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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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Emily Hauser

THE INSTANT TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes readers on an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends and the real heroes of the epic poems, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . . . 
 
'Bold and intellectually thrilling . . . blending history and science, rigorous scholarship and dazzling feats of imagination.' TOM HOLLAND, historian and co-host of 'The Rest is History' podcast 
 
'Absolutely blew me away . . . rich, evocative and original work . . . this book is quite wonderful.' ELODIE HARPER, author of The Wolf Den 
 
'Offers a dazzling new way of thinking about the ancient world . . . a wonderful, beautifully written and important book.' DAN JONES, author of Henry V 
 
'A book the world has been waiting for . . . I loved it.' 
BETTANY HUGHES, author of The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World 
 
Contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men – and it's not only men's stories that deserve to be told. 
 
In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them. 
 
A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

Mythica

A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It

Emily Callaci

'The women of the world are serving notice. We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee and every smile. And if we don’t get what we want, we will simply refuse to work any longer!' 
 
Across the globe in the 1970s, a network of feminists distilled their struggles into a single demand: Wages for Housework! Today, it remains a provocative idea, and an unfulfilled promise. 
 
Here historian Emily Callaci tells the story of this campaign by exploring the lives and ideas of its key creators, tracing their wildly creative political vision over the past five decades: from the early 1970s, when Selma James, a working-class political organizer, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a scholar-activist, started laying the foundations of Wages for Housework in London and Italy; through philosopher Silvia Federici reframing the campaign in the context of New York City’s fiscal crisis; to Wilmette Brown, lesbian poet and anti-war activist, and Margaret Prescod, community organizer, who brought the insights of Black feminism to the movement. 
 
Drawing on new archival research and extensive interviews, Callaci takes us deep inside the heart of the movement as it reached across Europe, America, Africa and the Caribbean. For these women, the wage was more than a demand for money: it was a starting point for remaking the world as we know it, imagining potential futures under capitalism – and beyond. Then as now, Wages for Housework poses profound questions. What would it be like to live in a society that prioritizes care rather than production? How would this change our relationship with the natural world? And what would women do with their lives if they had more time?

Wages for Housework

The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise

Noam Chomsky

Nathan J. Robinson

The land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of ‘spreading democracy’ – except wreak havoc across the globe and establish a reckless foreign policy that serves the interest of few and has endangered all too many? 
 
In this timely book, Noam Chomsky writing with Nathan J. Robinson, vividly traces America’s pursuit of global domination – from Washington’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – offering an incisive critique of the self-serving myths that dominant elites in the United States continue to push. 
 
Thorough, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to the conclusions Noam Chomsky has come to after a lifetime of thought and activism.

The Myth of American Idealism

How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World

Erling Kagge

‘Extraordinary . . . an elegant travel account, a learned history and a psychological thriller wrapped in one’ ANNE APPLEBAUM 
 
‘Erling Kagge is a deeply thoughtful writer . . . The North Pole proves to be the perfect subject for him’ MICHAEL PALIN 
 
‘The book of a lifetime, from a rare writer-adventurer whose obsession and passion for his subject know no bounds’ ELIF SHAFAK 
 
‘A beautiful book’ ALAIN DE BOTTON 
 
Throughout recorded human time, few places on Earth have inspired as much fascination as the North Pole. This is an otherworldly place where the sun rises and stays aloft for six whole months before setting, plunging the expanse of ice and water into darkness for half a year. 
 
Foot-stepping alongside Erling Kagge, who ventured to the North Pole in the spring of 1990, we hear the story of the North Pole as never told before. From Herodotus who first wondered what the northernmost point of our planet might be like, to the intrepid early cartographers who mapped the world, and the legendary expeditions led by Fridtjof Nansen and Robert Peary – the first polar explorer global celebrities – who were in the grip of a dangerous obsession to get to the North Pole first. What emerges is a new history of the world, spanning thousands of years, as seen from the ‘silver-shining vacantness’ of the North Pole. 
 
