Showing 241–252 of 265 resultsSorted by latest
The unmissable inside story of the most dramatic general election campaign in modern history and Theresa May’s battle for a Brexit deal, the greatest challenge for a prime minister since the Second World War.
By the bestselling author of All Out War, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2017.
This is the story of generations of parents, Britain’s richest and grandest, who believed that being miserable at school was necessary to make a good and successful citizen. Childish suffering was a price they accepted for the preservation of their class and their entitlement. The children who were moulded by this misery and abuse went on – as they still do – to run Britain’s public institutions and private companies. Confronting the truth of his own schooldays and the crimes he witnessed, Alex Renton has revealed a much bigger story.
Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction – his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. The essays in ‘The Rub of Time’ range from superb critical pieces on Amis’s heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump’s rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.
‘Things Can Only Get Worse?’ is the personal story of one political activist helping Labour progress from its 1997 landslide to the unassailable position it enjoys today. Along the way, he stood for Parliament against Theresa May but failed to step into her shoes; he was dropped from Tony and Cherie’s Christmas card list after he revealed he always sent their card on to a friend from the SWP; and he campaigned for a new non-selective inner-city state school, then realised this meant he had to send his kids to a non-selective inner-city state school.
From total unknown to one of Europe’s most powerful men in just a few years. At 39, Emmanuel Macron is France’s youngest leader since Napoleon and is intent on conquering the world stage. But what lies beneath the façade of this youthful, ultra-confident and calculating president? How did someone from small-town France assemble – in just 12 months – the network, team and finances to win the presidency? Now elected, can he make the French feel better about themselves? Can he rally Europe around him and turn the tide of right-wing nationalism sweeping the continent? Critically, what will his presidency mean for Britain?
Taking the Great Rift Valley – the geological fault that will eventually tear Africa in two – as his central metaphor, Alex Perry explores the split between a resurgent Africa and a world at odds with its rise. Africa has long been misunderstood – and abused – by outsiders. Perry travelled the continent for most of a decade, meeting with entrepreneurs and warlords, professors and cocaine smugglers, presidents and jihadis, among many others. Opening with a devastating investigation into a largely unreported war crime in Somalia in 2011, he finds Africa at a moment of furious self-assertion.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017
#1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘The best political book of the year’ Andrew Marr
‘A superb work of storytelling and reporting. Sets new benchmark for the writing of contemporary political history’ Guardian
The only book to tell the full story of how and why Britain voted to leave the EU.
From the condemned slums of Southam Street in West London to the corridors of power in Westminster, Alan Johnson’s multi-award-winning autobiography charts an extraordinary journey, almost unimaginable in today’s Britain. This third volume tells of Alan’s early political skirmishes as a trades union leader, where his negotiating skills and charismatic style soon came to the notice of Tony Blair and other senior members of the Labour Party. As a result, Alan was chosen to stand in the constituency of Hull West and Hessle, and entered Parliament as an MP after the landslide election victory for Labour in May 1997. His book takes you into a world which is at once familiar and strange: this is politics as you’ve never seen it before.
In this memoir written at the age of 33, Barack Obama, son of a black African father and a white American mother, describes the search for meaning in his life as a black American.
When Tony Blair brought Alan Johnson into Parliament in 1997, it was something of a culture shock. Blair famously said to him ‘Oh, so you really are working class aren’t you’. But Alan eventually took to the corridors of power as to the manner born, fuelled by his passionately held principles and his loyalty to his constituents in Hull West and Hessle. But this is no self-aggrandising memoir of politicking and skulduggery. Prepare to see Westminster as you’ve never seen it before.
Clement Attlee was a slightly-built, bald, pipe-smoking and unassuming man who presided over the radical administration of 1945-51 and is sometimes referred to as Britain’s greatest peace-time Prime Minster. This book will pierce the reticence of Attlee and explore the intellectual foundations and core beliefs of one of the most important figures in 20th century British history.
Through the Churchills’ ‘wilderness years’ in the 1930s, to Clementine’s desperate efforts to preserve her husband’s health during the struggle against Hitler, Sonia presents the inspiring but often ignored story of one of the most important women in modern history.
Notifications