of whether to stay in or leave – has dominated British politics for the last three years. Yet how much do you really know about the Continent? 
 
From the Ice Age to the Cold War, from Reykjavik to the Volga, from Minos to Margaret Thatcher, Norman Davies tells the entire story of Europe in a single volume. Discover the most ambitious history of the continent ever undertaken. 
 
‘Any European or world citizen should read this… History that illuminates the present day’ Big Issue

Europe

A History

Robert A Caro

Hailed as 'the greatest biography of our era' (The Times) this is the fourth part of Robert Caro's multi-award-winning best-selling work on American President Lyndon Johnson. 
 
The Passage of Power, 'the series' crowning volume' (Economist), spans the years 1958 to 1964, arguably the most crucial years in the life of Johnson and pivotal years for American history. This era saw some of the most frustrating moments of Johnson's career, but also some of his most triumphant. His battle with the Kennedy brothers over the 1960 Democratic nomination for president was a bitter one, and the ensuing years of Johnson's vice-presidency were marked with humiliation. But, thrust into power following the assassination of J. F. Kennedy, Johnson grasped the presidential role with unprecedented skill. Caro also provides a fresh perspective on Kennedy’s assassination from Johnson's viewpoint, and penetrates deep into what it was like for him to assume a position of such power at a time of national crisis. 
 
The Passage of Power documents Johnson's extraordinary early presidency, forcing previously abandoned bills on the budget and civil rights through an uncooperative Congress and striving to achieve what he saw to be the highest standard of office. 
 
In The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Caro shows a delicacy of touch and a profoundness of insight into the state of a nation under the hand of a political master. Collectively these volumes constitute a major history of America in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century.

The Passage of Power

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 4)

Jeffrey Sachs

The inspiring story of JFK, the Cold War, and the power of oratory to change the course of history. 
 
John F. Kennedy’s last great campaign was not the battle for re-election that he did not live to wage, but the struggle for a sustainable peace with the Soviet Union. To Move the World recalls the extraordinary days from October 1962 to September 1963, when JFK marshaled the power of oratory and his astonishing political skills towards that end. 
 
 Jeffrey Sachs shows how Kennedy emerged from the Cuban Missile Crisis with the determination and capabilities to forge a new direction for the world. Together, he and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, both deeply affected by this near-death experience, would pull the world away from the nuclear precipice and chart a path for future peacemakers. 
 
 During his final year in office Kennedy gave a series of speeches in which he sought to argue, against widespread pessimism, that peace with the Soviets was possible. He used his great gifts of persuasion on multiple fronts – with fractious allies, hawkish Republican congressmen, and dubious members of his own administration – to persuade America, the Soviet Union, and the world that cooperation between the superpowers was both realistic and necessary. 
 
 To Move the World gives us a startlingly fresh perspective on Kennedy’s presidency and an inspiring model for strong leadership and problem solving in our time.

To Move The World

JFK's Quest for Peace

Theo Padnos

In December 2009 the US government launched an air strike against the tiny Yemeni village of al-Majalah where al-Qaeda militants were believed to be in hiding. A second attack a week later targeted the prominent religious leader Anwar Awlaki. He escaped unharmed but many villagers were killed. These two strikes were intended to set back al-Qaeda's operations in Yemen but, within 24 hours, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - a 23-year-old Nigerian man and one of Awlaki's followers - boarded a plane to Detroit with explosives hidden in his clothing. 
 
His is not a unique story: at a time when true pluralism remains an aspiration rather than a reality in the West, young men, disillusioned and angry with the spiritually barren, consumerist societies in which they live, travel to Yemen in search of fulfilment. There, in the country's anarchic wilderness, they find what they could not at home: a pure way of life, submissive wives and like-minded brethren. Some, like Abdulmutallab, find something much more dangerous: the conviction to carry out Jihad. 
 
In Undercover Muslim, Theo Padnos brilliantly evokes a landscape and journey that few Westerners have experienced. He investigates the radicalisation of these disaffected young men as they move, almost unnoticed, from London, Berlin or Paris to their new spiritual home in Yemen. 
 
Padnos's journey takes him from the newsroom of a Yemeni newspaper to the prayer rows and lecture rooms of Yemen's madrassas, from covert Jeep rides into the sacred mountains to a stint in an overcrowded prison. It is through these events, and through the people he encounters, that Padnos shows us how a terrifying gulf has opened between Islam and the West.

Undercover Muslim

A Journey into Yemen

Simon Schama

Change - sometimes gentle and subtle, sometimes shocking and violent - is the dynamic of Simon Schama's unapologetically personal and grippingly written history of Britain, especially the changes that wash over custom and habit, transforming our loyalties. 
 
