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£10.99
This is a wide-ranging history of Russian nationalism chronicling Russia’s yearning for empire and how it has affected its politics for centuries. In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and attempted to seize a portion of Ukraine. While the world watched in outrage, this violation of national sovereignty was in fact only the latest iteration of a centuries-long effort to expand Russian boundaries and create a pan-Russian nation. In this book, award-winning historian Serhii Plokhy argues that we can only understand the merging of imperialism and nationalism in Russia today by delving into its history.
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£14.99
Eltham, South London. 1984: the warm fug of the swimming pool and the slow splashing of a boy learning to swim but not yet wanting to take his foot off the bottom. Fast-forward four years. Photographers and family wait on the shingle beach as a boy in a bright orange hat and grease-smeared goggles swims the last few metres from France to England. He has been in the water for twelve agonising hours, encouraged at each stroke by his coach, John Bullet, who has become a second father. This is the story of a remarkable friendship between a coach and a boy, and a love letter to the intensity and freedom of childhood.
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£9.99
A hospice chaplain’s lessons on the meaning of life, from those who are leaving it. What are the top regrets of the dying? That’s what Kerry Egan, a hospice chaplain, learned as she listened to her patients on their deathbeds, witnessing what she calls the ‘spiritual work of dying’ – the work of finding or making meaning of one’s life, the experiences it contained and the people who have touched it. In this book she recalls the stories she heard – stories of hope and regret, shame and pride, mystery and revelation and secrets held too long. This isn’t a book about dying – it’s a book about living. Each of Egan’s patients taught her something; in this moving and beautiful book, she imparts their poignant and profound lessons on how to live a life without regrets.
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£9.99
In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines. Now, writing with singular clarity and restraint, Hans’s sister, the editor and publisher Sigrid Rausing, tries to make sense of what happened. Mayhem is an eloquent and timely attempt to understand the conundrum of addiction, and a memoir that is as poignant and riveting as it is devastating.
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£10.99
The Greek myths are the greatest stories ever told, passed down through millennia and inspiring writers and artists as varied as Shakespeare, Michelangelo, James Joyce and Walt Disney. They are embedded deeply in the traditions, tales and cultural DNA of the West. In Stephen Fry’s hands the stories of the titans and gods become a brilliantly entertaining account of ribaldry and revelry, warfare and worship, debauchery, love affairs and life lessons, slayings and suicides, triumphs and tragedies. You’ll fall in love with Zeus, marvel at the birth of Athena, wince at Cronus and Gaia’s revenge on Ouranos, weep with King Midas and hunt with the beautiful and ferocious Artemis. Thoroughly spellbinding, informative and moving, Stephen Fry’s ‘Mythos’ perfectly captures these stories for the modern age – in all their rich and deeply human relevance.
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£9.99
To some he was Orphan X. Others knew him as the Nowhere Man. But to Jack Johns he was a boy named Evan Smoak. Taken from an orphanage, Evan was raised inside a top secret government programme and trained to become a lethal weapon. By Jack. And yet for all the dangerous skill he instilled in his young charge, Jack Jones cared for Evan like a son. But Jack knew too much about a programme that had gone rotten – he was a loose end that needed to be dealt with. But if you go after the only person who ever treated him like a human being, you can guarantee that the Nowhere Man will be coming for you. Hellbent on making things right.
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£9.99
When Jacqueline moves to south-west France with her husband, she embraces rural village life and buys two pigs to rear for slaughter. But as she gets to know the animals better, her English sentimentality threatens to get in the way and she begins to wonder if she can actually bring herself to kill them. This is a memoir about that fateful decision, but it’s also about the ethics of meat eating in the modern age, and whether we should know, respect and even love the animals we eat. At its heart, this book is a love story, exploring the increasing attachment of the author for her particular pigs, and celebrating the enduring closeness of humans and pigs over the centuries.
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£14.99
Anne Applebaum’s books have explained the history of Russia and Eastern Europe as compellingly as any other historian. Based on a mass of previous untranslated documents and hundreds of testimonies, Anne Applebaum’s ‘Red Famine’ tells the story of the Bolshevik war on Ukraine, from the brief moment of Ukrainian independence in 1917 to Stalin’s deliberately engineered famine in 1932-33. That genocide killed nearly five million people, destroyed the national aspirations of Ukraine for two generations and has real echoes in the politics of the present.
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£8.99
The formation of England happened against the odds – the division of the country into rival kingdoms, the assaults of the Vikings, the precarious position of the island on the edge of the known world. But King Alfred ensured the survival of Wessex, his son Eadweard expanded it, and his grandson {thelstan finally united Mercia and Wessex, conquered Northumbria and became Rex totius Britanniae. Tom Holland recounts this extraordinarily exciting story with relish and drama.
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£9.99
Most politicians write autobiographies to ‘set the record straight’ and provide retrospective justification for their careers. That is not the case with this book. Chris Patten’s career has taken him from the outer London suburbs to the House of Commons, a seat in the Cabinet, last Governor of Hong Kong, Chairman of the BBC and Chancellor of Oxford University. About all of these he is enlightening and entertaining.
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£9.99
As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life. This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin.
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£18.99
In March 2015, British businessman and the chairman of Arcadia Group Sir Philip Green sold BHS for 1 to Retail Acquisitions, owned by Dominic Chappell, a serial bankrupt who filed BHS for administration shortly after. By April 2016, BHS had debts of 1.3bn, including a pensions deficit of 571m. This title follows Green’s journey to the big time, the sale of BHS and the subsequent investigation that concluded with Green paying 363m to the Pensions Regulator.
