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A A Gill

Andrew Swanston read law at Cambridge, but was inspired to write by his lifelong interest in early modern history. His Thomas Hill novels – The King’s Spy, The King’s Exile and The King’s Return – are set against the backdrops of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the early Restoration respectively. He is also the author of Waterloo: The Bravest Man and Beautiful Star and Other Stories. His first historical thriller set during the reign of Elizabeth I – Incendium (published in paperback as The Incendium Plot) – introduced readers to the academic, lawyer and intelligencer Dr Christopher Radcliff, whose adventures continue in Chaos. Andrew Swanston lives in Surrey.

A D Swanston

A E Langsford

A G Hopkins

A. J. BAIME is the New York Times best-selling author of The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War and Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans. Both books are in development for major motion pictures. Baime is a longtime regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Popular Science, and Men’s Journal. He lives in Granite Bay, California. Visit him at facebook.com/ajbaime and trumanbook.com.

A J Baime

A J Jacobs

A J P Taylor

Anthony James Pollard is a British medieval historian, specialising in the fifteenth century and in particular the Wars of the Roses. A leading authority in the field, he is profesor emeritus of Teesside University. His books include North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses, Richard III and the Princes in theTower, Imagining Robin Hood: the Late Medieval Stories in Historical Context and Warwick the kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame.

A J Pollard

A J Rochester

A K Benjamin is a clinical neuropsychologist and the author of Let Me Not Be Mad: A Story of Unravelling Minds.

A K Benjamin

A. L. Berridge read English at Oxford, and taught for ten years before moving into television, where her production credits range from period drama and thrillers to long-running soaps. She has written two previous novels, Top Ten besteller Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King. Into the Valley of Death is her third novel.

A L Berridge

Alison Gaylin's first job was as a reporter for a celebrity tabloid, which sparked a lifelong interest in writing about people committing despicable acts. More than a decade later, she wrote and published her Edgar-nominated first novel, HIDE YOUR EYES. 
 
She's since published nine more books, including the USA Today and international bestselling Brenna Spector suspense series, which has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Thriller awards and won the Shamus award. 
 
She lives in upstate New York with her husband, daughter, cat and dog.

A L Gaylin

A Maxwell-Hyslop

A McArthur

A P Wavell

A.S. Webb is the Sunday Times bestselling author of Daughter of Chaos, the first instalment of The Dark Pantheon Trilogy. She is inspired by stories rooted in history and mythology, that push the boundaries of imagination and urge us to reflect on what it means to be human.

A S Webb

A. A. Dhand is the author of six previous novels, and has been shortlisted for the CWA Steel Dagger Award. His DI Harry Virdee novels are currently being adapted for TV by the BBC. He was raised in Bradford and spent his youth observing the city from behind the counter of a small convenience store. After qualifying as a pharmacist, he worked in London and travelled extensively before returning to Bradford to start his own business and begin writing. The history, diversity and darkness of the city have inspired all his novels. For more information about A. A. Dhand and his books, follow him on X @aadhand, and on Instagram @aa_dhand.

A. A. Dhand

A. A. Gill

A. A. Milne

A. Anatoli

A. B. Poranek grew up sharing her time between Ontario, Canada and rural Poland, and eventually completed a veterinary degree at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences. A lover of mythology and history, she enjoys exploring both in her writing. Her debut novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, an instant New York Times bestseller, is an ode to Poland's folktales, while A Treachery of Swans transports readers to a world inspired by 17th century France.

