Showing 1–12 of 116 resultsSorted by latest
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£9.99
David Baddiel would love there to be a God. He has spent a lot of time fantasising about how much better life would be if there actually was such a thing as a Superhero Dad who chased off Death. Unfortunately for him, there isn’t. Or at least, that is Baddiel’s view in this book, which argues that it is indeed the very intensity of his, and everyone else’s, desire for God to exist that proves His non-existence. Anything so deeply wished – for we will, considers Baddiel, make real. The admission of his own divine yearnings makes for a book that is more vulnerable – and more understanding of the value and power of religion – than most atheist polemics.
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£12.99
Caroline Wheeler has been reporting on the contaminated blood scandal – the worst treatment disaster in the history of the NHS – for over two decades. She has been integral to the campaign for justice for the victims and their families, and played a pivotal role in persuading Prime Minister Theresa May to agree to the infected blood inquiry in 2019. ‘Death in the Blood’ is based on thousands of government documents, court and inquiry transcripts, plus interviews with prime ministers, cabinet ministers, Downing Street advisers, senior civil servants, doctors, and above all the victims and their families whose personal testimony forms the beating heart of this book.
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£25.00
People have been drawing lines on maps for as long as there have been maps to draw on. Sometimes rooted in physical geography, sometimes entirely arbitrary, these lines might often have looked very different if a war or treaty or the decisions of a handful of tired Europeans had gone a different way. By telling the stories of these borders, we can learn a lot about how political identities are shaped, why the world looks the way it does – and about human folly. From the Roman attempts to define the boundaries of civilisation, to the secret British-French agreement to carve up the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, to the reason why landlocked Bolivia still maintains a navy, this is a fascinating, witty and surprising look at the history of the world told through its borders.
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£25.00
He’s climbed Everest not long after a heart bypass operation, he’s run seven marathons on seven continents, he’s hauled loaded sledges across both polar ice caps and he’s circumnavigated the earth – Ran Fiennes truly is the world’s greatest explorer, and this book celebrates his 80th birthday by showcasing his greatest achievements in his own words. Featuring interviews and tributes from his friends, colleagues and admirers, ‘Around the World in 80 Years’ celebrates the incredible life of a legendary explorer.
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£18.99
Maurice and Maralyn couldn’t be more different. He is as cautious and awkward as she is charismatic and forceful. It seems an unlikely romance, but it works. Bored of 1970s suburban life, Maralyn has an idea: sell the house, build a boat, leave England – and its oil crisis, industrial strikes and inflation – forever. It is hard work, turning dreams into reality, but finally they set sail for New Zealand. Then, halfway there, their beloved boat is struck by a whale. It sinks within an hour, and the pair are cast adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On their tiny raft, over the course of days, then months, their love is put to the test. Filled with danger, spirit and tenderness, this is a book about human connection and the human condition; about how we survive – not just at sea, but in life.
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£20.00
It has been 11 years since Diane Foley’s son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending. Here, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane’s story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death, in which Diane came face to face with one of the men responsible for her son’s kidnapping and torture. A testament to the power of radical empathy and moral courage, ‘American Mother’ takes us inside one woman’s extraordinary journey to find connection in a world torn asunder, and to fight for others as a way to keep her son’s memory alive.
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£12.99
In ‘The Red Hotel’, former Daily Telegraph Foreign Editor and Russian expert Alan Philps sets out the way Stalin created his own reality by constraining and muzzling the British and American reporters covering the Eastern front during the war and forcing them to reproduce Kremlin propaganda. War correspondents were both bullied and pampered in a gilded cage of the Metropol Hotel. They enjoyed lavish supplies of caviar and had their choice of young women to employ as translators and to share their beds. While some of these translators turned journalists into robotic conveyors of Kremlin propaganda, others were brave secret dissenters who whispered to reporters the reality of Soviet life and were punished with sentences in the Gulag. Here, the story of the role of the women of the Metropol Hotel and the foreign reporters they worked with is told.
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£16.99
Ten years after the publication of the prize-winning Love, Nina comes the author‘s diary of her return to London in her sixty-first year.
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£25.00
‘A GENUINELY NEW HISTORY OF OUR NATION’ DAN JONES
‘A LASTING WORK OF SOCIAL HISTORY’ THE TIMES
***** FIVE STARS FROM THE INDEPENDENT *****
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£25.00
As well as her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of her writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. ‘A Memoir of My Former Self’ collects the finest of this writing over four decades. Mantel’s subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels – revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England – and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia.
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£25.00
No comprehensive biography of the time Paul McCartney spent with Wings has ever been published. A period often dismissed as McCartney’s ‘missing’ years, in fact the band lasted for a decade: two years longer than the Beatles, and wielded such impact and influence that they at one point achieved the status as the biggest live band in the world. Band on the Run sold over six million copies worldwide and became EMI’s biggest selling album of the 1970s in the UK. Music biographer Lesley-Ann Jones has met McCartney many times and knew his late wife Linda. Here she shows how crucial Linda was to the evolution of Wings – at great cost to herself given the ridicule she was to encounter. Drawing on extensive interviews and her trademark meticulous research, Jones shows how this period in Paul McCartney’s career was to become crucial not only to his development as an artist, but to his very survival.
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£9.99
What first looked like yet another blunder in a long list of missteps for Boris Johnson now threatens to topple the government. While the rest of us were missing weddings and funerals, locked down and staying in for the good of others, No. 10 became the party central of the UK. Now, direct from the seat of power, comes this tongue-in-cheek party guide that will teach you everything from throwing a garden party to denying it ever happened.