Blending memories from Kagge’s own 1990 trip with this epic history, The North Pole is an adventure story, a book about enacting hidden human dreams, about difficult fathers and their difficult sons, and a psychological record of what it means to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the face of adversity. It is for anyone who’s gazed out at the horizon – and wondered what happens if you just keep walking. 
 
'As an explorer Erling Kagge is world class; as a writer he is equally gifted’ SIR RANULPH FIENNES

The North Pole

The History of an Obsession

Kenneth Roth

In three decades under the leadership of Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch conducted investigations in 100 countries to uncover abuses – and pressured offending governments to stop them. Roth has grappled with the worst of humanity, taken on the most ruthless oppressors of our time, and persuaded leaders from around the globe to stand up to their repressive counterparts. 
 
The son of a Jew who fled Nazi Germany just before the war began, Roth grew up knowing full well how inhumane governments could be. He has travelled the world to meet cruelty and injustice on its home turf: he arrived in Rwanda shortly after the genocide; scrutinized the impact of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait; investigated and condemned Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians. He directed efforts to curtail the Chinese government’s persecution of Uyghur Muslims, to bring Myanmar’s officials to justice after the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims, to halt Russian war crimes in Ukraine, even to rein in the U.S. government. Roth’s many innovations and strategies included the deployment of a concept as old as mankind – the powerful tool of ‘shaming’ – and here he illustrates its surprising effectiveness against evildoers. 
 
This is a story of wins, losses, and ongoing battles in the ceaseless fight for a more decent world.

Righting Wrongs

Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments

Sinclair McKay

Built by slave labour in the early years of the eighteenth century, Saint Petersburg was Peter the Great’s so-called ‘window on to Europe’, a city that would outdo all of Europe in its splendour. But a window works both ways, and as bestselling historian Sinclair McKay writes, St Petersburg has always been a city that has drawn Westerners who wanted to see into Russia. It is also a city where much has happened. It was St Petersburg until 1917, Petrograd after the revolution, Leningrad after Lenin’s death in 1924, and St Petersburg once again from 1991. 
 
This biography of a city stretches from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin, who was born and made in St Petersburg. The story centres the ‘900 days and nights’ of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–44. Unlike Paris or Prague, the Nazis weren’t trying to take over, they wanted to wipe it off the map. According to some, this siege of 1.5 million people – including Putin’s mother – was an attempted genocide. Based on first-hand and many unpublished accounts from figures from all walks of life – irascible authors, factory workers, bakers, furriers, dancers, sailors, grandparents, children – this masterpiece reveals the central importance of St Petersburg over the centuries. This is the story of the city told from the perspective of the people who lived there.

Saint Petersburg

The City That Defied Hitler

Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler

Jason Allen-Paisant

The Possibility of Tenderness is a personal history narrated through the lens of the ‘grung’ and plants. It’s also a people’s history of the land, a family saga, an archival detective story through time. It’s the migration tale of a young scholar who arrives in Britain from rural Jamaica to study at Oxford to achieve ‘upward social mobility’ and who now lives in Roundhay Leeds. Suddenly, amidst his journey of dreams and class aspiration, the plants and people of his native district, Coffee Grove, begin to offer different ways of living, alternative dreams, and the possibility of tenderness and the permission to roam England. 
 
Marrying the local and the familial with global history and unfolding as a timely and immersive tale of land, environment, and the world of plants, The Possibility of Tenderness reveals how the history of a tiny rural village in a mountainous region of Jamaica is interlinked with that of modern Britain. And, also what that rural village can teach us about leisure, land ownership and reclamation today. 
 
Mama, the author’s grandmother, is a central protagonist of the story. Alongside her, herbalists, plant workers, farmers, and plant lovers help forge an intimate portrait of Coffee Grove, as do the plants themselves; fever grass, jointa, search mi heart, leaf of life, helping Allen-Paisant revise his sense of self and solidify a new understanding of his place in the world. 
 
The Possibility of Tenderness is a cross-pollinating book about the transformative power of plants, the legacy of dreams, and the lessons they offer for living with the earth.