What makes or breaks a nation? To whom do we give our allegiance and why? And where do the boundaries of our community lie - in our hearth and home, our village or city, tribe or faith? What is Britain - one country or many? Has British history unfolded 'at the edge of the world' or right at the heart of it? 
 
Schama delivers these themes in a form that is at once traditional and excitingly fresh. The great and the wicked are here - Becket and Thomas Cromwell, Robert the Bruce and Anne Boleyn - but so are countless more ordinary lives: an Irish monk waiting for the plague to kill him in his cell at Kilkenny; a small boy running through the streets of London to catch a glimpse of Elizabeth I. 
 
The first in a series, this volume paints a rich and vivid portrait of the life of the British people and their nation.

A History of Britain - Volume 1

At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

Simon Schama explores the forces that tore Britain apart during two centuries of dynamic change - transforming outlooks, allegiances and boundaries. 
 
From the beginning of July 1637, battles raged on for 200 years - both at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe, America and India. Most would be wars of faith - waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction. But as wars of religious passions gave way to campaigns for profit, the British people did come together in the imperial enterprise of 'Britannia Incorporated'. 
 
The British Wars is a story of revolution and reaction, inspiration and disenchantment, of progress and catastrophe, and Schama's evocative narrative brings it vividly to life.

A History of Britain - Volume 2

The British Wars 1603-1776

The final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain spans centuries, crosses the breadth of the empire and covers a vast expanse of topics - from the birth of feminism to the fate of freedom. 
 
The Fate of the Empire asks crucial questions about the nature of empire, journeying from celebrations of industrial and imperialist power at the Great Exhibition, to the catastrophic Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny. 
 
Through the military and economic shocks and traumas of our past, Schama asks the question that is still with us - is the immense weight of our history a blessing or a curse, a gift or a millstone around the neck of our future? 
 
This third and final volume in the series is a vast compelling history, made more so by the lively storytelling and big bold characters at the heart of the action. But alongside flamboyant heroes, like Nelson and Churchill, Schama recalls unsung heroines and virtually unknown enemies. Alongside the grand ideas, he exposes the grand illusions that cost untold lives.

A History of Britain - Volume 3

The Fate of Empire 1776-2000

* 'Great art has dreadful manners...' Simon Schama observes at the start of his epic exploration of the power, and whole point, of art. 'The hushed reverence of the gallery can fool you into believing masterpieces are polite things, visions that soothe, charm and beguile, but actually they are thugs. Merciless and wily, the greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your sense of reality...' 
 
* With the same disarming force, Power of Art jolts us far from the comfort zone of the hushed art gallery, as Schama closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. 
 
* The embattled heroes - Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko - faced crisis with steadfast defiance. The masterpieces they created challenged convention, shattered complacency, shifted awareness and changed the way we look at the world. With powerfully vivid story-telling, Schama explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the flamboyant theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain. 
 
* Most compelling of all, Power of Art traces the extraordinary evolution of eight world-class works of art. Created in a bolt of illumination, such works 'tell us something about how the world is, how it is to be inside our skins, that no more prosaic source of wisdom can deliver. And when they do that they answer, irrefutably and majestically, the nagging question of every reluctant art-conscript... "OK, OK, but what's art really for?"'

The Power of Art

Stefan Aust

The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group constitutes one of the most remarkable phenomena of post-war Europe. A group of young people, most of them from solid, middle-class backgrounds, took the law into their own hands, and by means of arson, bombing, kidnap and murder sought to alter the direction of national, and indeed international, politics. 
 
Rooted in the student protest movement of the late 1960s, the story of the group begins in May 1970 with the freeing of Andreas Baader - imprisoned for planting fire bombs in protest against the Vietnam War - by Ulrike Meinhof, Gudrun Ensslin and others. They spent the years that followed requisitioning apartments from left-wing sympathisers, stealing cars and robbing banks in preparation for attacks on US military bases. 
 
After an intense manhunt, the ringleaders of the group, which now called itself the Red Army Faction (RAF), were finally captured in 1972. Their prolonged trial began in 1975 and lasted for almost 2 years, in the course of which Ulrike Meinhof hanged herself in her cell. The other members of the group were convicted and received life sentences. 
 
The 'war of six against sixty million' (Heinrich Böll) reached its climax in the autumn of 1977 when supporters tried to secure their release by kidnapping the president of the German Employers' Association, Hanns Martin Schleyer, and later by hijacking a Lufthansa jet, which was eventually captured by German special forces at Mogadishu airport. On the morning the rescue was announced, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe were all found dead in their cells. The 'German Autumn' marked the violent peak of a journey that had begun with peaceful protests against the American war in Vietnam : moral outrage had turned into blatant immorality. 
 
