Showing 13–24 of 48 resultsSorted by latest
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£10.99
A devastatingly original look at the world’s worst dictators, through the eyes of their personal chefs. What is it like to cook for the most dangerous men in the world? In this darkly funny and fascinating book, Witold Szablowski travels across four continents in search of the personal chefs of five dictators. From the savannahs of Kenya to the faded glamour of Havana, and the bombed-out streets of Baghdad, Szablowski finds the men and women who cooked fish soup for Saddam Hussein, roasted goat for Idi Amin and chopped papaya salad for Pol Pot. He reveals the strangeness of a job where a single culinary mistake could be fatal, but a well-seasoned dish could change your life. And in doing so, he lifts the veil on what life is like at the very heart of power.
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£10.99
On 20 November 1974, British Labour MP and Privy Counsellor John Stonehouse faked his death in Miami and, using a forged identity, entered Australia hoping to escape his old life and start anew. One month later his identity was uncovered and he was cautioned; the start of years of legal proceedings. In a tale that involves spies from the communist Czechoslovak secret service, a three-way love affair and the Old Bailey, John’s daughter examines previously unseen evidence, telling the dramatic true story, disputing allegations and upturning common misconceptions which are still in circulation.
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£18.99
In 1922, Major Herbert Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor, was found guilty of, and executed for, poisoning his wife, Katharine, with arsenic. Armstrong’s case has all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, from a plot by Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. It is a near-perfect whodunnit. 100 years later, Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, a time of newspaper sensationalism, hypocrisy and sanctimonious morality.
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£20.00
On the 12th of May 1982, as the Falklands conflict became a shooting war, ITN journalist Julian Manyon and his crew were kidnapped on the streets of Buenos Aires and put through a traumatic mock execution by the secret police. Less than eight hours later they were invited to film an exclusive interview with an apologetic President Galtieri, head of the Argentine Junta. Timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the conflict, this book is an extraordinary personal insight into the war behind the war, seen through the eyes of a reporter who was fortunate to escape with his life.
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£12.99
Inspired by her popular Twitter account, ‘The Year I Stopped To Notice’ brings together Miranda Keeling’s observations of the magic, humour, strangeness and beauty in ordinary life. Through the changing seasons, on city streets and on buses, in parks and cafes, Miranda notices things: moments between friends, the interactions of strangers, children delighting in the world around them, the quiet melancholy of lost items on the pavement.
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£16.99
Recently widowed, Winnie, 84, was in need of some companionship. Someone to help with the weekly food shop and offer tips on the crossword. Ben, 34, was looking for a new housemate. As the UK was locked down in 2020, Ben and Winnie’s lives interwove, forming an unlikely friendship, where lessons were learnt and grief, both personal and that of a nation, was explored.
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£25.00
Money has many apparently magical properties. It can be created out of the void – and vanish without so much as a puff of smoke. It can flash through space. It can grow without limit. And it can blow up without warning. David Orrell argues that the emerging discipline of quantum economics, of which he is at the forefront, is the key to shattering the illusions that prevent us from understanding money’s true nature. In this colourful tour of the history, philosophy and mathematics of money, Orrell demonstrates how everything makes much more sense when we replace our classical economic models with ones based on quantum probability – and reveals the explosive reality of what is left once the illusions are stripped away.
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£9.99
In 2013, travel writer Ben Aitken decided to follow in the footsteps of his hero – literally – and started a journey around the UK, tracing the trip taken by Bill Bryson in his classic tribute to the British Isles, ‘Notes from a Small Island.’ Staying at the same hotels, ordering the same food, and even spending the same amount of time in the bath, Aitken’s homage – updated and with a new preface for 2022 – is filled with wit, insight and humour.
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£9.99
After over a decade of Bitcoin, which has now moved beyond lore and hype into an increasingly robust star in the firmament of global assets, a new and more important question has arisen. What happens beyond Bitcoin? The answer is decentralised finance – ‘DeFi’. Tech and finance experts Steven Boykey Sidley and Simon Dingle argue that DeFi – which enables all manner of financial transactions to take place directly, person to person, without the involvement of financial institutions – will redesign the cogs and wheels in the engines of trust, and make the remarkable rise of Bitcoin look quaint by comparison.
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£7.99
Since March 2020, babies have been born into a world of masks, hand washing and social distancing. They met their grandparents on video calls. Their parents held them up to windows and took them for long walks in the rain. Pia Bramley’s illustrations capture the intimacy of the small, strange world of the pandemic baby. She draws on her own experience as a new parent, telling the story of a child’s first year against the backdrop of the pandemic: the quiet streets of the first lockdown, the relative freedom of summer, the long nights of autumn and winter and, finally, new hope as spring arrives and life begins to open up again.
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£20.00
The Etymologicon is an occasionally ribald, frequently witty and unerringly erudite guided tour of the secret labyrinth that lurks beneath the English language. What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? Mark Forsyth’s riotous celebration of the idiosyncratic and sometimes absurd connections between words is a classic of its kind: a mine of fascinating information and a must-read for word-lovers everywhere.
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£10.99
Echoing Sherlock Holmes’ famous dictum, John Gribbin tells us: ‘Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is certainly possible, in the light of present scientific knowledge.’ With that in mind, in his sequel to the hugely popular ‘Six Impossible Things and Seven Pillars of Science’, Gribbin turns his attention to some of the mind-bendingly improbable truths of science.