A. B. Poranek

A. Bradley

Professor A. C. Grayling is Principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He has written and edited over thirty books on philosophy, history, science and current affairs. For several years he wrote columns for the Guardian newspaper and The Times and was the chairman of the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

A. C. Grayling

A.D. Miller is the author of Snowdrops, The Earl of Petticoat Lane and The Faithful Couple. Snowdrops was a bestseller and was shortlisted for many prizes including the Man Booker and the CWA Gold Dagger. It was translated into 25 languages. As Moscow Correspondent of The Economist A.D. Miller has travelled across the former Soviet Union and covered the Orange Revolution in Ukraine; he is now the magazine’s Culture Editor based in London. 
 
admillerbooks.com

A. D. Miller

A. E. Ellis

A. E. W. Mason

A. Humphreys

A. Igoni Barrett was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, in 1979 and lives in Lagos. He is a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short story collection, Love is Power, or Something Like That, was published in 2013. In 2014 he was named on the Africa39 list of sub-Saharan African writers under 40. Blackass is his first novel.

A. Igoni Barrett

The short life of A.J.A. Symons (1900-41) was described by his biographer as an intricate and largely harmless confidence trick. His many interests included the collection of musical boxes and rare books as well as the study and practice of forgery; they left him time to edit an anthology of Edwardian verse and compose studies of H.M. Stanley and other notable figures. He is remembered for The Quest for Corvo, one of the most remarkable biographies ever written, and for co-founding the Wine and Food Society.

A. J. A. Symons

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Odd Arne Westad

If there are lessons from history, now is the time when we need to heed them, so that we do not end up in another Great Power war because of the fatal combinations of jingoism, fear, fatalism, and sheer stupidity that set off the first major war of the 20th century. 
 
The great majority of people alive today have come of age in a world of remarkable stability, presided over by either one or two superpowers. This is not to say the world has been peaceful; but it has to an extent been predictable. As an increasing number of Great Powers now jostle for regional supremacy our world has become more fragile, unpredictable – and combustible. 
 
To understand the threats that face us in this complex new terrain, we must look to the lessons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a time when Great Powers clashed and sought regional dominance, when nationalism and populism were on the rise, and many felt that globalization had failed them: a time, in other words, that carries eerie parallels with our own.

The Coming Storm

Power, Conflict and Warnings from History

Jane Rogoyska

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. 
 
In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich. In 1945, the Lutetia was requisitioned once more, this time transformed into a reception centre for deportees returning from concentration camps. 
 
Hotel Exile is about what happens on the edges of a war. At its heart are three groups of people connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology which dictates the course of their lives. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Jane Rogoyska’s extraordinary new book offers us a vision of individual human beings desperately trying to find a path through some of the twentieth century’s most devastating events.

Hotel Exile

Paris in the Shadow of War

Fay Bound-Alberti

What’s in a face? 
 
The face is the only part of the body where all the senses come together and, over the course of human history, has come to represent who we are as individuals. We unlock our phones with facial recognition; we have our faces stamped in our passports; and although our faces may change over the course of our lives – whether through ageing, accident, illness or lifestyle – they remain a foundational marker of identity. 
 
In The Face, cultural historian Fay Bound-Alberti explores the ways humans have interpreted faces and how they have shaped our ideas of morality, social hierarchy, psychology and so much more, revealing some of the biases that inform our everyday lives. She charts how new technologies and cultural innovations have transformed our conception of selfhood over time – from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century developments, such as digital avatars and face transplants. 
 
Bringing together a wealth of fascinating research, interviews and illuminating personal narratives, Bound-Alberti probes beneath the surface to ask what our faces really say about us.

The Face

A Cultural History

Sergio Luzzatto

In nineteenth-century France, the first fascist was born. Decades before Mussolini, the Marquis de Morès became the first populist and openly antisemitic leader in the Western world. A key figure behind the Dreyfus affair, he tore France apart with his inflammatory media rhetoric and violent stunts. Who was this man, who both anticipated and propelled the fascist politics that erupted in the twentieth century? 
 
