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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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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

Simon Morrison

An erudite and entertaining history of Moscow, a city whose rich past offers crucial insight into contemporary global politics 
 
Moscow stands at the centre of a nation comprising eleven percent of the globe’s landmass, eleven time zones, and nearly one hundred and fifty million people, some thirteen million of whom live in the capital. In A Kingdom and a Village, acclaimed historian Simon Morrison offers a vividly rendered history of Russia’s heart and soul, tracing its transformation from a ‘big village’ – the demeaning nickname the St. Petersburg nobility gave to its provincial neighbour – into a spectacular metropolis of vast geopolitical import. 
 
That arc is the stuff of dramatic, violent, stranger-than-fiction historical narrative: the last century alone has featured invasions and costly battles, the destruction (and reconstruction) of sacred cultural and religious landmarks, and the collapse of the Soviet republic – not to mention the rise of an authoritarian leader who is a keen student of Russian history. Morrison reaches back to the city’s founding as a fortress on a river nearly a millennium ago. In the centuries that followed, any number of external forces – from Tatar Mongols and Swedes to Napoleon and Hitler – set their sights on Moscow, bolstering its self-conception as both a glittering prize and a site of perpetual defence and resurrection. 
 
Drawing on a rich array of archival materials, Morrison shows us that to understand Moscow is not only to unlock the spellbinding mysteries of Russia’s past, but also to grasp the grim logic of its present. 
 
A Kingdom and a Village is a magisterial biography of a place – and an essential guide to a people and a nation.

A Kingdom and a Village

A One-Thousand-Year History of Moscow

Simukai Chigudu

In my home country, they call me a ‘bornfree’. 
 
Chasing Freedom is the story of the inheritance of violence, of struggle, of African liberation. It is guided by one central question: what does it mean to be truly free? 
 
As a member of the first generation born after the end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe, Simukai Chigudu had heard stories about his grandfather’s murder by the Rhodesian regime, and of how his father was imprisoned and tortured as a student activist before joining the bloody war of independence as a guerrilla soldier. 
 
Yet, despite his country’s hard-won freedom, Chigudu’s early life was steeped in British tradition. He’d sung English folk songs, read Shakespeare, played cricket. 
 
When Zimbabwe convulsed from political turmoil and economic collapse, Chigudu left his home to attend a Catholic boarding school in Lancashire. What followed was a culture shock that unravelled his understanding of the world, his family and himself. 
 
Simukai Chigudu elegantly weaves together his own story with Zimbabwe’s history, from a young Cecil Rhodes on the diamond trail to the making of Rhodesia through plunder and dispossession, from his parents’ meeting in Idi Amin’s Uganda to his family’s fight to free Zimbabwe, and from the undoing of Robert Mugabe to the Rhodes Must Fall movement in Oxford, of which he was a founding member. 
 
Chasing Freedom traces the tangled threads of personal and political history to give a new perspective on race, class, identity and the heavy legacy of colonialism. It is an intimate reckoning with the ghosts of the past that haunt our politics and our psyches in ways we cannot always see.

Chasing Freedom

Coming of Age at the End of Empire

Paul O'Keeffe

A vivid and visceral portrayal of the most famous naval battle in history, focusing on the human cost of war, by a brilliant military historian 
 
At or about 1.15 in the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was struck by a 22-gramme, 15-millimetre French musket round fired down from the mizzen top of the Redoutable, a distance of some 70 feet to HMS Victory’s quarter deck. It nicked the edge of his epaulette, and passed diagonally down, through the material of his coat and into the left shoulder, fracturing the upper part of the scapula or shoulder blade, then the second and third rib. It pierced the left lung, dividing a branch of the pulmonary artery, and emerged to sever the spine, splintering the sixth and seventh vertebrae above and below as it crashed between. The soft lead ball – distorted by collisions with bone – ended its flight embedded in muscle two inches below the right scapula. 
 
