Herlands
£22.00A landmark exploration of women-led communities worldwide and what they can teach us about new ways to live, think and govern, from BBC global correspondent Megha Mohan.
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Trafalgar
£25.00At or about 1.15 in the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was struck by a 22-gramme, 15-millimetre French musket round fired down from the mizzen top of the Redoutable, a distance of some 70 feet to HMS Victory’s quarter deck. It nicked the edge of his epaulette, and passed diagonally down, through the material of his coat and into the left shoulder, fracturing the upper part of the scapula or shoulder blade, then the second and third rib. It pierced the left lung, dividing a branch of the pulmonary artery, and emerged to sever the spine, splintering the sixth and seventh vertebrae above and below as it crashed between. The soft lead ball – distorted by collisions with bone – ended its flight embedded in muscle two inches below the right scapula. In this fresh and visceral retelling of the battle of Trafalgar, Paul O’Keeffe traces the course of events both prior and subsequent to that fatal shot.
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Holy Places
£12.99This year, as they have for millennia, many people around the world will set out on pilgrimages. But these are not only journeys of personal and spiritual devotion – they are also political acts, affirmations of identity and engagements with deep-rooted historical narratives. Kathryn Hurlock follows the trail of pilgrimage through nineteen sacred sites – from Tai Shan to Jerusalem, Amritsar to Buenos Aires – revealing the many ways in which this ancient practice has shaped our religions and our world. Pilgrimages have transformed the fates of cities, anointed dynasties, provided guidance in hard times and driven progress in good. Filled with fascinating insights, this book unveils the complex histories and contemporary endurance of one of our most fundamental human urges.
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Farewell to Russia
£22.00A razor-sharp, utterly immersive political travelogue that reveals one of the world’s most enigmatic regions
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Hotel Exile
£25.00The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution, the only ‘grand’ hotel on the city’s bohemian Left Bank. Ever since it opened, it has served as a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians. Andre Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. It has a darker history, too. During one short period, it became a focus for some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history. In the 1930s the Hotel Lutetia attracted intellectuals and political activists, forced to flee their homes when Hitler came to power, who met here with the hope of forming an alternative government. But when war came, Paris was occupied, and the hotel became the headquarters of the German military intelligence service – and the centre of their operation to root out enemies of the Reich.
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Bad Friend
£12.99Move over idealised BFFs, glossy gal pals and indestructible work wives. Meet the bad friends. The dangerously romantic school girls of the 1900s. The office gossips of the 1930s. The mum cliques of the 1950s. The angry activists of the 1970s. The coven – women who choose to live together in old age – of the present day. These ‘bad’ friends broke the rules about femininity they didn’t write. Their relationships were controlled, patrolled and judged too intimate, too consuming and in some cases, too powerful. In this history of women’s friendship, celebrated cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith reckons with the ways we understand this complex and vital connection. She takes us from Japan to the Ivory Coast, The Mindy Project to Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, from prisons to film sets to hospital wards and elder communities, untangling the assumptions about good and bad friends we live by.
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The Blood in Winter
£12.99A thrilling political history about the months that brought England to the cusp of civil war, from the acclaimed author of The Blazing World
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Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife
£12.99A spectacular, vivid, groundbreaking work of history which takes us into the mind and lives of medieval women.
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Super Nintendo
£20.00A joyous exploration of the cultural phenomenon that created Mario, Zelda and Pokémon, and an ode to our love of gaming, by one of the most trusted voices in video games writing.
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Born to Rule
£12.95This data-rich sociological study uses everything from census figures to Who’s Who to analyze how, over 125 years, the British elite have used status, elite education, and powerful social networks to shape politics and cultural values. But what happens when elites begin to change-in what they look like, value, and how they position themselves?
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Ancient Myths and Legends Without Men
£22.00Mother. Virgin. Warrior. Witch. Maniac. Monster. The labels applied to mythological women echo throughout history. These archetypes, created in the Ancient World, still resonate today. From the stories of the virgin goddesses Athena and Artemis, the contrasting depictions of wifely duty in Clytemnestra and Penelope, the ecstatic frenzies of the Maenads, Echidna – the so-called mother of all monsters – and the misunderstood Medusa, ‘Ancient Myths and Legends Without Men’ reveals a world where powerful women were both worshipped and feared. Accompanied with beautiful illustrations throughout, uncover the real stories behind the women of ancient mythology and find what they can teach us about being a woman today. Discover the women shaping and subverting womanhood from the very beginning.
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Fenwomen
£10.99Mary Chamberlain’s vivid social and oral history of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens was the first book ever published by Virago. Told through the voices and lives of women, whose memories span over one hundred years, it provides a unique portrait of a working-class, rural community where intermarriage was common, most inhabitants lived all their lives in the village, and until the middle of the twentieth century a single family owned almost all the land.