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£11.99
Our world has innumerable boundaries, ranging from the obvious – like oceans and mountain ranges – to the intangible – like subtle differences in language or climate. Most of us cross invisible lines all the time, but rarely do we stop to consider them. ‘Invisible Lines’ presents 30 such unseen boundaries, intriguing and unexpected examples of the myriad ways in which we collectively engage with and experience the world. From football fans in Buenos Aires to air quality in China, Paris’ banlieues to sub-Saharan Africa’s Malaria Belt, the invisible boundaries that shape our experiences and existence provide a compelling guide to seeing and understanding our world anew.
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£12.99
The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the 21st century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority. John Kay’s incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation – and describes how we have come to ‘love the product’ as we ‘hate the producer’.
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£11.99
In this bold follow-up to ‘Confronting Leviathan’, David Runciman unmasks modern politics and reveals the great men and women of ideas behind it. What can Samuel Butler’s ideas teach us about the oddity of how we choose to organise our societies? How did Frederick Douglass not only expose the horrors of slavery, but champion a new approach to abolishing it? Why should we tolerate snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy, as Judith Shklar suggested? And what does Friedrich Nietzsche predict for our future? From Rousseau to Rawls, fascism to feminism and pleasure to anarchy, this is a mind-bending tour through the history of ideas which will forever change your view of politics today.
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£11.99
Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country. Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people – children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers – who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.
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£14.99
For centuries, Europeans assumed that indigenous Americans lacked the sophistication to build cities and establish hierarchies. For over a millennium, prior to and after the arrival of white colonialists, however, native nations had been adapting to changing climates, founding and abandoning urban centres and forging complex, democratic societies. In this magisterial new history of North America, Kathleen DuVal puts indigenous people back at the heart of the story. From the splendour of ancient cities like Cahokia and Moundsville to the careful diplomacy of native leaders in the face of colonial expansion, ‘Native Nations’ reveals the diversity of indigenous civilisation and shows how a 1,000-year legacy still shapes America today, in struggles over sovereignty, climate and indigenous rights.
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£9.99
The holiday season is here, and for most of us, our minds are on carefree days in the sunshine. But for every trip to the seaside or sultry afternoon on the sunlounger, there’s someone who’s busy packing a suitcase full of secrets and a motive – for murder. Join ten of the best crime writers in history for the trip of a lifetime, as they puzzle, astound and delight you with these classic mysteries. Whether on the English coast or the blistering terraces of the Mediterranean, it’s time to spread out the beach towel, put your feet up – but never forget to watch your back.
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£25.00
Blue-veiled nomads, camels crossing infinite dunes, oases shimmering on the horizon: ready-made images of the Sahara are easy to conjure. But they can never truly capture a region that crosses eleven countries and is home to millions. This sweeping account upends old fantasies, revealing the far more interesting reality of the Earth’s largest hot desert. Drawing on decades of research, and years spent living in the region, anthropologist Judith Scheele takes us from Libya to Mali, Algeria to Chad, from the ancient Roman Empire to contemporary regional battles and fraught international diplomacy, questioning every easy cliché and exposing fascinating truths along the way.
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£10.99
If we do what is right, everything else will follow: happiness, success, meaning, reputation, love. This is central to Stoic wisdom. The path isn’t always easy, but it is essential, and the alternative – taking the easy route – leads only to cowardice and folly. Ryan Holiday explores the crucial role that integrity plays in every good life. From pillars of upright living like Ulysses S. Grant and Marcus Aurelius, to the cautionary tales of Napoleon and F. Scott Fitzgerald, this book shows us the power of owning our convictions and acting in accordance with our beliefs – and the perils of an ill-formed conscience.
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£11.99
Whether it’s pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trade and lucrative speculation are the hallmarks of our era, but the backbone of globalisation is still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made – and is still making – our unequal world. Professor Laleh Khalili reflects on the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits.
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£22.00
In 2010, two decades after the Cold War, ten Russian spies were arrested in the US following a ten-year FBI operation. Among them were three couples who had lived as Americans for years, and one agent who had nearly forgotten Russian. They had hidden their true identities from their children, neighbours and even their partners. Moscow expert Shaun Walker captures the untold history of Russia’s deep cover spy programme, from the ‘great illegals’ of the 1920s and 1930s to the twenty-first century, when agents maintained their fake identities and loyalties after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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£10.99
When Orlando Whitfield first meets Inigo Philbrick, they are students dreaming of dealing art for a living. Their friendship lasts for fifteen years until one day, Inigo – by then the most successful dealer of his generation – disappears, accused of a fraud so gigantic and audacious it rocks the art world to its core. A sparklingly sharp memoir of greed, ambition and madness, ‘All That Glitters’ will take you to the heart of the contemporary art world, a place wilder and wealthier than you could ever imagine.
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£22.00
This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiritual devotion – they are also political acts, affirmations of identity and engagements with deep-rooted historical narratives. Kathryn Hurlock follows the trail of pilgrimage through nineteen sacred sites – from Tai Shan to Jerusalem, Amritsar to Buenos Aires – revealing the many ways in which this ancient practice has shaped our religions and our world. Pilgrimages have transformed the fates of cities, anointed dynasties, provided guidance in hard times and driven progress in good. Filled with fascinating insights, this book unveils the complex histories and contemporary endurance of one of our most fundamental human urges.
Strange Houses 