The Possibility of Tenderness

A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams

Richard Coles

Charles Spencer

Cat Jarman

Join the trio behind the hit history podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives, Richard Coles, Charles Spencer and Cat Jarman in their first trivia book as they investigate weird and wonderful facts and stories rescued from obscurity. From the earliest recorded examples of practical jokes to a whistle-stop tour of the world's ghost towns to a history of red heads, The Rabbit Hole Book is a fascinating and entertaining dive into all the things you didn't know you wanted to know.

The Rabbit Hole Book

99 adventures into the history of stuff

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue. 
 
The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before. 
 
This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

More and More and More

An All-Consuming History

An All-Consuming History of Energy

Sunil Amrith

In this paradigm-shifting global history of how humanity has reshaped the planet, and the planet has shaped human history, Sunil Amrith twins the stories of environment and Empire, of genocide and eco-cide, of the expansion of human freedom and its costs. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich diversity of primary sources, he reckons with the ruins of Spanish silver mining in Peru, British gold mining in South Africa, and oil extraction in Central Asia. He explores the railways and highways that brought humans to new terrains of battle against each other and against nature. Amrith’s account of the ways in which the First and Second World Wars involved the massive mobilization not only of men, but of other natural resources from around the globe, provides an essential new way of understanding war as an irreversible reshaping of the planet. He also reveals the reality of migration as consequence of environmental harm.The imperial, globe-spanning pursuit of profit, joined with new forms of energy and new possibilities of freedom from hunger and discomfort, freedom to move and explore, has brought change to every inch of the Earth. Amrith relates, on the largest canvas, a mind-altering epic – vibrant with stories, characters, and vivid images – in which humanity might find the collective wisdom to save itself.

The Burning Earth

An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Bible observes that God made humanity ‘for a while a little lower than the angels’. If humans are that close to angels, does the difference lie in human sexuality and what we do with it? In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history, bringing liberation for some and fury and fear for others. 
 
This book by Oxford's Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. It beckons us to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity, an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears and hopes.

Lower than the Angels

A History of Sex and Christianity

Martin Daunton

This is the history of the institutions and individuals who have managed the global economy, from the World Monetary and Economic Conference in the wake of the Great Depression to the present, as leading nations tackle the fallout from Covid-19 and the threats of inflation, food security and climate change. Since the Second World War, organisations created at Bretton Woods - the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development - and afterwards - the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - have left an indelible mark on our contemporary world. 
 
Martin Daunton examines the swings of the pendulum over ninety years between the forces of democracy, national determination and globalization. He shows that the structures of economic government have been overwhelmingly shaped by 'first world' powers, often to the dismay of developing countries. He argues that whilst structures cannot be separated from the politics of and between the biggest economies, future global recovery rests on the reduction of inequality and that multilateral institutions are fundamental in fostering inclusive growth.

The Economic Government of the World

1933-2025

1933-2023

Jerry Brotton

North, south, east and west: almost all societies use the four cardinal directions to orientate themselves, to understand who they are by projecting where they are. 
 
In Four Points of the Compass, Jerry Brotton takes the reader on a journey of directional discovery. He reveals why Hebrew culture privileges east; why Renaissance Europeans began drawing north at the top of their maps; why early Islam revered the south; why the Aztecs used five colour-coded cardinal directions; and why no societies, primitive or modern, have ever orientated themselves westwards. He ends by reflecting on our digital age in which we, the little blue dot on the screen, have become the most important compass point. Throughout, Brotton shows that the directions reflect a human desire to create order and that they only have meaning, literally and metaphorically, depending on where you stand.

Four Points of the Compass

The Unexpected History of Direction

Rebecca Hall

Hugo Martinez

Women warriors planned and led slave revolts on slave ships during the passage across the Atlantic. They fought their enslavers throughout the Americas. And then they were erased from history. 
 
