Profile Books

  • Discipline is destiny

    £10.99

    The inscription on the Oracle of Delphi says: ‘Nothing in excess.’ C.S. Lewis described temperance as going to the ‘right length but no further.’ Easy to say, hard to practice – and if it was tough in 300 BC, or in the 1940s, it feels all but impossible today. Yet it’s the most empowering and important virtue any of us can learn. Without self-discipline, all our plans fall apart. Here, Ryan Holiday shows how to cultivate willpower, moderation and self-control in our lives. From Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius, to Toni Morrison and Queen Elizabeth II, he illuminates the great exemplars of its practice and what we can learn from them.

  • The handover

    £20.00

    ‘The Singularity’ is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before. A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die. They have made us richer, safer and healthier than would have seemed possible even a few generations ago – and they may yet destroy us. ‘The Handover’ distils over 300 years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.

  • Footsloggers

    £30.00

    The only way to truly understand what it was like to fight in the Second World War is to listen to the experiences of those men who were there. And often, there was nowhere more dangerous than on the ground. In ‘Footsloggers’, Peter Hart reconstructs one infantry battalion’s war in staggering detail. Based on his interviews with members of the 16th Durham Light Infantry, Hart bears witness not only to their comradeship, suffering, dreadful losses and individual tragedies, but also their courage and self-sacrifice as they fought their way across North Africa, Italy and Greece.

  • The invention of Essex

    £16.99

    Essex. A county both famous and infamous: the stuff of tabloid headlines and reality television, consumer culture and right-wing politicians. England’s dark id. But beyond the sensationalist headlines lies a strange and secret place with a rich history: of smugglers and private islands, artists and radicals, myths and legends. It’s where the Peasants’ Revolt began and the Empire Windrush docked. And – from political movements like Brexit to cultural events like TOWIE – where Essex leads, the rest of us often follow. Deeply researched and thoroughly engaging, this book shows that there is more to this fabled English county than meets the eye.

  • The observant walker

    £20.00

    When we go for a walk, whether in the countryside or city, we pass through landscapes full of natural beauty and curiosities both visible and invisible – but though we might admire the view, or wonder idly about the name of a flower, we rarely have the knowledge to fully engage with what we see. When we do, our sense of place is expanded, our understanding deepened and we can discover richness in even the most everyday stroll. John Wright has been leading forays around Britain for decades. As an expert forager, he shows people how to identify the edible species that abound – but he also reveals the natural history, stories and science behind our surroundings. Warm, wise and endlessly informative, with helpful illustrations and suggested routes, this book will help you to see the world around you with new eyes – no walk will be the same again.

  • A spotter’s guide to the countryside

    £12.99

    From the enormous to the truly tiny, John Wright illuminates the oddities that pepper our countryside and reveals the many pleasures of spotting and understanding them. Informative, entertaining and beautifully illustrated, this is for anyone who has ever gone outside and wondered what is that?

  • Murder in a heatwave

    £8.99

    As the days get longer, escape your troubles and take a trip to the desperately hot towns where nightfall lingers and a sun-drenched picnic can end in panic. No matter how murderously high the temperatures rise, these stories will chill you to the bone. Featuring terrifying tales of summertime murder and mayhem from Dorothy L. Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Carter Dickson, Michael Innes, Baroness Orczy, Margery Allingham, Ian Rankin, Julian Symons, Ethel Lina White and Rex Stout.

  • The daily dad

    £16.99

    What does it mean to be a great father? And how do you become one? Parenting is a role filled with meaning and purpose, but every dad needs guidance: because fatherhood is not a one-off, it is something you do every day. Instead of a parenting book you read once as a sleep-deprived new parent, ‘The Daily Dad’ provides 366 accessible meditations on fatherhood, one for each day of the year.

  • George

    £16.99

    Then, just in time, before I swung the spade again, I saw, right by the blade and camouflaged by the leaves on the ground, a magpie chick. It squatted belligerently, peering up at me with miniature magpie fury. George. When Frieda Hughes moved to the depths of the Welsh countryside, she was expecting to take on a few projects: planting a garden, painting and writing her poetry column for the ‘Times’. But instead, she found herself rescuing a baby magpie, the sole survivor of a nest destroyed in a storm – and embarking on an obsession that would change the course of her life. As the magpie, George, grows from a shrieking scrap of feathers and bones into an intelligent, unruly companion, Frieda finds herself captivated – and apprehensive of what will happen when the time comes to finally set him free.

  • The Celts

    £10.99

    The history of the Celts is the history of a misnomer. There has never been a distinct people, race or tribe claiming the name of Celtic, though remnants of different languages and cultures remain throughout Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall. The word keltoi first appears in Greek as applied generally to aliens or ‘barbarians’ – and theories of Celticism continue to fuel many of the prejudices and misconceptions that divide the peoples of the British Isles to this day. Often seen as unimportant or irrelevant adjuncts to English history, in ‘The Celts’ Simon Jenkins offers a compelling counterargument.

  • Chums

    £9.99

    Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Daniel Hannan, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians. They debated each other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections, and attended the same balls and black tie dinners. They aren’t just colleagues – they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them. Eleven of the fifteen postwar British prime ministers went to Oxford. In this book, Simon Kuper traces how the rarefied and privileged atmosphere of this narrowest of talent pools – and the friendships and worldviews it created – shaped modern Britain.

  • Ravenous

    £14.99