In this fresh and visceral retelling of the battle of Trafalgar, Paul O’Keeffe traces the course of events both prior and subsequent to that fatal shot: from about 6.30 in the morning, as the British ships began their slow approach towards the combined French and Spanish fleet, until the cessation of firing that followed the apocalyptic destruction of the French 74-gun Achille at 5.45 in the afternoon. 
 
But we also learn about the battle’s dramatic aftermath: how a violent storm that raged for eight days destroyed the surviving French and Spanish ships and drowned more sailors than had been killed during battle; how news of victory travelled and was celebrated in London; how Nelson’s body was brought home and given a spectacular funeral. 
 
Paying meticulous attention to the peripheral – and little explored – details, O’Keeffe gives us a front-row view of events; and in his unflinching portrayal of the brutal reality of naval warfare, he tells the story of the human cost of war. Gripping and immersive, this is a unique account of Trafalgar for a new generation of readers.

Trafalgar

Tim Wu

Today’s tech platforms are some of history's most advanced tools for extracting as much as possible – data, attention, profit-margins – from everyone else. As they become essential, we are at risk of building an economy that is perpetually unfair for much of humanity. 
 
Places and spaces where people can exchange information and goods have been at the heart of every economy and every civilization in history, but today’s global platforms - as provided by Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta and others - are different: instead of providing value they extract it, creating vast disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have-nots. For the first time in history, we have the ability to create sustainable prosperity for all, but currently that wealth is concentrated in a tiny number of hands. It isn't abundance that's the problem; it is distribution. 
 
In this brilliantly engaging, frequently surprising account, Tim Wu, one of the world’s foremost experts on anti-monopoly law, draws on fascinating case studies in the history of technology's explosive rise to demonstrate emphatically that breaking monopolies will ultimately unleash creativity and growth - and reduce the vast inequality that inevitably leads to social upheaval and political chaos. Wu also sets out an alternative blueprint that preserves the economic flourishing that platforms catalyze, allowing tech platforms to play a major role in creating and sustaining an economic model of prosperity not just for the few but for the many.

The Age of Extraction

How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

Stephen Greenblatt

Poor boy. Dark star. Spy. Transgressor. Genius. 
 
From one of the greatest writers on the Elizabethan era, Dark Renaissance is the thrilling and subversive life story of Christopher Marlowe – Shakespeare’s inspiration and rival, who helped to bring England out of the cultural darkness and into the light. 
 
In brutally repressive Elizabethan England, artists are frightened; foreigners are suspect; popular entertainment largely consists of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world comes an ambitious cobbler’s son from Canterbury with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry – which to him is a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous scepticism. 
 
What Christopher Marlowe finds on the other side of that door, and what he does with it, brings about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of many others, including his youthful collaborator William Shakespeare. By the time of his murder in a Deptford tavern in 1593, the 29-year-old Marlowe will be the most celebrated dramatist of his time. 
 
Stephen Greenblatt grippingly reconstructs the involvement with the queen’s spy service that shaped Marlowe’s brief, troubling life and gave us his masterpieces about power and its costs. And he explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, gave birth to the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world – involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still. 
 
Dark Renaissance is a scintillating life of a writer whose blazing talent catapulted England from cultural backwater to crucible of creativity.

Dark Renaissance

The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe

James Fox

Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our identities, built our communities and shaped our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that once governed every aspect of life on these shores. 
 
Travelling the length of Britain, from the Scilly Isles to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox seeks out the country’s last remaining master craftspeople. Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bell-founders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life — one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could shape our future. 
 
For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, enriching even the most modest things. And in this increasingly digital age, it is perhaps more valuable than ever. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

Craftland

A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

Liam Shaw

Antibiotics: one of humanity’s greatest achievements – but invented by microbes. 
 
An epic narrative of discovery and innovation – but also of extraction and exploitation. 
 
This is the spellbinding story of how we have burned through the fossil fuels of medicine. 
 