Stefan Aust's utterly absorbing account of these events reads like a first-class thriller. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is the definitive chronicle of seven years that changed Germany.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Rachel Morley

Every church tells a story. Churches have been at the centre of the English community since Christianity arrived on our shores with the Romans in the second century. They are palimpsests of human history and human emotion, containing layer upon layer of stories and secrets. 
 
The poet John Betjeman coined the phrase ‘church crawling’ to describe his days out visiting churches. In the spirit of Betjeman, Morley’s book captures the magical experience of poking around a deserted rural church only to see it transform – through her expert eyes – into a portal to the past, one that brings England’s people and history to life in the most colourful, moving and unexpected ways. 
 
What we discover is that churches are real survivors: they were smashed to bits in the Reformation, had their riches stripped during Cromwell’s puritanical purges, have been pulled apart to make new buildings every time there’s a new architectural fashion, and had bodies snatched from their graveyards to service the Victorian lust for scientific discovery. But still they stand, as witnesses of history. 
 
Church Crawling is an exploration of something so richly imbedded in English culture it’s hard to separate it from the national narrative of who we are and where we came from.

Church Crawling

The Lost Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches

Ed Douglas

Britain's mountains have inspired poets, painters and scientists and they are a cornerstone of our cultural narrative and our national identity. Yet they are also at the forefront of agricultural and climate change policy, in a tug of war between factions seeking preservation and economic development. Touching on their formation and prehistory, Upland describes how mountains were transformed through the centuries, the conflicts and reforms that shaped their landscapes and how the industrial revolution made their wide open spaces so important to the wealth of the nation. 
 
Upland will tell the story of the kings, monks, travellers, shepherds, poets, engineers, soldiers, explorers, visionaries and campaigners who made Britain’s mountains what they are today. It will unpick the centuries of war and the political framework that allowed these significant tracts of land to remain in the hands of a few landowners, the human cost of sudden depopulation in waves of clearances, the slow and then rapid decline of mountain environments and their central place in adapting to the challenges of a changing climate and a growing population. 
 
Most of all, Upland will capture the enduring beauty of these treasured landscapes and explore why they mean so much to us.

Upland

The Strange History and Vital Future of Britain’s Mountains

Tim Whitmarsh

How did Christianity, starting out as a minor offshoot of Judaism, grow into an international faith that shaped the world as we know it? Rome’s Age of Revolution corrects the triumphalist narrative that the Christian message was so persuasive, and indeed superior, that people converted in huge numbers, abandoning their pagan beliefs, thereby turning a small persecuted sect into the state religion of the Roman Empire. 
 
Tim Whitmarsh shows that Christianity would never have succeeded if it had not taken advantage of the infrastructure and culture of the Roman Empire; in turn the new religion was indelibly shaped and transformed by Roman beliefs and ideas, especially those circulating in the Greek-speaking, or Hellenistic, eastern parts of the empire. This radical transformation, Tim argues, can only be described as a revolution. The consequences are with us to this day.

Rome's Age of Revolution

Augustus, Empire and the Making of Christianity

David Turner

A ground-breaking history of modern Britain that brings disabled experiences to the fore for the first time. 
 
Notable medical developments, technological breakthroughs, increased visibility in popular culture and greater political representation all suggest that disabled people in Britain today are better off than those in centuries past. Or so we like to believe. 
 
Spanning over 500 years of British history and unearthing countless untold tales and voices, David Turner shows how attitudes in the past were often more open than we assume. And where they were not, we see how disabled people and their allies have always demanded just treatment; whether petitioning for better community support in the sixteenth century, campaigning for integrated education in the nineteenth, or protesting inaccessible transport in the twenty-first, the fight for equality has deep historical roots. 
 
Turning the spotlight on disabled people's histories - and appreciating their stories as ones of resistance, resourcefulness and resilience as well as suffering and hardship - has never been more urgent. Disability reveals the realities of disabled life in Britain across time so that we can fully understand our past - and the work we must do for a truly inclusive society moving forward.

Disability

A History of Resistance

Ben Rhodes

A vital account of fifteen speeches and orators – from Benjamin Franklin to Barack Obama – that tells the story of the United States as a battle over what it means to be an American, from a New York Times bestselling author and former presidential speechwriter 
 
What does it mean to be an American? Since the Founding, Americans have been having an intense debate over this deceptively simple question which has spawned Constitutional crises, civil war, populism, mass migrations, reform movements – and their inevitable backlash. The history of this debate over who and what makes an American, Ben Rhodes argues, is essential to understanding how the United States has evolved as a nation and the intensity of their divisions today. 
 
