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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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Gavin Newsom

“Go slow,” his political elders advised him. But young Gavin Newsom didn’t know such a speed. A month into his first term as mayor of San Francisco, he turned city hall into an altar of gay marriage, an act of defiance that catapulted him onto the national stage, irking not only some of his hometown political mentors but elected officials across the country. 
 
The California Dream has always run in Newsom’s blood. It lured his father’s family from County Cork, Ireland, six generations ago. His great-great-grandfather, a cop, walked a beat in San Francisco; his grandfather, nicknamed the Boss, built neighborhoods that looked out to the Pacific. His father, William, became an appellate court judge and a consigliere to his best friend, Gordon Getty. 
 
Newsom was five when his parents divorced, and as he came of age, he struggled to make fit the starkly different worlds of his mother and father. His mother, Tessa, worked three jobs to pay the bills, while his father, ensconced in San Francisco society, had become a distant figure. His struggle with dyslexia made childhood harder, a dissonance that made him pedal even faster on his paper route. 
 
In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom traces his rise as a successful businessman and the happenstance that led him to politics. As the governor of California, he confronts the challenges of balancing his family life as he guides California through plague, flood, wildfire, and the rise of autocratic figures in American politics, and examines the many forces that shaped the lives of his parents and grandparents. Filled with intimate family history and written with candor and remarkable personal insight, here is a deeply resilient American story.

Young Man in a Hurry

A Memoir of Discovery

Jason Burke

Immersive, globe-spanning and full of detail and drama, The Revolutionists is an unprecedented account of a seismic decade that transformed the modern world. 
 
In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with intricately planned plane hijackings and hostage-takings. Among them were the glamorous young Leila Khaled with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking Carlos the Jackal in shades and designer suits, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. United by their hatred of Israel, capitalism and ‘Western imperialism’, they unleashed a series of audacious attacks that brought governments to their knees and glued the world to their televisions in morbid fascination. 
 
Drawing on decades of research, recently declassified government files, secret documents, and original interviews with hijackers, spies, witnesses and victims, Jason Burke takes us into the lives and minds of the perpetrators of these often-deadly operations. Through their eyes – and the eyes of the unrelenting agents who hunted them down – he uncovers a dark, complex world of loyalty, betrayal and commitment to radical change at any cost. 
 
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War and packed with revelations about iconic events such as the deadly attack on the Munich Olympic, Israel’s raid on Entebbe, the Iranian revolution and the rise of Islamic extremism, this is a sweeping, scrupulously reported historical narrative with the pace and suspense of a thriller. 
 
The Revolutionists pitches the reader into these tumultuous times. Ultimately, it shows how a campaign led by secular, leftist revolutionaries gave way to a far more lethal movement of conservative religious fanaticism that would dominate the decades to come. It is impossible to understand the world today without reading this history.

The Revolutionists

The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s

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

Eric Klinenberg

What unites us? What divides us? What do we value? Sociologist Eric Klinenberg had been studying what crises reveal about societies for over two decades when his home of New York became the deadliest hot spot of the global pandemic. In this book he tells the deeply reported stories of seven ordinary people trying to survive at the epicentre of the crisis, and combines them with data gathered from around the world to provide unprecedented insights into what societies are made of, why they come together or fall apart, and how they shape our lives.

2020

A Reckoning

Adam Wagner

0n 26 March 2020, a new law appeared. In eleven pages it locked down tens of millions of people, confined us to our homes, banned socialising, closed shops, gyms, pubs, places of worship. It restricted our freedoms more than any other law in history, justified by the rapid spread of a deadly new virus. 
 
You may have expected such a law to be fiercely debated in Parliament. But it wasn't debated at all. A state of emergency was declared, meaning the law came into force the moment it was signed. The emergency was supposed to be short but lasted for 763 days, allowing ministers to bring in, by decree over 100 new laws restricting freedoms more than any in history - laws that were almost never debated, changed at a whim and increasingly confused the public. Meanwhile, behind the doors of Downing Street, officials and even the Prime Minister broke the very laws they had created. 
 
This book tells the startling story of the state of emergency that brought about an Emergency State. A wake-up call from one of the UK's leading human rights barristers, Emergency State shows us why we must never take our rights for granted.

Emergency State

How We Lost Our Freedoms in the Pandemic and Why it Matters

Timothy Snyder

Nora Krug

A captivating graphic edition of Timothy Snyder's bestselling book of lessons for surviving and resisting the arc toward authoritarianism. 
 
 Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny is one of the essential books of recent years, using the darkest moments in twentieth-century history to teach twenty lessons on resisting modern-day authoritarianism. These include a warning to be aware of how symbols used today could affect tomorrow, an urgent reminder to research everything for yourself and to the fullest extent, and an encouragement to use personalised and individualised speech rather than clichéd phrases when arguing a point 
 
 In this graphic edition, Nora Krug draws from her highly inventive style in Heimat - at once a graphic memoir, collage-style scrapbook, historical narrative and trove of memories - to breathe new life, colour and power into Snyder's modern classic, turning a quick-read pocket guide of lessons into a visually striking rumination and call for action. 
 
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In a time of great uncertainty and instability, this edition of On Tyranny emphasises the importance of being active, conscious, and deliberate participants in resistance.

On Tyranny Graphic Edition

Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Jeffrey Toobin

What happens when the President of the United States engages in criminal activity? He runs for re-election. 
 
Donald Trump's campaign chairman went to jail. So did his personal lawyer. His long-time political consigliere was convicted of serious federal crimes, and his National Security Advisor pleaded guilty to several more. Multiple Russian spies were indicted in absentia. Career intelligence agents and military officers were alarmed enough by his actions as President that they alerted senior government officials and ignited the impeachment process. Yet despite all this, a years-long inquiry led by Robert Mueller, and the third Presidential impeachment trial in American history, Donald Trump survived to run for presidency again. Why? 
 
Jeffrey Toobin's highly entertaining, definitive account of the Mueller investigation and the impeachment of the President takes readers behind the scenes of the epic legal and political struggle to call Trump to account for his misdeeds. Toobin recounts the mind-boggling twists and turns in the case – Trump's son met with a Russian operative promising Kremlin support; Trump paid a porn star $130,000 to hush up an affair; Rudy Giuliani and a pair of shady Ukrainian-American businessmen got the Justice Department to look at Russian-created conspiracy theories. Toobin shows how Trump's canny lawyers used Mueller's famous integrity against him, and how Trump's bullying and bluster cowed Republican legislators into ignoring the clear evidence of the impeachment hearings. 
 
Based on dozens of interviews with prosecutors in Mueller's office, Trump's legal team, Congressional investigators, White House staffers, and several of the key players, including some who are now in prison, True Crimes and Misdemeanours is a revelatory narrative that makes sense of the seemingly endless chaos of the Trump years. Filled with never-before-reported details of the high-stakes legal battles and political machinations, the book weaves a tale of a rogue President guilty of historic misconduct, and how he got away with it.

True Crimes and Misdemeanors

The Investigation of Donald Trump

Jane Jacobs

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written. 
 
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually works on the ground. 
 
The real vitality of cities, argues Jacobs, lies in their diversity, architectural variety, teeming street life and human scale. It is only when we appreciate such fundamental realities that we can hope to create cities that are safe, interesting and economically viable, as well as places that people want to live in. 
 
'Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... Jacobs has a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind' New York Times Book Review

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Robert A Caro

‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times 
 
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. 
 
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Master of the Senate takes Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: his twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate. Once the most august and revered body in politics, by the time Johnson arrived the Senate had become a parody of itself and an obstacle that for decades had blocked desperately needed liberal legislation. Caro shows how Johnson’s brilliance, charm and ruthlessness enabled him to become the youngest and most powerful Majority Leader in history and how he used his incomparable legislative genius – seducing both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives – to pass the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction.

Master of the Senate

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 3)

‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times 
 
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. 
 
 In this second instalment we witness a momentous turning point in American politics: the tragic last stand of the old politics versus the new. Following Johnson through his service in the Second World War, it describes the foundation and the myths of his long-concealed fortune. The explosive heart of the book is Caro’s revelation of the shocking true story of the fiercely contested 1948 senatorial election, which Johnson won with the the ‘87 votes that changed history’.

Means of Ascent

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 2)

‘The greatest biography of our era … Essential reading for those who want to comprehend power and politics’ The Times 
 
Robert A. Caro’s legendary, multi-award-winning biography of US President Lyndon Johnson is a uniquely riveting and revelatory account of power, political genius and the shaping of twentieth-century America. 
 
This first instalment tells of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country, revealing in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy and ambition that set LBJ apart. It charts his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as a Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate and his attainment, nonetheless, at the age of thirty-one of the power for which he hungered.

The Path to Power

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 1)

The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is 'simply one of the best non-fiction books in English of the last forty years' (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times): a riveting and timeless account of power, politics and the city of New York by ‘the greatest political biographer of our times’ (Sunday Times); chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time and by the Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize; a Sunday Times Bestseller; 'An outright masterpiece' (Evening Standard) 
 
The Power Broker tells the story of Robert Moses, the single most powerful man in New York for almost half a century and the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever once being elected to office, he created for himself a position of supreme and untouchable authority, allowing him to utterly reshape the city of New York, turning it into the city we know today, while at the same time blighting the lives of millions and remaining accountable to no one. 
 
First published in the USA in 1974, this monumental classic was a Sunday Times bestseller when published in the UK in 2015 and is now widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest books of its kind.

The Power Broker

Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Philip Caputo

The first memoir of the Vietnam War and an all-time classic of war literature 
|40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION| 
 
In March 1965, Marine Lieutenant Philip J. Caputo landed in Danang with the first ground combat unit committed to fight in Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line in one of modern history's ugliest wars, he returned home - physically whole but emotionally destroyed, his youthful idealism shattered. 
 
A decade later, having reported first-hand the very final hours of the war, Caputo sat down to write ‘simply a story about war, about the things men do in war and the things war does to them’. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest war memoirs of all time. 
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‘A singular and marvellous work – a soldier’s-eye account that tells us, as no other book that I can think of has done, what it was actually like to be fighting in this hellish jungle’ The New York Times 
 
‘Unparalleled in its honesty, unapologetic in its candour and singular in its insights into the minds and hearts of men in combat, this book is as powerful to read today as the day it was published in 1977. Caputo has more than earned his place beside Sassoon, Owen, Vonnegut, and Heller’ Kevin Powers 
 
‘To call this the best book about Vietnam is to trivialize it. A Rumour of War is a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist that readers asks themselves the questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive? A terrifying book, it will make the strongest among us weep’ Los Angeles Times Book Review 
 
‘Caputo’s troubled, searching meditations on the love and the hate of war, on fear and the ambivalent discord warfare can create in the hearts of decent men are amongst the most eloquent I have read in modern literature’ New York Review of Books 
 
‘Superb. At times it is hard to remember that this is not a novel’ New Statesman

A Rumor of War

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 
 
‘A sort of survival book, a sort of symptom-diagnosis manual in terms of losing your democracy and what tyranny and authoritarianism look like up close’ Rachel Maddow 
 
'These 128 pages are a brief primer in every important thing we might have learned from the history of the last century, and all that we appear to have forgotten' Observer 
 
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. 
 
In the twentieth century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and rejected reason in favour of myth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. 
 
History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the twentieth century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. 
 
Now is a good time to do so.

On Tyranny

Orlando Figes

Unrivalled in scope and brimming with human drama, A People's Tragedy is the most vivid, moving and comprehensive history of the Russian Revolution available today. 
 
'A modern masterpiece' Andrew Marr 
 
Opening with a panorama of Russian society, from the cloistered world of the Tsar to the brutal life of the peasants, A People's Tragedy follows workers, soldiers, intellectuals and villagers as their world is consumed by revolution and then degenerates into violence and dictatorship. Drawing on vast original research, Figes conveys above all the shocking experience of the revolution for those who lived it, while providing the clearest and most cogent account of how and why it unfolded. 
 
Illustrated with over 100 photographs and now including a new introduction that reflects on the revolution's centennial legacy, A People's Tragedy is a masterful and definitive record of one of the most important events in modern history. 
 
'The most moving account of the Russian Revolution since Doctor Zhivago' Independent

A People's Tragedy

The Russian Revolution – centenary edition with new introduction

Jerry White

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

London in the Twentieth Century

A City and Its People

Walter Benjamin

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

Illuminations

M R D Foot

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

S.O.E.

An outline history of the special operations executive 1940 - 46

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

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

The Passage of Power

The Years of Lyndon Johnson (Volume 4)

Theo Padnos

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

Undercover Muslim

A Journey into Yemen

Stefan Aust

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

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

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

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