Since their advent, antibiotics have saved millions of lives, marking one of the greatest medical advances in our history. Dangerous Miracle weaves together the grand arc of the evolution of antibiotics over millions of years with a history of the past century: first as we mined the earth for naturally occurring antibiotic molecules, then as we learned to synthesise our own. 
 
But like fossil fuels, antibiotics are a finite resource which we’ve regarded as a cheap, everlasting fuel. They are unlike other drugs: every time we use them we increase the possibility of antibiotic resistance emerging, risking their future effectiveness. If we want antibiotics to have a future, we need to prepare to adapt. And fast. 
 
Rich with pioneering characters, great breakthroughs and grave risks, Dangerous Miracle is a grand drama of science, history and politics. It is a revelatory account of the miraculous history and uncertain future of antibiotics from a gifted writer.

Dangerous Miracle

A natural history of antibiotics – and how we burned through them

Madeline Potter

The Roma is a profoundly personal portrait of a people and their on-going journey, shedding new light on their history and what it means to be Romani in Europe today. It is a history that is not widely known and understood, and that invisibility has created a space where fear and hostility continue to thrive. 
 
Full of fascinating stories and extraordinary individuals, The Roma is a powerful corrective to the stereotyping and prejudices still faced by Romani communities. We meet the Romani artist who chronicled her experiences of the Holocaust in Austria; the boxer who should have become Germany’s light-heavyweight champion only to have his win scratched from the record by the Nazis; and a eighteenth-century Romani woman in London who was accused of kidnapping a girl and sentenced to death only to be exonerated thanks to some detective work by an unconvinced judge. 
 
Throughout, Madeline Potter weaves in her travels though contemporary Romani Europe as well as strands of her own journey as a Romani woman in Romania and now in Britain. Deftly blending explorative history and portraits of a unique and vibrant culture with intimate accounts of racism, The Roma is a celebration of survival – of resilience and resistance in the face of prejudice and persecution.

The Roma

A Travelling History

Lanre Bakare

We Were There is about a Black Britain that for too long has been unknown and unexplored – the one that exists beyond London. 
 
From the late 1970s to the early 1990s Britain was in tumult: rocked by Margaret Thatcher’s radical economic policy, the rise of the National Front, widespread civil unrest. With anti-immigration policies in the political mainstream, Black lives were on the frontline of a racial reckoning. But it was also a time of unrivalled Black cultural creation, organising and resistance. This was the crucible in which modern Britain came into existence. 
 
We Were There brings into the spotlight for the first time extraordinary Black lives in once-rich cities now home to failing industries: the foundries of Birmingham, the docks of Liverpool and Cardiff, the mills of Bradford. We are in Wigan, Wolverhampton, Manchester and the green expanse of the British countryside. We meet feminists and Rastafarians, academics and rugby-league superstars; witness landmark campaigns and encounter radical artists and thinkers; tread dancefloors that hosted Northern Soul all-nighters and the birth of Acid House. 
 
London was only ever part of the picture – We Were There is about incorporating a vastly broader range of Black Britons into the fabric of our national story. 
 
Alive with energy and purpose, We Were There decisively expands our sense of who we are. Confronting, joyful and thrilling, this is a profoundly important new portrait of modern Britain.

We Were There

How Black culture, resistance and community shaped modern Britain

How Black culture and community shaped modern Britain

Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow helped to reveal to the West the true and staggering human cost of the Soviet regime in its deliberate starvation of millions of peasants and remains one of the most important works of Soviet history ever written. 
 
More deaths resulted from the actions described in this book than from the whole of the First World War. 
 
Epic in scope and rich in detail, The Harvest of Sorrow describes how millions of peasants in the USSR were dispossessed and deported as a result of the abolition of private property, and how millions in the newly established ‘collective’ farms of the Ukraine and other regions were then deliberately starved to death through impossibly high quotas, the removal of all other sources of food and their isolation from outside help. 
 
With the publication of this and his earlier book, The Great Terror, which revealed the truth about Stalin’s political purges, Robert Conquest revealed to the West the staggering human cost of the Soviet regime.