Drawing on a wealth of original sources, award-winning historian Sergio Luzzatto explores the forgotten story of a father of fascism. He shows how, after losing aristocratic status in modern, democratic France, Morès led an adventurous life cattle ranching on the American frontier and building a railway in the jungles of Indochina – yet found all his schemes dogged by failure. He follows in Morès’s footsteps, as, blaming supposed Jewish machinations for his defeats, he returned to France and soon controlled a large, violent militia of disgruntled workers. Even when his rapid political rise was torpedoed by a highly publicized financial scandal, his shadow continued to loom. In Vichy France, as Jewish people were being deported to Auschwitz, officials would gather to celebrate Morès’s memory. Vivid and unsettling, The First Fascist is an engrossing exploration of the roots of our present discontent.

The First Fascist

The Life and Legacy of the Marquis de Morès

Daniel Neep

Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was then brutally ruled by France. This French ‘mandate’ carved out new borders with equally provisional neighbours in a process that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war. 
 
Syria's subsequent history has been a series of attempts to make sense of its borders, including a failed attempt in the late 1950s to unite with Egypt and several humiliations at the hands of Israel's armed forces. The civil war that broke out in 2011 plunged Syria into a nightmarish series of disasters, including the terrible years of Islamic State, ultimately resulting in the reimposition of Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, which came to an end in 2024. 
 
Daniel Neep’s remarkable book creates a gripping, intelligent narrative of how Syrians have lived through these events, never losing sight either of the fates of ordinary people or of Syria’s rich, complex and diverse society, unwillingly or willingly brought together in such a highly contested space.

A History of Modern Syria

Mark B. Smith

With Stalin's death, the Soviet Union remained a repressive, harsh and belligerent place. Yet it also became one that was more predictable for its citizens, and made a genuine attempt to create the egalitarian, progressive country the Russian Revolution had once promised. That this attempt would fail was not clear until the 1980s. 
 
Mark B. Smith's original and evocative book recreates the day-to-day life of this vast state, the largest ever to exist. What was life like in a country which made such absolute claims for the future, which claimed to be on its way to creating a people's utopia and which, like the USA, owned enough atomic weapons to end human life on Earth? 
 
Exit Stalin is filled with extraordinary stories about those who lived in the USSR and the distinctive and functioning civilization that they built. Many of them embraced its values, understood its goals and could not imagine life outside such a vastly ambitious and progressive project. The shortages, coercion and incompetence that underlay the USSR - and which by the late 1980s would doom it - have to be understood alongside the acceptance it always had from many of its citizens. And this in turn is a crucial issue for understanding Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century.

Exit Stalin

The Soviet Union as a Civilization, 1953-1991

James McDougall

From its birth in seventh-century Arabia, Islam has been a faith on the move. In Worlds of Islam, James McDougall explores its origins and transformations from Late Antiquity to the digital age. 
 
Over the span of a thousand years, armies, missionaries, and merchants carried it to the edges of Europe, the coasts of Southeast Asia, and the remote interior of China. By the nineteenth century, Islam encompassed a world of great diversity, from Muslim-ruled empires to nations where Muslims lived out their faith among many others. In the twentieth century, while monarchs in the Gulf asserted dynastic privilege and fundamentalists in Egypt and Pakistan preached social morality, revolutionaries from Algeria to Indonesia fought for national self-determination, and activists in North America and Europe campaigned for civil liberties and social justice. 
 
As empires fell and new superpowers rose, Muslims proved to be as adaptable and dynamic as modernity itself. Sweeping and authoritative, Worlds of Islam narrates the epic story of how Muslims emerged as a community, built empires, traversed the globe, came to number in the billions, and became modern.

Worlds of Islam

A Global History

Sven Beckert

No other phenomenon has shaped human history as decisively as capitalism. It structures how we live and work, how we think about ourselves and others, how we organise our politics. Sven Beckert situates the story of capitalism within the largest conceivable geographical and historical framework in this fascinating new book. 
 
Capitalism, argues Beckert, was born global. Emerging from merchant communities across Asia, Africa and Europe, capitalism’s radical recasting of economic life rooted itself only gradually. Then it burst onto the world scene, as European states and merchants built a powerful alliance that would propel them across the oceans. This epic drama corresponded at no point to an idealised dream of free markets. All along, state-backed institutions and imperial expansions shaped its dynamics. 
 
