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Veteran journalist Chris Horton delivers a gripping, urgent and approachable account of Taiwan’s rich history and precarious present. Based on a decade of on-the-ground reporting, he reveals how this vibrant democracy and tech colossus emerged against all odds.
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a definitive history of the Western hemisphere, a sweeping five-century narrative of North and South America that redefines our understanding of both continents. The story of the United States’ unique sense of itself was forged facing south – no less than Latin America’s was indelibly stamped by the looming colossus to the north. In this reinterpretation of the New World, Greg Grandin reveals how the Americas emerged from constant, turbulent engagement with each other, shedding new light on well-known historical figures like Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar and Woodrow Wilson, as well as lesser-known actors such as the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda, who almost lost his head in the French Revolution and conspired with Alexander Hamilton to free America from Spain.
The global powerhouse that is the United States of America is younger even than the British Museum, Guinness and the flushing toilet. In 2026 it celebrates its 250th birthday. How did this vast land, long inhabited by diverse indigenous cultures, come to be dominated by English speakers? How has it grappled with the stark contradictions between its ideals of liberty and the grim reality of genocide and slavery? This extraordinary collection of fifty distinct states has weathered immense – and recent – challenges, including a Civil War that was still raging as the first London Underground station opened. How did this melting pot of peoples and ideas not only endure but rise to dominate global politics, commerce, culture and warfare? What insights does this rich history offer about an increasingly divided nation – and the world that moves to its rhythm?
Written while the organisation he directs, Forensic Architecture, works to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel, Weizman explores the larger geographical and historical context, from the displacement of the Nakba in 1948 to the present day. He shows how architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. The book is an extraordinary and eye-opening journey through the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, settlements and barriers. Territory is never a neutral backdrop nor the location within which a colonisation takes place. Instead, it is a mechanism by which colonisation is undertaken and key to understanding how Israel’s attack on Gaza in the wake of 7 October has escalated into violence so extreme as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of
A panoramic history of the roots of China and Mongolia’s historic rivalry… and why it matters now.
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.
From the master storyteller behind 2023’s critically acclaimed KILLING THATCHER
Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the story of a lifetime – the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain nearly three centuries earlier. But that ship, the galleon San Jose, never reached its destination. Instead, the Spanish treasure fleet was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean. Though a diver at heart, Dooley was an unlikely candidate to find the San Jose. Dooley had little in the way of serious credentials, yet his tenacity and single-minded devotion to finding the San Jose led him to breakthroughs once thought impossible.
Few countries have had as vexed a political history as Syria. Carved out of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War, Syria was brutally ruled as a French colony, cut off by a series of new borders with equally newly created neighbours that pulled apart families, trade networks and political assumptions that had already been ravaged by the war. Syria’s subsequent history has been a series of attempts to make sense of its borders, including a failed attempt in the late 1950s to unite with Egypt and several humiliations at the hands of Israel’s armed forces. It has been a satellite of France, an ally of the USSR and, most recently, torn apart by a civil war that has now been in turn subverted by the rise of the Islamic State, an entity that refuse to acknowledge any of Syria’s existing borders.
‘A historically insightful read’Financial Times
‘A wry, rollicking, and provocative history’ Michael Taylor, author of The Interest
‘A thought-provoking analysis of Africa’s relationship with economic imperialism’ Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata, authors of It’s A Continent
Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, ‘Question 7’ is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of H.G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.
In ‘Empireworld’, award-winning author and journalist, Sathnam Sanghera extends his examination of British imperial legacies beyond Britain. Travelling the globe to trace its international legacies – from Barbados and Mauritius to India and Nigeria and beyond – Sanghera demonstrates just how deeply British imperialism is baked into our world. And why it’s time Britain was finally honest with itself about empire.
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