The Harvest of Sorrow

Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine

Jerry White

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert. 
 
London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. 
 
In Jerry White’s acclaimed history of London’s magnificent and boisterous rebirth we witness the astonishing drama of daily life in the midst of this burgeoning city.

London In The Eighteenth Century

A Great and Monstrous Thing

Stamped from the Beginning is a redefining history of anti-Black racist ideas that dramatically changes our understanding of the causes and extent of racist thinking itself. 
 
** Winner of the US National Book Award** 
 
Its deeply researched and fast-moving narrative chronicles the journey of racist ideas from fifteenth-century Europe to present-day America through the lives of five major intellectuals - Puritan minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, brilliant scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, and legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis - showing how these ideas were developed, disseminated and eventually enshrined in American society. 
 
Contrary to popular conception, it reveals that racist ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era, including anti-slavery and pro-civil rights advocates, who used their gifts and intelligence wittingly or otherwise to rationalize and justify existing racial disparities in everything from wealth to health. Seen in this piercing new light, racist ideas are shown to be the result, not the cause, of inequalities that stretch back over centuries, brought about ultimately through economic, political and cultural self-interest. 
 
Stamped from the Beginning offers compelling new answers to some of the most troubling questions of our time. In forcing us to reconsider our most basic assumptions about racism and also about ourselves, it leads us to a true understanding on which to build a real foundation for change. 
 
**INCLUDED IN BARACK OBAMA'S BLACK HISTORY MONTH READING LIST**

Stamped from the Beginning

The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. 
 
London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. 
 
In Jerry White's dazzling history we witness the city's unparalleled metamorphosis over the course of the century through the daily lives of its inhabitants. We see how Londoners worked, played, and adapted to the demands of the metropolis during this century of dizzying change. The result is a panorama teeming with life.

London In The Nineteenth Century

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'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

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

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 Keegan

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

Simon Schama

* '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

Gareth Harney

It was the Greeks that invented money as we know it, striking the first coins in the seventh century BC. Before long this innovative idea of a portable metallic store of wealth spread across the waves of the Mediterranean. But these coins were more than simple units of exchange; they quickly became artistic masterpieces crafted in gold and silver and endure today as some of the most important surviving examples of Ancient Greek art. 
 
More important, they advertised the power and virtues of each polis with patriotic fervour; for the empire of Greece was not a single entity but a rich mosaic of wholly distinct city-states spread across three continents. Yet for all their unique identities and rivalries, these states were bonded by their shared worship of a colourful gallery of gods, their devotion to art, literature and philosophy, and the courage and skill of their citizen-soldiers. 
 
In this thrilling numismatic adventure Gareth Harney introduces us to twelve fascinating coins that provide the perfect introduction to Ancient Greece. We witness the birth of democracy on a sacred hilltop overlooking the Acropolis, battle invading Persians in an existential war on land and at sea, take part in the bitter conflict between Athens and Sparta, and march alongside Alexander the Great as he carries Greek culture all the way to India.

Nomos

A History of Ancient Greece in Twelve Coins

Patricia Kingori

‘Original, fascinating and shocking’ BERNARDINE EVARISTO 
 
You may well know someone who has gone overseas and put their future in the hands of a stranger to pursue their dream of becoming a parent; you may even know someone who has resorted to the services of an exam mill or shadow scholar to get themselves through their finals. But do you know anything about the women who provide these services, let alone where they live? 
 
They call themselves the surrogates. 
 
Patricia Kingori, Professor at Oxford, uncovers a world where the parentally and academically desperate seek help, with few questions asked, from the entrepreneurial surrogates, who sacrifice their bodies and minds at the peak of their most productive years, to give birth to someone else’s baby and write someone else’s assignment. At its heart are Millicent and Rose, the brilliant, unforgettable and resourceful women who embody the pressures and precarity, humour and heartache, corruption and empty choices of these twin trades, on which so many in the Global North depend. 
 