Capitalism decentres the European perspective, highlighting agency, resistance, innovation and ruthless coercion around the world through to the present with the rise of Asian economies, particularly China. Sven Beckert doesn’t merely add up capitalism’s debits and credits in this monumental book, but allows us to think afresh about the past to help us re-imagine the future.

Capitalism

Paul Gillingham

It begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucatán. Only ten years later, an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels seized the island city of Tenochtitlán, seat of one of the world’s great empires. It would become Mexico City, and marked the collision of two radically different worlds. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate and the most sophisticated city they had ever seen. For Mexicans the encounter brought horses, wheels, but also lethal germs – sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that would kill a majority of the indigenous population. 
 
Paul Gillingham’s superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures. He shows how the industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world, making it the centre of the first truly global economy. We then see how independence from Spain went on to bring calamitous wars with the United States and France. One of the world’s great social revolutions then remade Mexico and ushered in a one-party state that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century – before the country collapsed into violence in the drug wars of the 2000s. 
 
Mexico: A History uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often Mexico has been one of the world’s great innovators; a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.

Mexico: A History

Mark Mazower

For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s political Right, the province of blood-and-soil ethno-nativists who built on Christendom’s long-standing suspicion of its Jewish population and infused it with racist pseudo-science. Such threats culminated in the nightmare of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. 
 
The landscape is very different now, as Mark Mazower argues in this piercingly brilliant book. More than four-fifths of the world’s Jews now live in Israel and the United States, with the former’s military dominance of its region guaranteed by the latter while the loudest voices decrying antisemitism see it coming from the Left not the Right. 
 
Mazower clearly and carefully shows us how we got here, seeking to illuminate rather than blame. Very few words have the punch of ‘antisemitism’ and yet no term is more liable to be misunderstood in ways affecting free speech and foreign policy alike. On Antisemitism is a vitally important attempt to draw a line that must be drawn.

On Antisemitism

A Word in History

Catherine Clarke

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. 
 
These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses. Their creators, witnesses to events from the Great Fire of London to the Miners’ Strike, range from the famous to the forgotten, yet each invites us into an immersive encounter with their own time. 
 
A History of England in 25 Poems is a portal to the past; a constant companion, filled with vivid voices and surprising stories alongside familiar landmarks, and language that speaks in new ways on each reading. Catherine Clarke’s knowledge and passion take us inside the words and the moments they capture, with thoughtful insights, humour and new perspectives on how the nation has dreamed itself into existence – and who gets to tell England’s story.

A History of England in 25 Poems

Christopher Clark

Now part of the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian and German port of Königsberg has always been a somewhat sleepy place, doomed to be famous for having once been the residence of Immanuel Kant. But in the late 1830s, just for a short while, it became famous for all the wrong reasons.Christopher Clark’s brilliant new book is the result of many years of fascination with this strange case. Sensational accusations were bandied about, implying that beneath the town’s somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. For the Prussian authorities this was just the sort of moral collapse they feared most. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which had unsettled a generation, every lapse could be seen as the harbinger of new storms.A Scandal in Königsberg beautifully brings to life a time and a place that we would now situate in the tranquil ‘Biedermeier’ years between the seismic upheavals of the 1810s and 1840s. But there is a timeless quality to this small vortex of turbulence, in which spiritual hunger, vanity, professional rivalry, sexual incontinence, naivety and sheer human waywardness threatened to tear a city apart.

A Scandal in Königsberg

Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Who owns language? In Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas, Ngugi wa Thiong’o presents a series of essays that build on his vast wealth of work on language and its constructive role in national culture, history, and identity. Intricate, nuanced and accessible, it reaffirms the revolutionary power of African languages to fight back against both the psychic and material impacts of colonialism, past and present.With immense relevance to our present moment, Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas is a brilliant distillation of the enduring themes of Ngugi’s work and a vital addition to the library of one of the world’s greatest and most provocative writers.

Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas

Justin Marozzi

Slavery in the Islamic world has a long, complex and controversial history. Captives and Companions is a brilliant synthesis of history and contemporary reportage, which brings to life the voices of the enslaved in stories of eighth-century concubines and ninth-century revolts, thirteenth-century slave soldiers who established dynastic rule over Egypt, Syria and Iraq, eighteenth-century corsairs and twentieth century 
pearl divers in the Gulf. It also includes first-hand accounts of this legacy in the twenty-first century, including the depredations of Daesh and continuing hereditary slavery in Mali and Mauritania. 
 
Justin Marozzi traces the extraordinary variety of enslavement in the Islamic world, which ranged from agricultural labour and domestic toil to elite concubinage, guardianship of sacred spaces, political leadership and even military command. He shows how Africa bore the brunt of the demand for slave labour, fuelled throughout the nineteenth century by expanding global markets and commodity chains. Slavers plied African coasts, traders raided inland for human cargo, and millions were marched across the Sahara into captivity. Meanwhile, North African corsairs turned the Mediterranean into a slave-raiding ‘free-for-all’ between Muslims, Christians and Jews. 
 
Taking the reader on an extraordinary historical journey from Baghdad to Bamako, Tripoli to Timbuktu, Istanbul to the Black Sea, this is the riveting human drama of those caught up in one of history’s most remarkable overlooked stories.

Captives and Companions

A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World

Toby Green

In 1665 Crispina Peres, the most powerful trader in the West African slave trafficking port of Cacheu, was arrested by the Inquisition. Her enemies had conspired to denounce her for taking treatments prescribed by Senegambian healers: the djabakós. But who was Peres? And why was the Portuguese Inquisition so concerned with policing the faith of a West African woman in today’s Guinea-Bissau? 
 
In The Heretic of Cacheu Toby Green takes us to the heart of this conundrum, but also into the atmosphere of a very distant time and place. We learn how people in seventeenth-century Cacheu built their houses, what they wore, how they worshipped – and also the work they did, how they had fun, and how they healed themselves from illness. 
 
Through this story, the haunting realities of the growing slave trade and the rise of European empires emerge in shocking detail. By the 1650s, the relationship between Europe, West Africa, and the Americas was already an old one, with slaving entrepots, colonies, and military bases interweaving over many generations. But Cacheu also challenged the dynamic. It was globally connected to places ranging from China and India to Brazil and Colombia, and women like Crispina Peres ran the town and challenged the patriarchy of empire. 
 
For the first time, through the surviving documents recording Peres’s case, we can see what this world was really like. The Heretic of Cacheu is an extraordinary act of historical recovery. It is the story of a seventeenth-century West African woman, but also of the shifting, sophisticated world in which she lived – its beliefs, values and people.

The Heretic of Cacheu

Struggles over Life in a Seventeenth-Century West African Port

Frank Close

Henry Becquerel’s accidental discovery, in Paris in 1896, of a faint smudge on a photographic plate sparked a chain of discoveries which would unleash the atomic age. 
 
Destroyer of Worlds is the story of how pursuit of this hidden source of nuclear power, which began innocently and collaboratively, was overwhelmed by the politics of the 1930s, and following devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened the way to a still more terrible possibility: a thermonuclear bomb, the so-called “backyard weapon”, that could destroy all life on earth – from anywhere. 
 
The story spans decades and continents, moving from Becquerel to Ernest Rutherford, the Cambridge-based, New Zealand scientist who first split the atom, expands to include Enrico Fermi in Rome, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner in Berlin and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, leading to the appearance of Robert Oppenheimer before climaxing with increasingly horrifying developments in the USA and USSR. The roles of three remarkable women – Lise Meitner, Ida Noddack and Irene Curie – are re-evaluated, and there are new insights into the work of Ettore Majorana, Fermi’s mercurial but brilliant assistant, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938, possibly after foreseeing the explosive power of nuclear energy. Above all, this is a story of how knowledge is often advanced by personal convictions and relationships, an indeed by chance, in a remarkable way.