In Wake Rebecca Hall, a historian, a granddaughter of slaves, and a woman haunted by the legacy of slavery, tells their story. With in-depth archival research and a measured use of historical imagination, she constructs the likely pasts of women rebels who fought for freedom on slave ships bound to America, as well as the stories of women who led slave revolts in Colonial New York. Beneath both is Hall's own tale: of a life lived in the shadow of slavery and its consequences. 
 
Strikingly illustrated in black and white, Wake explores both a personal and a global legacy. Part graphic novel, part memoir, it is a powerful reminder that while the past is gone, we still live in its wake. 
 
'Not only a riveting tale of Black women's leadership of slave revolts but an equally dramatic story of the engaged scholarship that enabled its discovery' - Angela Davis

Wake

The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

Riccardo Falcinelli

Have you ever wondered why so many pencils are yellow? Why black is the colour of mourning? Or why carrots are orange? 
 
In Chromorama, acclaimed graphic designer Riccardo Falcinelli delves deep into the history of colour to show how it has shaped the modern gaze. With over four hundred illustrations throughout and with examples ranging widely across art and culture - from Flaubert's novels to The Simpsons, from Byzantine jewellery to misshapen fruit, from the black lines of Mondrian to the thrillers of Hitchcock - Falcinelli traces the evolution of our long relationship with colour, and how first the industrial revolution, and then the dawn of the internet age, changed it forever. 
 
Beautiful, warm and wise, taking in the lives of philosophers, entrepreneurs, designers, astrologists, shop assistants and pastry chefs, Chromoroma is an engrossing account of shade and light, of tone and hue, of dyes, pigments, and pixels. It is the story of why we now see the world the way we do.

Chromorama

How Colour Changed Our Way of Seeing

Helen Charman

When we talk about motherhood and politics together, we usually talk about isolated moments - the policing of breastfeeding, or the cost of childcare. But this is not enough: we need to understand motherhood itself as an inherently political state, one that poses a serious challenge to the status quo. 
 
In Mother State, Helen Charman uses this provocative insight to write a new history of Britain and Northern Ireland. Beginning with Women's Liberation and ending with austerity, the book follows mothers' fights for an alternative future. Alongside the mother figures that loom large in British culture, from Margaret Thatcher to Kat Slater, we meet communities of lesbian squatters, anti-nuclear campaigners, the wives of striking miners and teenage mothers protesting housing cuts: groups who believed that if you want to nourish your children, you have to nourish the world around them too. 
 
Here we see a world where motherhood is not a restrictive identity but a state of possibility. 'Mother' ceases to be an individual responsibility, and becomes an expansive collective term to organize under, for people of any gender, with or without children of their own. It begins with an understanding: that to mother is a political act.

Mother State

A Political History of Motherhood

Richard Whatmore

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure. 
 
By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states &ndash; and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife and liberty itself turned fanatic. 
 
The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason, but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess and the continued growth of violent colonialism. 
 
Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured - especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.

The End of Enlightenment

Empire, Commerce, Crisis

Adrian Bliss

History belongs to the heroes. But to get the full story, sometimes you have to ask the side characters. 
 
The lives of Leonardo da Vinci, Henry VIII and Queen Victoria fill bookshelves and fascinate scholars all over the world. But little attention is given to the ferret who posed for the renaissance master, the servant who oversaw the Tudor’s toilet time, or the famous horse who thrilled the miserable old monarch. 
 
These supporting cast members have been waiting in the wings for too long, and Adrian Bliss thinks it’s high time they join their glory-hogging contemporaries in the spotlight. Fortunately, - thanks to some recently discovered ancient complaint letters, court transcripts and memoirs in bottles - now they can. 
 
Equal parts fascinating and hilarious, the Greatest Nobodies of History is a surreal love letter to life’s forgotten heroes featuring hitherto undocumented accounts from Ancient Greece to the frontlines of the Great Emu War. 
 
All that follows really happened, and some of it could even be true...

The Greatest Nobodies of History

Minor Characters from Major Moments

Richard Sennett

The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. 
 
The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing. 
 
This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.

