International relations

  • Chief of Staff

    £10.99

    Once a more sedate affair, since 2016, British politics has witnessed a barrage of crises, resignations and general elections. As Brexit became logjammed, Theresa May’s premiership was the most turbulent of all. In her darkest hour, following the disastrous 2017 election, she turned to Gavin Barwell to restore her battered authority. He would become her Chief of Staff for the next two years – a period punctuated by strained negotiations, domestic tragedy, and intense political drama. In this gripping insider memoir, Barwell reveals what really went on in the corridors of power – and sheds a vital light on May, the most inscrutable of modern prime ministers.

  • The Age of Unpeace

    £10.99

    We thought connecting the world would bring lasting peace. Instead, it is driving us apart. In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, global leaders have been integrating the world’s economy, transport and telecommunications, breaking down borders in the hope of making war impossible. In doing so, they have unwittingly created a formidable arsenal of weapons for new kinds of conflict and the motivation to keep fighting. As a leading authority on international relations, Mark Leonard’s work has taken him into many of the rooms where our futures are being decided at every level of society. In seeking to understand the ways that globalisation has broken its fundamental promise to make our world safer and more prosperous, Leonard explores how we might wrest a more hopeful future from an age of unpeace.

  • Follow the Pipelines

    £14.99

    This chronicle unravels the mystery of a master spy’s death by following pipelines and mapping wars in the Middle East. In 1947, Daniel Dennett, America’s sole master spy in the Middle East, was dispatched to Saudi Arabia to study the route of the proposed Trans-Arabian Pipeline. It would be his last assignment. A plane carrying him to Ethiopia went down, killing everyone on board. Today, Dennett is recognized by the CIA as a ‘Fallen Star’ and an important figure in US intelligence history. Yet the true cause of his death remains clouded in secrecy. In this book, investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s postwar counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies – the British, French, and Russians – in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East.

  • False Prophets

    £20.00

    Britain shaped the modern Middle East through the lines that it drew in the sand after the First World War and through the League of Nation mandates over the fledgling states which followed. Since the Second World War, oil interests, Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, militant Islam and the Anglo-American special relationship have all drawn Britain back into the Middle East. Nigel Ashton explores the reasons why British leaders have been unable to resist returning to the mire of the Middle East, while highlighting the misconceptions about the region which have helped shape their interventions, and the legacy of history which has fuelled their pride and arrogance. It shows that their fears and insecurities have made them into false prophets who have conjured existential threats out of the Middle East.

  • Hard Choices

    £9.99

    After decades of peace and prosperity, the international order put in place after World War II is rapidly coming to an end. Disastrous foreign wars, global recession, the meteoric rise of China and India and the COVID pandemic have undermined the power of the West’s international institutions and unleashed the forces of nationalism and protectionism. In this lucid and groundbreaking analysis, one of Britain’s most experienced senior diplomats highlights the key dilemmas Britain faces, from trade to security, arguing that international co-operation and solidarity are the surest ways to prosper in a world more dangerous than ever.

  • Border Wars

    £10.99

    Can Donald Trump really build that wall? What does Brexit mean for Ireland’s border? And what would happen if Elon Musk declared himself president of the Moon? In ‘Border Wars’, Professor Klaus Dodds takes us on a journey into the geopolitical conflict of tomorrow in an eye-opening tour of the world’s best-known, most dangerous and most unexpected border conflicts from the Gaza Strip to the space race. Along the way, we’ll discover just what border truly mean in the modern world: how are they built; what do they mean for citizens and governments; how do they help understand our political past and, most importantly, our diplomatic future?

  • The Digital Silk Road

    £20.00

    China is wiring the world, and, in doing so, rewriting the global order. As things stand, the rest of the world still has a choice. But the battle for tomorrow will require America and its allies to take daring risks in uncertain political terrain. Unchecked, China will reshape global flows of data to reflect its interests. It will develop an unrivalled understanding of market movements, the deliberations of foreign competitors, and the lives of countless individuals enmeshed in its systems. Networks create large winners, and this is one contest that democracies can’t afford to lose. Taking readers on a global tour of these emerging battlefields, Jonathan Hillman reveals what China’s digital footprint looks like on the ground, and explores the dangers of a world in which all routers lead to Beijing.

  • The Gate to China

    £25.00

    ‘Impressive ? Fascinating’ Sunday Times

    ‘An authoritative history’ Financial Times

    ‘Gripping and richly researched’ Rana Mitter

    A superb new history of the rise of China and the fall of Hong Kong to authoritarian rule.

  • Chief of Staff

    £20.00

    Once a more sedate affair, since 2016, British politics has witnessed a barrage of crises, resignations and general elections. As Brexit became logjammed, Theresa May’s premiership was the most turbulent of all. In her darkest hour, following the disastrous 2017 election, she turned to Gavin Barwell to restore her battered authority. He would become her Chief of Staff for the next two years – a period punctuated by strained negotiations, domestic tragedy, and intense political drama. In this gripping insider memoir, Barwell reveals what really went on in the corridors of power – and sheds a vital light on May, the most inscrutable of modern prime ministers.

  • Checkpoint Charlie

    £10.99

    This is a powerful, fascinating, and ground-breaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary and most important military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States and her allies confronted the USSR during the Cold War.

  • The Man in the Red Coat

    £10.99

    In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days’ shopping. One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian name, who four years earlier had been the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s greatest portraits. The three men’s lives play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. The beautiful age of glamour and pleasure more often showed its ugly side: hysterical, narcissistic, decadent and violent, a time of rampant prejudice and blood-and-soil nativism, with more parallels to our own age than we might imagine. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, society doctor, pioneer gynaecologist, and free-thinker, a rational and scientific man with a famously complicated private life. ‘The Man in the Red Coat’ is at once a fresh and original portrait of the French Belle Epoque and a life of a man ahead of his time.

  • Asian waters

    £11.99

    In the sphere of future global politics, no region will be as hotly contested as the Asia-Pacific, where great power interests collide amid the mistrust of unresolved conflicts and disputed territory. This is where authoritarian China is trying to rewrite international law and challenge the democratic values of the United States and its allies. The lightning rods of conflict are remote reefs and islands from which China has created military bases in the 1.5-million-square-mile expanse of the South China Sea, a crucial world trading route that this rising world power now claims as its own. No other Asian country can take on China alone. They look for protection from the United States, although it, too, may be ill-equipped for the job at hand.

Nomad Books