Destroyer of Worlds

The Deep History of the Nuclear Age: 1895-1965

Jeremy Atherton Lin

A Book of the Year for The New Yorker and Electric Lit 
 
It’s 1996, and Jeremy, a young American, has met the British boy of his dreams — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion shows, and East Village hotel rooms; eventually, finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in San Francisco. 
 
What emerges is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. Deep House moves through the couple’s various domiciles while unlocking doors to a lineage of outsiders who came before them: hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subvert the system and activists who go all the way to the Supreme Court to fight for their freedoms. Combining cultural history with radically intimate memoir, Deep House is at once a romp through the queer archives and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.

Deep House

The Gayest Love Story Ever Told

Sadiah Qureshi

Anyone alive today is among a tiny fraction of the once living: over 90% of species that ever existed are now extinct. How did we come to think of ourselves as survivors in a world where species can vanish forever, or as capable of pushing our planet to the verge of a sixth mass extinction? 
 
Extinction, Sadiah Qureshi shows us, is a surprisingly modern concept – and a phenomenon that’s not as natural as we might think. In Europe until the late eighteenth century, species were considered perfect and unchanging creations of God. Then in the age of revolutions, scientists gathered enough fossil evidence to determine that mammoth bones, for example, were not just large elephants but a lost species that once roamed the Earth alongside ancient humans. Extinction went from being regarded as theologically dangerous to pervasive, and even inevitable. 
 
Yet Vanished shows us that extinction is more than a scientific idea; it’s a political choice that has led to devasting consequences. Europeans and Americans quickly used the notion that extinction was a natural process to justify persecution and genocide, predicting that nations from Newfoundland’s Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians were doomed to die out from imperial expansion. 
 
Exploring the tangled and unnatural histories of extinction and empire, Vanished weaves together pioneering original research and breath-taking storytelling to show us extinction is both an evolutionary process and a human act: one which illuminates our past, and may alter our future.

Vanished

An Unnatural History of Extinction

John Cassidy

At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence. 
 
John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams's paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It looks at familiar figures – Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi – from a fresh perspective, but also focuses on many less familiar, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labour union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; and J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics. 
 
Blending biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.

Capitalism and Its Critics

A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World

Edward White

For more than forty years, Diana, Princess of Wales, has been mythologized to the most extraordinary degree. Adored and lionized by some, ridiculed and traduced by others, Diana has always commanded a cultural presence unmatched by any other member of the royal family. 
 
In Dianaworld, Edward White offers both a portrait of the princess and a group portrait of those who existed in her orbit—from her royal in-laws, her servants, and the dilapidated ranks of the British aristocracy from which she rose, to drag performers, artists, Britain’s ethnic minorities, and the Gen Z superfans who maintain her status as a cultural icon. 
 
Drawing on a wide array of sources and perspectives, many never used in books about Diana or the royal family, White vividly recreates the world Diana lived in, explores the growth of her global reputation, and illuminates her lasting impact on the world she left behind.

Dianaworld

An Obsession

Jack Ashby

In Nature's Memory, zoologist Jack Ashby shares hidden stories behind the world’s iconic natural history museums, from enormous mounted whale skeletons to cabinets of impossibly tiny insects. 
 
Look closely and all is not as it seems: these museums are not as natural, Ashby shows us, as we might think. Mammals dominate the displays, for example, even though they make up less than 1 percent of species; there are many more male specimens than females; and often a museum’s most popular draw – the dinosaur skeletons – are not actually real. Over 99 percent of museum collections are held in immense, unseen storehouses. And it’s becoming clear that these institutions have not been as honest about their complex histories as they should be. Yet natural history museums are also the only museums that can save the world – it is just starting to be understood that their vast collections are indispensable resources in the fight against biodiversity loss and climate catastrophe. 
 