The Performer

Art, Life, Politics

Biyi Bandele

'Run, Àjàyí, run!' 
 
The day the Malian slave traders invaded the Nigerian town of Òsogùn, thirteen-year-old Àjàyí's life was split in two. 
 
Before, there was his childhood, surrounded by friends and family, watched over by the ancient Yorùbá gods of forest and water, earth and sky. After: capture, slavery - and release, into the service of a new god, his own culture left far behind. So Àjàyí becomes Samuel Crowther - missionary, linguist, minister - and abolitionist: driven to negotiate against his own people to end the miserable trade in human beings which destroyed his family. 
 
From the heart-stopping drama of Àjàyí's last day of freedom to his consecration as the first African Bishop of the Anglican Church, Biyi Bándélé's kaleidoscopic reimagining of Crowther's life is a brilliant tour de force.

Yorùbá Boy Running

Jessica Rawson

The three millennia up to the establishment of the first imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BC cemented many of the distinctive elements of Chinese civilisation still in place today. Records of these early achievements, and their diverse and unexpected expressions, often lie not in written history but in the ways people marked the end of their lives. 
 
Jessica Rawson here explores twelve grand tombs – each from a specific historical moment and place – showing how they reveal wider political, dynastic and cultural developments, culminating in the lavish ambition of the First Emperor's monument, guarded by his army of terracotta warriors. Drawing on the latest archaeological discoveries, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China illuminates a constellation of beliefs about life and death very different from our own and provides a remarkable new perspective on one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

Life and Afterlife in Ancient China

Ekow Eshun

In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. 
 
What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask? 
 
In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future. 
 
Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

The Strangers

Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them

Adam Higginbotham

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Midnight in Chernobyl comes the definitive, dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger space shuttle disaster based on fascinating in-depth reporting and new archival research – riveting history that reads like a thriller 
 
On the morning of 28 January 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions around the world witnessed the tragic deaths of the crew, which included schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in twentieth century history – one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened – and why – has never been told. 
 
Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space follows a handful of central protagonists – including each of the seven members of the doomed crew – through the years leading up to the accident, a detailed account of the tragedy itself, and into the investigation that followed. It’s a compelling tale of optimism and ingenuity shattered by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubristic ‘go fever’; and of an investigation driven by heroic leakers and whistle-blowers determined to bring the truth to light. 
 
With astonishing clarity and narrative verve, Adam Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program, the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster, as well as the designers, engineers and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space. A masterful blend of riveting human drama, fascinating science and shocking political infighting, Challenger brings to life a turning point in our history. The result is an even more complex and extraordinary story than any of us remembered – or thought possible.

Challenger

A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space

Clare Hammond

In 2016, while working as a journalist in Yangon, Clare Hammond discovered an obscure map that showed a web of new railways spanning the length and breadth of the country - railways not shown on any other publicly available maps. She was determined to uncover the railways' origins, purpose, and most of all, the silence that surrounded them. She would spend three months travelling on these mysterious railways, and the next five years piecing their story together. 
 
Her journey would take her from Myanmar's tropical south to the embattled mountain towns that border India and China. In dilapidated carriages, along tracks in disrepair, through contested ethnic states and former sites of forced labour, visiting temples, tea shops and festivals, Clare encountered a colourful and contradictory Myanmar through the stories of its people. Simultaneously a lush and evocative travelogue, an unsparing account of Myanmar's recent history, and an astonishing, conversation-shifting engagement with Britain's colonial legacy, On the Shadow Tracks is that rare and necessary thing: a book that finds and tells the truth.

On the Shadow Tracks

A Journey through Occupied Myanmar

Eugene Rogan

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East: the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus. 
 
Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority. 
 
But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly - but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital. 
 
This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.

The Damascus Events

The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World

Wright Thompson

Emmett Till’s murder is one of the most infamous in American history; a moment that, more than any other, awakened the world to the racism of the Deep South. Yet despite growing up just a few miles from where it happened, Wright Thompson knew nothing of it until he left Mississippi. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing. 
 