The Surrogates is the first ever in-depth examination of the lives of African women entangled in these booming, multi-billion-dollar industries of biological and intellectual surrogacy. With unprecedented access, drawing on four years of on-the-ground research and interviews with 80 women, it confronts the inequalities and contradictions woven into the fabric of education, technology, globalization, and the pursuit of personal agency. Kingori also holds up a mirror to our own societies, engaging with the thorny issues of medical tourism, AI and offshoring labour, and illuminating the resilience of those largely unheard in the ongoing conversation about empowerment and choice.

The Surrogates

The Hidden Lives and Invisible Labour of the Women for Hire in Kenya

How the turmoil of revolution and war created the London we know today – the world’s first truly global city. 
 
The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars changed London beyond recognition, turning it into the capital of the world – the focal point of international finance and trade. Victory over France in 1815 ushered in the ‘British Century’: the next hundred years would be defined by Britain’s capitalist innovation and financial might, naval supremacy and imperial ambition. 
 
In this brilliant portrait of these pivotal years, Jerry White looks at how revolution and war on the Continent transformed the capital. While the manufacture of war materials brought wealth for some, high food prices led to bread riots. The war divided public opinion, with ultra-patriots clamouring for the defeat of ‘Bony’, while others sought to emulate the democratic reforms pioneered across the Channel. Crucially, the chaos and uncertainty on the Continent led to a mass flight of foreign bankers and merchants to London, which would help turn London into the world’s leading financial centre -- contemporaries called it ‘The Modern Rome’. 
 
Yet Birth of a Global City takes in the wider world too. Who was feeding London, in the British Isles and across the empire? How instrumental was Britain’s financial might in victory over France? What impact did the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 have on London, Britain and its empire? And how dangerous were the political ideas coming from the Continent? It was this turbulent period of war and political turmoil that created London as we know it today.

Birth of a Global City

London in a Revolutionary World, 1789-1815

William A. Pettigrew

Britannia’s Binding Thread

How the Slave Trade Shaped Britain

Ian Mortimer

This book tells the story of Mearsdon, the house where Ian Mortimer lives in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor. We very rarely have a continuous account of a particular place over a long stretch of history, but Mortimer has a documentary record of all the owners who lived there since the 1260s – although the origins of the building probably date back to the eleventh century. 
 
Blending the broadest national history and the most intimate local events with a description of changing daily life from the Norman Conquest to the present day, Mortimer acquaints us with the people who passed through the house – from its first known owner, John the Palmer, to the folklore collector Charlie Laycock, who turned the house into a museum in the early twentieth century, to Mortimer’s family living there today. And along the way he shows how national events – from the Black Death to the Prayerbook Rebellion, from the Civil Wars to the two world wars – affected a rural community in deepest Devon over a time span of 900 years. 
 
The result is fascinating social history like no other. Bringing to it the brilliant imagination and storytelling gifts that made his Time Traveller’s Guides such a huge success, Mortimer introduces us to lords and merchants, ale brewers and peasants, clergymen and murderers, to create a continuously evolving story. Seeing through its windows, we not only glimpse at the people who lived in the house over the ages; we also see through their eyes as they look out at the changing world around them.

Through the Windows of an Ordinary House: A History of England

Rachel Morley

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. 
 
Through their wall-paintings and monuments, their graffiti and plaques, carved beams and crypts, their jumble of furniture and oddities, Morley shows these buildings to be the living expression of centuries of communal history and folk culture, time capsules of wonder and connection. The stories they contain are both boisterous and tender, raucous and sublime, transporting us to the ancient and medieval past, to revolutions and wars, to lives both glorious and humble. 
 
Often the oldest and most significant building in a settlement, churches are where for centuries births have been celebrated, relationships consecrated and deaths memorialised, where the great and enduring mysteries have been contemplated, and where the ghosts of countless, unnamed, normal lives are to be found. As Rachel Morley shows, the concentration of human experience within their walls is so rich and so layered, that they offer as close an encounter with the past as it is possible to get.

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

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

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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