Weaving together fresh historical research with surprising insights, Nature's Memory is a love letter to the joys, eccentricities and planet-saving potential of the world's best-loved museums.

Nature's Memory

Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums

Quinn Slobodian

After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated – and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek’s disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote.In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of ‘competition’ ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neoconfederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right.Hayek’s Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.

Hayek's Bastards

The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right

Owen Hatherley

In the 1930s, tens of thousands of central Europeans sought sanctuary from fascism in Britain. While the rainy, seemingly quaint island they discovered on arrival was a far cry from the dynamism of Weimar Berlin or Red Vienna, it was safe, and it became home. Yet the émigrés had not arrived alone: they brought with them new and radical ideas, and as they began to rebuild their lives and livelihoods, they transformed the face of Britain forever.Drawing on an immense cast of artists and intellectuals, including celebrated figures like Erno Goldfinger, forgotten luminaries like Ruth Glass, and a host of larger-than-life visionaries and charlatans, the historian Owen Hatherley argues that in the resulting clash between European modernism and British moderation, our imaginations were fundamentally realigned and remade for the better. In casting what Bertolt Brecht called, in a new German word, a Verfremdungseffekt, an ‘alienation effect’, on Britain, the aliens made us all a little bit alien too.Provocative, entertaining and meticulously researched, The Alienation Effect opens our eyes to the influence of the émigrés all around us – many of our most quintessentially British icons are the product of this culture clash – and entreats us to remember and renew our proud national tradition of asylum.

The Alienation Effect

How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century

Fara Dabhoiwala

‘Free Speech!’ is a clarion call all over the world, yet what it means today is more contested than ever. Many cultures regard it as dangerous: in China, India, and across the Islamic world, unorthodox views about politics, sex, and religion are repressed and people are often punished for expressing them. Even in the western world, where it is held up as a core value, there is widespread discord and disagreement about what freedom of expression means. Amidst perennial imbalances of power, continually evolving cultural taboos, dramatic new technologies and a fast-changing global media landscape, where free speech comes from – and how we might think about it – are critical questions. 
 
Through the lens of history, What Is Free Speech? shows us that freedom of speech is not an absolute from which societies and regimes have drifted or dissented at different times, but something more complicated and interesting. 
 
Our modern conceptions of press and speech liberty, Dabhoiwala shows, were invented in Britain around 1700. The real history of freedom of expression is a story of countless fascinating men and women whose lives have shaped its principles and practices over the past 300 years – slaves and imperialists, poets and philosophers, plutocrats and revolutionaries. Ranging across Europe, North America and South Asia, and not neglecting other parts of the world, Dabhoiwala rejects celebratory platitudes about the past and present of free expression. Instead, his book explains how to think more deeply about free speech as a global as well as a local question — by tracing how we got into our current predicaments, showing that history complicates our contemporary presumptions, and suggesting fresh possibilities for the future.

What Is Free Speech?

The History of a Dangerous Idea

Manu S Pillai

**A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025 ** 
 
'A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India's most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians' William Dalrymple 
 
When European missionaries arrived in India in the sixteenth century, they entered a world both fascinating and bewildering. Hinduism, as they saw it, was a pagan mess: a worship of devils and monsters by a people who burned women alive, performed outlandish rites and fed children to crocodiles. But it quickly became clear that Hindu ‘idolatry’ was far more layered and complex than European stereotypes allowed, surprisingly even sharing certain impulses with Christianity. 
 
Nonetheless, missionaries became a threatening force as European power grew in India. Western ways of thinking gained further ascendancy during the British Raj: while interest in Hindu thought influenced Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire in Europe, Orientalism and colonial rule pressed Hindus to reimagine their religion. In fact, in resisting foreign authority, they often adopted the missionaries’ own tools and strategies. It is this encounter, Manu S. Pillai argues, that has given Hinduism its present shape, also contributing to the birth of an aggressive Hindu nationalism. 
 