In this book, Rhodes tells the story of fifteen essential speeches – some famous, some obscure - that, together, offer a fresh and revealing portrait of the United States as an ongoing contest over what it means to be American. With rare insight into the power and purpose of political rhetoric, Rhodes illuminates how each speech reflects the nature of American identity at a particular historical moment, with riveting portraits of the people, movements, and social conditions that produced pivotal oratory. Rhode also establishes the unique role of speaking as an act of American political persuasion – from Franklin’s case for compromise at the Constitutional convention to Alexander Stephen’s case for white supremacy as the cornerstone of the Confederacy; or, in social movements, from Martin Luther King’s demand for racial equality at the march on Washington, to Pat Buchanan’s 'culture war' speech to the 1992 Republican convention which foreshadowed Donald Trump. For a country that values individualism, self-invention, and mass media, Rhodes reminds us that speeches have occupied an out-sized space in the American national imagination: the lone voice before a crowd, bending history to its will. 
 
At a time when what it means to be an American is a matter of intense debate and division, Ben Rhodes offers rare insight into the gap between who we say we are, and who we want to be.

All We Say

A History of the United States in Fifteen Speeches

Darragh McGee

A pioneering, eye-opening investigation into the world of online gambling, its explosive growth and the transformational impact it is having on sport, tech, individuals and society. 
 
A little flutter. No harm. All part of the game. Get closer to the action. A friendly, familiar voice, inviting you to join the real fans and get involved. 
 
It has never been easier to place a bet. Wall to wall adverts on repeat surround every sporting event. The smartphone in your pocket all you need to unlock a dizzying array of bets on almost any aspect of any sport. 
 
Since its origins as a provincial cottage industry almost twenty-five years ago, UK online gambling has become a globe-straddling behemoth worth more than £10 billion a year. It can sometimes feel as if the point of sport is to bet on it. 
 
But it didn’t have to be this way. In Imitation Games, Darragh McGee travels the world to tell the incredible story of the individuals and companies who brought this brave new world of betting into being (and got very rich doing so). 
 
He also traces the devastation and destruction that gambling leaves behind it. The inadequate safeguards and the broken lives that show that when the fun stops, it stops hard. And proffers a series of solutions for how we can create a different future.

Imitation Games

How the Gambling Industry Hijacked Sport

Louise Brangan

Work, work, work. Pray, pray, pray. 
 
Following independence in 1922, Ireland began to chase a dream: to become the perfect Catholic nation. But purity had a price. The women and girls who did not conform – the wayward, the poor, the disabled, the abused – were purged from the streets and detained in a network of facilities, from Mother and Baby Homes and asylums to industrial schools. 
 
The Magdalene Laundries represented the deep end of this regime of social control. Thousands were sent to these institutions; each was perceived to have fallen in some way. Once locked inside, their hair was shorn off, their names were erased and they were put to work. They washed, they scrubbed and they prayed, labouring in often indefinite captivity in an attempt to salvage their souls. 
 
This is the forgotten story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, told through the voices of those who endured them, the nuns who presided over them and the communities who lived alongside them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies, Louise Brangan recovers the lives of six women: Eileen, Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid and Katie. Unflinching and compassionate, she dismantles long-held myths about what the Laundries were, who was sent there, and why. 
 
When the gates of the last Laundry closed in 1996, Ireland moved on. Or so it seemed. This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods of recent history. The Fallen compels us not only to confront this shameful past, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember?

The Fallen

The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence

Ibram X. Kendi

A revelatory account of the racist conspiracy theory that now pervades global politics – from the prize-winning historian and number-one-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi. 
 
Throughout the world, authoritarian movements are radically reshaping our politics and our lives. At the heart of them all lies ‘great replacement theory’, which insists that peoples of colour, migrants and minorities are being deliberately empowered to displace white majorities. 
 
In Chain of Ideas, Ibram X. Kendi shows how this conspiracy theory has mutated from the extremist fringe into a global ideology, embraced by leaders as varied as Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump. He traces its historic roots in slavery, segregation, colonialism and Nazism, and shows how these age-old prejudices have been dressed in new language for a digital age. 
 
But this is not a book about extremists on the margins. From Anders Breivik’s massacre to the chants of the Charlottesville marchers, from Brexit slogans to the Christchurch shooting, Kendi shows how these ideas have crossed borders, inspired terror and are now re-shaping parties of government. Chain of Ideas is a penetrating history of how reactionary ideas have been repackaged as common sense, and how they shape the globe today.

Chain of Ideas

Great Replacement Theory and the Origins of Our Authoritarian Age

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

Filters

Category

Publication Date

Format

Imprint

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter