Showing 1–12 of 24 resultsSorted by latest
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£25.00
The crises that face us in the twenty-first century are global and interconnected: amongst many others, climate change exacerbates the water crisis, which in turn impacts health. Yet, as Mariana Mazzucato argues, we have failed to treat these as collective goals with shared agendas. This, she argues, is not by coincidence, but by design. In this ambitious and urgent new book, Mazzucato presents a systematic and scalable vision of successful government that creates value, addresses inequalities, and serves collective ends. Emphasizing a need to shift from reactively putting bandages on market failures to proactively shaping economies that actually work, she proposes a new economic theory of the common good. The book outlines five pillars of progressive government and demonstrates how they can help us tackle the most pressing challenges of our time.
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£20.00
A tsunami of change, we are told, is sweeping the economy as robots and AI threaten to take over tasks done by humans. But while we worry that we’re robotizing our work, what if the real risk is that we’re robotizing ourselves? When prize-winning Financial Times journalist Sarah O’Connor set out to investigate what was happening on the front lines of technological change, she found people who weren’t losing their jobs to machines, but who felt they were losing something else instead. From translators forced to edit AI output to university graduates interviewed by software and warehouse workers surrounded by robots, she heard stories of work becoming lonelier, less creative, less human. But O’Connor also found hopeful stories of jobs being made better, safer and more enjoyable – where workers haven’t rejected the new tools, but instead have learned to control them.
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£30.00
‘The Traveller’ spreads out before us the life and times of George Forster, who journeyed to the far reaches of the known world, and whose radical ideas about humanity, equality and freedom challenged the worldviews of 18th-century Europe. Andrea Wulf paints a picture of a man of profound curiosity and brilliance. He joined Cook’s second voyage at the age of 17, an exploration of vast contrasts from the icy world of Antarctica to tropical islands of the South Pacific. Studying the diverse nature, peoples and cultures he encountered, he came back imbued with a deep belief in the equality of races – an understanding far ahead of his time. On his return he was feted in England, France, Germany and Poland, using his fame to advocate for freedom and women’s rights and against empire, racism and slavery.
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£25.00
The wealthy and powerful few have dominated the masses throughout most of human history. This is starkly visible now more than ever – today, the gulf between oligarchs and the average citizen is larger than any gap that existed during European serfdom or the slave society of Imperial Rome. We have arrived at the most blatant version of oligarchy that most modern states have endured, with politicians bought and paid for across the political spectrum. The strange thing is: we aren’t in open revolt against this system. In fact, we keep voting to prop it up. Why? In ‘The Blind Spot’, political scientist Jeffrey A. Winters delivers an urgent, incisive account of how we reached this era of in-your-face oligarchy, exposing how modern democracy was developed to protect the interests of the ultra-rich.
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£30.00
Weimar looms large in German history: a crucible of democracy and dictatorship. This ancient town nestled in the heart of the country was home to some of Europe’s greatest thinkers, Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Nietzsche among them. It gave its name to the ambitious Weimar Republic crafted in the aftermath of the First World War. But it was also where fascism took hold. Where Bauhaus architects first experimented with new ways of living, Buchenwald was dug out of a beech forest. This book shows us a town and its people on the edge of catastrophe. Drawing on a wealth of new archival research, historian Katja Hoyer takes us from 1919 to 1939 as she tells the stories of the men and women who lived through the new republic and Hitler’s regime. We encounter a vividly drawn cast of characters, from bookbinder Carl Weirich and hotel owners Rosa and Arthur Schmidt, to Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth.
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£35.00
What do dogs do in art? Long before the phrase ‘man’s best friend’ became common parlance, dogs were already standing beside us in art as in life. In ‘The Dog’s Gaze’, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur invites us to explore why they feature more than any other animal in the ways in which we picture ourselves and our stories.
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£25.00
Christopher de Hamel is one of the world’s best-known scholars and writers on illuminated manuscripts. He was mostly brought up in the south of New Zealand, where his family moved when he was four. This book magically evokes a childhood at vast distance from Europe, recalling his thrill and wonder in first encountering medieval manuscripts in libraries there and the realization that they too are migrants far from home. ‘The Migrants’ explores the immense journeys of books and people. It is a tale of colonization and the migration of culture, of motives and idealism, triumphs and disasters, bringing us face-to-face with history.
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£30.00
Even by the standards of an industry stacked with so-called visionary leaders, Demis Hassabis is recognized as a special case. His journey to pursue the dream of super-human intelligence has taken him from working-class origins in North London to the founding of revolutionary AI company DeepMind to a Nobel Prize. Unlike many of his Silicon Valley peers, his goals are not money and power but scientific enlightenment. For the past several years, Sebastian Mallaby has had unprecedented access to Hassabis and DeepMind. In this book, he offers an unrivalled window into the AI revolution, a transformation potentially more significant than any since we gained a capacity for abstract thought 70,000 years ago.
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£30.00
Roderick Beaton tells the story of Europe as never before – as the history of an idea, and a collective identity. Since its dramatic birth in ancient Greece, ‘Europe’ has been defined, and redefined, by its people. Through this powerful lens, and with the narrative drive and scope of a novelist, Beaton deftly surveys Europe’s major historical developments: the rise and fall of Rome; the explosion of Christianity; the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; the arrival of Europeans in the Americas; the violent upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries; and the uncertainties of the present. Throughout, original sources allow the voices of the past, from Tacitus to Thatcher, to speak for themselves. Grappling with the multi-layered identities that have always come with being European, Europe places the Europe of today in a long arc of history stretching back more than 2500 years.
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£25.00
Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age. It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world.
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£25.00
We live in an age of extremes: populist leaders are setting the agenda, autocracies are on the march, and the liberal establishment is a bewildered blob, devoid of new ideas or fresh solutions. Having once powered progress in the form of democracy, mass welfare and defeating totalitarianism, liberals have the power to save the world again – but only if they rediscover the lost genius of their creed. Guiding us skilfully and entertainingly through the intellectual, cultural and political histories of liberalism, this book lays out a centrist agenda for today’s problems. It reminds us of the dynamism and fixed principles that have shaped the successes of liberalism and warns us against splitting into sub-groups that fail to grapple with the common good.
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£22.00
The great majority of people alive today have come of age in a world of remarkable stability, presided over by either one or two superpowers. This is not to say the world has been peaceful; but it has to an extent been predictable. As an increasing number of Great Powers now jostle for regional supremacy our world has become more fragile, unpredictable – and combustible. To understand the threats that face us in this complex new terrain, we must look to the lessons of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – a time when Great Powers clashed and sought regional dominance, when nationalism and populism were on the rise, and many felt that globalization had failed them: a time, in other words, that carries eerie parallels with our own. ‘The Coming Storm’ is a prescient, thoughtful and chilling examination of the current state of the world.
