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£25.00
A fascinating history of the republican tradition that modern states inherited from ancient Rome. Julius Caesar, Lucretia, Cincinnatus, Augustus, the Gracchi brothers: Roman figures have had an extraordinary influence on modern republics from America to France. Here historian Jamie Gianoutsos traces the Roman republic and its afterlives through the revolutionary birth of modern republics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal how ancient ideas of liberty, virtue, and corruption shaped the political imagination of a new age. Moving from stories of tyranny and collapse in ancient Rome to moments of crisis in early modern Europe and the Atlantic world, Gianoutsos uncovers recurring patterns in the rise – and fall – of republics.
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£25.00
On the night of President Trump’s second presidential victory, economist Isabella Weber tweeted: ‘Can we now finally have a serious conversation about an anti-fascist economics?’ In her view, Democrats had missed the seriousness of the affordability crisis in the wake of pandemic-era inflation. By refusing to step in to protect their constituencies against corporate profiteering and price shocks in essentials, they left room amidst the global crisis for the resurgence of the politics of resentment that Trump and the right revelled in. Her question, though, was a bold one with implications that reached far beyond one election. In a neoliberal world, we tell people at the same time: Democracy is the highest form of political organization. And: When it comes to the economy, to the material foundation of our life, the best the representatives of the people can do is to subordinate their constituencies to the corporate pursuit of profits.
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£30.00
Food should nourish us, but instead it’s making us sick: from obesity and diabetes to heart disease, cancer, and poor mental health. As cardiologist and public health expert Dariush Mozaffarian shows, the problem isn’t how much we eat – it’s what we eat too little of: the foods that heal, protect and restore the body and mind. Cutting through widespread confusion and misinformation, he reveals astonishing new discoveries about how food truly affects our health, our biology, and even our longevity. Harnessing the power of the right foods, he shows, can do more than prevent illness; it can treat disease, extend life, and reduce the staggering human and economic costs of ill health. This work maps the path forward, from transforming our own diets to reshaping what grows on our farms and reaches our stores and our plates.
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£25.00
Edinburgh, 1878. A medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle squeezes into the Royal Infirmary’s packed operating theatre, hoping to catch a glimpse of the celebrated professor whose uncanny powers of observation blur the line between diagnosis and detective work. That professor was Joseph Bell, who became one of the most celebrated surgeons and medical reformers of his age. With a flair for the theatrical and an eye for clues hidden in the tiniest details, he astonished his students with lightning-fast deductions about his patients’ backgrounds and ailments. Together with Edinburgh’s chief police surgeon, Henry Duncan Littlejohn, Bell also investigated some of the highest-profile murders of the century, including those of Jack the Ripper, and collaborated with forensic specialists such as a ballistics expert named Dr Watson. And as Conan Doyle’s mentor, Bell inspired the creation of literature’s most iconic sleuth: Sherlock Holmes.
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£40.00
In 1804, immediately after his coronation as Emperor, Napoleon created the Marshalate, the supreme martial rank of the empire. Over the next decade, he elevated to it some of his most outstanding generals, who played leading roles in his extraordinary campaigns – including the brave Ney, the flamboyant Murat, the vain Massena, the iron Davout and the logistics master Berthier. Some of them were son of aristocrats, others of innkeepers or coopers, but all carried the baton of a Marshal of France. Andrew Roberts masterfully captures their personalities and ambitions, capacities and rivalries. But unlike Lincoln, who forged a team of rivals, Napoleon created a nest of vipers whose lust for glory descended into destructive competitiveness and mutual recrimination. For all his inspiring qualities as a leader, he manipulated and controlled those whose loyalty he most needed to survive, and ultimately only two of them rode beside him at Waterl
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£25.00
In early 2025, an army of young men invaded the offices of US government. Armed with laptops and sleeping bags, a raft of prejudices and a bulletproof sense of mission instilled in them by their new boss, Elon Musk, the tech bro acolytes of DOGE were on a mission to seek and destroy, by any means necessary. But once inside, they came up against a group of people whose courage, commitment and in some cases lifelong devotion to the nation they served would quickly earn them the wrath of Musk. He called them Blockers. Find the Blockers, Musk told his band of worshipful young men – and eliminate them. This is the story of the unsung heroes at the heart of the most complex and powerful machine ever designed by humankind, who fought back when DOGE, and then even darker forces, wanted to smash it all up.
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£25.00
Almost everywhere we turn these days, there’s talk of a West in decline. Our jobs, our values, our past are all under attack, in the face of which we have become immersed in self-loathing, gone weak at the knees: the West needs to be Made Great Again. We know where this toxic narrative comes from: the nationalist, nativist Right. And now it’s gone mainstream. The thing is, the West is in decline, self-evidently so. But the truth is that it’s not migrants or Muslims or a woke mob which has brought the West to the edge of catastrophe. It’s good, old-fashioned hubris. In this book, Owen Jones explores how, amid the triumphalist sugar rush that came with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West came to believe that its rule, its economic order, its moral values, would endure for ever – and how, over a quarter-century, this brittle self-mythologising narrative collapsed in on itself.