Gods, Guns and Missionaries surveys these remarkable dynamics with an arresting cast of characters – maharajahs, poets, gun-wielding revolutionaries, politicians, polemicists, philosophers and clergymen. Lucid, ambitious, and provocative, it is at once a political history, an examination of the mutual impact of Hindu culture and Christianity upon each other, and a study of the forces that have prepared the ground for politics in India today. Turning away from simplistic ideas on religious evolution and European imperialism, the past as it appears here is more complicated – and infinitely richer – than previous narratives allow.

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

N A M Rodger

At the end of the French and Napoleonic wars, British sea-power was at its apogee. But by 1840, as one contemporary commentator put it, the Admiralty was full of ‘intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’. How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the course of the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, the culmination of one of the most admired British historical works in recent decades. 
 
All the great actions are here, from Navarino in 1827 (won by a daringly disobedient Admiral Codrington) to Jutland, D-Day, the Battle of the Atlantic and the battles in the Pacific in 1944/45 in concert with the US Navy. The development and strategic significance of submarine and naval air forces is superbly described, as are the rapid evolution of ships (from classic Nelsonic type, to hybrid steam/sail ships, then armour-clad and the fully armoured Dreadnoughts and beyond) and weapons. As in its predecessors, the social history of officers and men – and now also women – has a prominent place. 
 
Rodger sets all this in the essential context of politics and geo-strategy. The character and importance of leading admirals – Beatty, Fisher, Cunningham – is assessed, together with the roles of other less famous but no less consequential figures. The book is based on a lifetime’s learning, and refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses. Naval specialists will find much that is new, and will be invigorated by the originality of Rodger’s judgements; but everyone who is interested in the one of the central threads in British history will find it rewarding.

The Price of Victory

A Naval History of Britain: 1815 – 1945

Paul McCartney

In 2020, an extraordinary trove of nearly a thousand photographs taken by Paul McCartney on a 35mm camera was re-discovered in his archive. They intimately record the months towards the end of 1963 and beginning of 1964 when Beatlemania erupted in the UK and, after the band's first visit to the USA, they became the most famous people on the planet. The photographs are McCartney's personal record of this explosive time, when he was, as he puts it, in the 'Eyes of the Storm'. 
 
1964: Eyes of the Storm presents 275 of McCartney's photographs from the six cities of these intense, legendary months - Liverpool, London, Paris, New York, Washington, D.C. and Miami - and many never-before-seen portraits of John, George and Ringo. In his Foreword and Introductions to these city portfolios, McCartney remembers 'what else can you call it - pandemonium' and conveys his impressions of Britain and America in 1964 - the moment when the culture changed and the Sixties really began.

1964: Eyes of the Storm

Simon Jenkins

Simon Jenkins has travelled the length and breadth of England to select his thousand best churches. Organised by county, each church is described - often with delightful asides - and given a star-rating from one to five. All of the county sections are prefaced by a map locating each church, and lavishly illustrated with colour photos from the Country Life archive. Jenkins contends that these churches house a gallery of vernacular art without equal in the world. Here, he brings that museum to public attention.

England's Thousand Best Churches

Richard Overy

Anxiety and Longing

The Pursuit of Progress in Britain After 1945

David Zilber

Rotten

An Edible History of Human/Microbe Coevolution

The year is 1Q84. This is the real world, there is no doubt about that. But in this world, there are two moons in the sky. Discover the 1Q84 Trilogy by Haruki Murakami.

1Q84

365 Days of Art

A BBC Christmas

A Black Book Thriller

A Box Full of Murders

A Cal Leandros Novel

A Christmas Mystery

The intelligent and capable police commissioner Guido Brunetti confronts crime in and around his home town of Venice.

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery

A DC Smith / Kings Lake Investigation Series

A Daisy Story

Chronicling the lives of over three hundred characters, unrivalled for its scope and humour, this is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.

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