Over the course of five years’ research, Thompson has learnt that almost every part of the standard account of Till’s killing is wrong. In August 1955, after the two men charged with the murder were acquitted by an all-white jury, they gave a false confession to a journalist: one that was misleading about where the murder took place and who was involved. We now know that at least eight people were present, and many more complicit. And we now know precisely where it took place: inside a barn on a 36-square-mile grid called Township 22 North, Range 4 West. 
 
This book tells the story of that barn. It is the story of what really happened on the night of August 28, 1955, and of the individuals who have spent decades bringing the truth to light. And it is the story of the centuries-old forces that made that night inevitable: forces that, over the course of 200 years, transformed Township 22 North, Range 4 West from Choctaw land, to a slave plantation, to a sharecropper’s farm, to the site of the most significant murder in US history. 
 
The result is a revelatory work of investigative reportage and a panoramic new history of white supremacy in America. It maps the road that the US – and the world – must travel to heal its oldest, deepest wound.

The Barn

The Murder of Emmett Till and the Cradle of American Racism

Martin Clunes

Inspired by Martin Clunes' own adoption of a former guide dog, Meetings With Remarkable Animals celebrates the fascinating, moving and sometimes astonishing ways animals have enriched our lives. From search and rescue dogs to mine-sniffing rats, and life-saving dolphins to therapy horses and medal-winning cats and pigeons, the stories brought to life will charm, surprise and astonish in equal measure. 
 
Together with his own life-changing encounters with animals around the world, Martin has celebrated the intelligence, loyalty, and companionship of some truly extraordinary creatures whose lives have been entwined with our own. By turns heart-warming, inspiring and always fascinating, Meetings With Remarkable Animals gives us a chance to meet them too.

Meetings With Remarkable Animals

Beth Ashley

From award-winning journalist Beth Ashley comes a groundbreaking investigation into the history of slutshaming, how it continues to affect us today and what we can do to fight it. 
 
Whore. Hoe. Jezebel. Harlot. Slut. Five words. One meaning. 
 
But what exactly is a slut? How has the concept changed over time? And why is slutshaming so dangerous? 
 
In this groundbreaking investigation, Beth Ashley reveals the truth about slutshaming, gives us the tools to fight it, and encourages us all to have better conversations about sex. 
 
The fight starts now.

Sluts

The truth about sex shame and what we can do to fight it

The truth about slutshaming and what we can do to fight it

Shami Chakrabarti

Our human rights are endangered. After the devastation of World War Two the international community united to enshrine fundamental rights to refuge, health, education and living standards. They protected privacy, fair trials and free speech and outlawed torture, slavery and discrimination. Their goal was greater global justice, equality and peace. That settlement is now under attack from opponents on both left and right and populist and authoritarian movements worldwide. Simultaneously, we are threatened by war, inequality, new tech and climate catastrophe, crises human rights can help us address. 
 
In this urgent, powerful book, Shami Chakrabarti, demonstrates why human rights matter and why we need to secure further rights to deal with challenges of the present and future. Outlining the historic national and international struggles for human rights, from ancient Babylon to the present day, Chakrabarti is an indispensable guide to the law and logic underpinning human dignity and universal freedoms. This book equips supporters in the battle of ideas and will encourage doubters to think again. 
 
To believe in human rights is to believe in human beings. If they - and we - are to survive, these rights must be owned and understood by everyone.

Human Rights

The Case for the Defence

Corinne Fowler

The countryside is almost sacred to many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, historian Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together, with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton. 
 
Empire transformed rural lives: whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, it offered both opportunity and exploitation. Fowler shows how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities directly contributed to enclosure, land clearances and dispossession. These histories, usually considered separately, continue to link the lives of their descendants now. 
 
To give an honest account, to offer both affection and criticism, is a matter of respect: we should not knowingly tell half a history. This new knowledge of our island stories, once gained, can only deepen Britons' relationship with their beloved landscape.

Our Island Stories

Ten Walks through Rural Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire

Country Walks through Colonial Britain

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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