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£20.00
What can we really know about the world around us? With clarity and lightness, physicist Carlo Rovelli guides us through the speculative depths of modern physics, unafraid to test their limits, not least because, as he suggests, there may be no final ground to reach. Electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies are not essentially different in nature from one another. They are ideas that illuminate each other. Reality, he shows, is shaped by this continuous play of reflections. From this emerges Rovelli’s central insight: the equality of all things. Like the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who dreams he is a butterfly and wakes unsure whether he is Zhuangzi dreaming to be a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming to be Zhuangzi, Rovelli invites us to see reality anew, recognizing our knowledge is coherent but also uncertain and circular.
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£25.00
The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side. In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’.
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£20.00
What should the next generation learn – and what should they stop worrying about – in a world transformed by artificial intelligence? AI is rewriting the rules in the classroom, the job market and the workplace, leaving parents, teachers, students and all types of workers unsure about how best to prepare for what lies ahead. In this work, globally renowned economist Daniel Susskind cuts through the outdated advice to show us what young people actually need to succeed now.
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£25.00
We often read history as the biographies of ‘great men’ who shaped the world. But are leaders, whichever field they are in, really that influential? Should CEOs be given large bonuses when a company performs well? Why, when a political leader is assassinated, is their successor as likely to improve as damage a country? When do we know if firing a coach has changed the fortunes of the team? Historian and bestselling author Jared Diamond argues that leaders are neither heroic exceptions nor products of circumstance. Looking at four difference spheres: history, business, sport and religion, Diamond asks under which conditions is a leader most likely to make a difference and why. Drawing on the life and career of iconic leaders, Diamond shows us how leadership effectiveness is determined by a range of complex interrelated factors, from resources to geography, culture to technology.
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£25.00
Tom Overton got to know John Berger around 2010, after he gave his archive to the British Library: a kind of homecoming to the city of his birth, after a life lived mostly in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France. Curious about the origin of a piece of writing or art, Tom would scan something in and email it. Then there’d come a call, very early, very late. ‘Hello? Is that Tom? This is John. John Berger. Can I tell you a story?’ Tom realised he was bringing this archive back into John’s life, peering together through holes in time, remembering things he couldn’t himself. And then, at the beginning of 2017, John died. In this book, Overton explores the life and work of one of the great cultural figures of the last century, who came of age in a world threatened by nuclear apocalypse, and grew old in a world dominated by the idea that human life should be ordered with the logic of profit, always looking forward, never back.
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£25.00
We live in the age of data. Over the past century, rapidly evolving technologies have transformed every aspect of our society, in troubling and seemingly unstoppable ways. Political campaigns have been reduced to attention-mining algorithms, multinational corporations control public discourse, and the era of the liberal nation-state seems to be coming to an end, replaced by the rule of artificial intelligence. Today, power is maintained through mystification: machines, we are told, know what humans cannot. Yet nothing about any of this was, or is, inevitable. In this account of how technology has corroded democracy around the world, prizewinning historian Jill Lepore traces the rise and fall of what she calls the ‘Artificial State’.
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£22.00
Two friends meet in an art gallery after decades of silence. The idealism that once bound them together fissured and fractured under the weight of collective and personal griefs. Through their memories of youthful certainty, the antagonism of their conversation and the embers of their enduring kinship, they navigate the wreckage of our world today – the hope, the anger and the exhaustion. In her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet, Claudia Rankine blends narrative, memory and criticism in a poignant exploration of the beautiful but complicated friendships that we rely on to unsettle us, to make us better – exposing the fiction in the facts of our lives and demanding action in our time of relentless loss.
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£25.00
There are few greater film lovers than David Thomson who, over fifty years, has built a reputation as one of the wisest and most penetrating voices on the art form. But every flicker of light has its shadow. In this profound reckoning, Thomson confronts the dark side of the movies – responsible for creating an alternate reality and fantasyland that has only deepened the isolation and disconnection of our society over the course of a century. Thomson explores the high and low points of film history with his usual brilliant insight – sharp and arresting readings of movies from Metropolis to Rear Window to The Godfather can be found in these pages. But he also shows the ways in which our love of voyeurism and villainy, and the passivity which the movies further engender, have led to a coarsening not just of a medium, but of the larger culture, including our political life.
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£9.99
The world is re-arming and embroiled in endless conflict. The Doomsday Clock has now been set to 85 seconds to midnight, with the risk of nuclear war the highest it has ever been. Why do we always fail to learn from the past? In this urgent book, physicist Carlo Rovelli reframes the history of nuclear weapons: from how the atomic bomb was born to why Germany didn’t build it and why the US used it, to the narrowly averted disasters of the Cold War and the political brinkmanship careering out of control today. As he grapples with the legacy of his scientific forebears, Rovelli spotlights the true nature of the decisions being made by leaders around the world today.
