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Drawing on half a century of travel and experience, ‘Homelands’ tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries – how, having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945, it slowly recovered and rebuilt, liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe ‘whole, free and at peace.’ And then faltered. Humane, expert and deeply felt, ‘Homelands’ is full of encounters, conversations and anecdote.
We tend to think about the Middle Ages as a dark, backward and unchanging time characterised by violence, ignorance and superstition. By contrast we believe progress is the consequence of science and technological innovation, and that it was the inventions of recent centuries which created the modern world. We couldn’t be more wrong. As Ian Mortimer shows in this fascinating introduction to the Middle Ages, people’s horizons – their knowledge, experience and understanding of the world – expanded dramatically. All aspects of life were utterly transformed between 1000 and 1600, marking the transition from a warrior-led society to that of Shakespeare.
Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, ‘The Song of the Cell’ is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human.
Despite being unable to play an instrument, Susan Rogers became an extraordinarily successful record producer – and certainly one of the most successful women record producers in history – because of her ability to listen. (She was an engineer on Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’). ‘This is What It Sounds Like’ distils a lifetime’s expertise as a producer and an award-winning professor with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, to present a new theory of listening for everyday music fans. Each person has a unique identity as a listener, she explains, determined by seven influential dimensions of musical listening: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm and timbre.
From two prize-winning New York Times investigative journalists, an explosive, deeply-reported expose of McKinsey & Co., the international consulting firm that advises corporations and governments around the world.
Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West. Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. The regime he heads is autocratic and corrupt. Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin’s leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with. Philip Short’s magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin’s Russia.
In ‘The Age of the Strongman,’ Gideon Rachman finds global coherence in the chaos of the new nationalism, leadership cults and hostility to liberal democracy. We are in a new era: authoritarian leaders have become a central feature of global politics. Since 2000, self-styled strongmen have risen to power in capitals as diverse as Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Brasilia, Budapest, Ankara, Riyadh and Washington. These leaders are nationalists and social conservatives, with little tolerance for minorities, dissent or the interests of foreigners. At home, they claim to be standing up for ordinary people against globalist elites; abroad, they posture as the embodiments of their nations. And everywhere they go, they encourage a cult of personality. What’s more, these leaders are not just operating in authoritarian political systems but have begun to emerge in the heartlands of liberal democracy.
Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s land mass and claiming nearly 500 colonial subjects, Britain’s empire was the largest empire in human history. For many, it epitomised our nation’s cultural superiority, but what legacy have we delivered to the world? Spanning more than 200 years of history, Caroline Elkins reveals evolutionary and racialised doctrines that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve British imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in Victorian calls for punishing indigenous peoples who resisted subjugation, and how over time, this treatment became increasingly institutionalised.
Set in Venice, 1522, this is ‘eye-witness history’ telling the story of Suleyman’s rise to power in the 16th century. Sensitive intelligence arrives from the east confirming the European powers’ greatest fear: the vastly rich Ottoman Sultan has amassed all he needs to wage total war – and his sights are set on Rome. With Christendom divided, Suleyman the Magnificent has his hand on their entrails.
Britain and Germany were at war for almost six long years. For prolonged periods of time – from September 1940 to May 1941, and again from December 1943 to March 1945 – London was under sustained, sometimes unrelenting, aerial bombardment by night and by day. Throughout the war, London was the nation’s front line, and the capital and its people bore the brunt of the nation’s suffering. Yet if the bombing defined the era for those who lived through it, the months of terror were outnumbered by those spent knitting together the skein of daily life at work, in the home, on the allotment, in the cinema or theatre and, not least, standing in those interminable queues for daily necessities that were such a feature of London’s war. Jerry White has unearthed what actually happened during those years, getting close up to the daily lives of ordinary people, telling the story through their own voices.
In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei – one of the world’s most famous artists and activists – tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation’s most celebrated poet.
History does not repeat, but it does instruct. In the 20th century, European democracies collapsed into fascism, Nazism and communism. These were movements in which a leader or a party claimed to give voice to the people, promised to protect them from global existential threats, and established rule by an elite with a monopoly on truth. European history shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary people can find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. History can familiarise, and it can warn. Today, we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to totalitarianism in the 20th century. But when the political order seems imperilled, our advantage is that we can learn from their experience to resist the advance of tyranny. Now is a good time to do so.
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