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There can be few more important but also more contentious issues than attempting to understand the human propensity for conflict. Our history is inextricably tangled in wave after wave of inter-human fighting from as far back as we have records. How can we make sense of what Einstein called ‘the dark places of human will and feeling’? Richard Overy draws on a lifetime’s study of conflict to write this challenging, invaluable book.
In 2003 Jan van Aken almost helped stop a war. But as he was preparing to go to Baghdad to search for biological weapons, he got a message: the US was determined to avenge 9/11 and wouldn’t wait for UN inspections to take place. The invasion went ahead, and only years later, the world discovered that Iraq had had no biological weapons at that time. From this experience and the many others he has had as a weapons inspector, conflict analyst and activist, in this book van Aken shows how conflict resolution really works. From disinformation and dodgy dossiers to chemical weapons and murderous drones, he identifies why wars start and spiral. He looks at the alternatives, including civil initiatives, diplomacy, sanctions, and international interventions.
A hundred and fifty years of conflict. What does that do to a person’s soul, to the spirit of a nation? To both the occupied and the occupier? International Booker Prize winning Israeli novelist David Grossman has spent decades campaigning for peace in Israel and Palestine. But after October 7th 2023, a day marking the biggest loss of Jewish life in this century, he retreated inwards to ask himself difficult and necessary questions about his beloved nation: How could this massacre have happened? How could the Netanyahu government, tangled in its web of scandals, fail to protect its citizens? And did October 7 and the war that followed take with it their last hope of a two-state solution? In eleven essays David Grossman traces the years leading up to that day and the ensuing war through a string of failures by a morally bankrupt party clinging to power.
Kissinger’s six leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. All of them were formed in a period when established institutions collapsed all over Europe, colonial structures gave way to independent states in Asia and Africa, and a new international order had to be created from the vestiges of the old. Kissinger penetratingly analyses each of these leaders’ careers through the highly individual strategies of statecraft which he presents them as embodying, to show how it is the combination of character and circumstance which creates history. Kissinger’s public experience, personal knowledge and historical perceptions enrich the book with insights and judgements such as only he could make.
Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against the Nazi threat. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten. Tobias Kelly invites us to spend the war with five of these individuals.
Ed Miliband has captured imaginations with his award-winning hit podcast ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’, which discovers brilliant people all around the world who are successfully fixing problems, transforming communities and pioneering global movements. From a citizens’ assembly in Mongolia to the UK’s largest walking and cycling network in Greater Manchester, from flexible working in Finland to the campaign for the first halal Nando’s in Cardiff, ‘Go Big’ draws on the most imaginative and ambitious of these ideas to provide a vision for how to remake society.
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