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£12.99
Our laws and justice system are vast and ancient: they might touch our lives when we have an accident, a wrong is done to us, or we have a family difficulty. And they cover everything from the personal to the regulation of our government. Lady Hale – former President of the Supreme Court and an inspirational figure admired for her historic achievements and for the causes she has championed – shows us how the law is on our side. Taking us into the complexities of real courts and real decisions, we see that we all have rights. Here are true stories from every part of the justice system, from lowly benefits tribunals and magistrates’ courts to the lofty heights of the Royal Courts of Justice and the Old Bailey; stories about the dilemmas of deciding what is right and just, which invite you to say where justice lies before knowing what the courts decided.
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For the first time in history, we have the ability to create sustainable prosperity for all, but currently that wealth is concentrated in a tiny number of hands. It isn’t abundance that’s the problem; it is distribution. In this engaging, frequently surprising account, Tim Wu, one of the world’s foremost experts on anti-monopoly law, draws on fascinating case studies in the history of technology’s explosive rise to demonstrate emphatically that breaking monopolies will ultimately unleash creativity and growth – and reduce the vast inequality that inevitably leads to social upheaval and political chaos. Wu also sets out an alternative blueprint that preserves the economic flourishing that platforms catalyse, allowing tech platforms to play a major role in creating and sustaining an economic model of prosperity not just for the few but for the many.
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The tortured poet. The rebellious scientist. The monstrous artist. The tech disruptor. You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. Taking us from the Renaissance Florence of Leonardo da Vinci to the Floridian rocket launches of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Helen Lewis unravels a word that we all use – without really questioning what it means. Along the way, she uncovers the secret of the Beatles’ success, asks how biographers should solve the Austen Problem, and reveals why Stephen Hawking thought IQ tests were for losers (before taking one herself). And she asks if the modern idea of genius – a class of special people – is distorting our view of the world.
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2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found. 2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.
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Newfoundland, 1919. Buffeted by winds, an unwieldy aircraft – made mainly from wood and stiff linen – struggled to take off from the North American island’s rocky slopes. Cramped side by side in its open cockpit were two men, freezing cold and barely able to move but resolute. They had a dream: to be the first in human history to fly, non-stop, across the Atlantic Ocean. But there were three other teams competing against them, and as the waves raged a few miles below, memories of wartime crashes resurfaced. Mining letters, diaries and evocative unpublished photographs, David Rooney’s deeply researched account of the audacious contest shows how it was the airmen’s thrilling wartime experiences that ultimately led them to the ‘Big Hop’, and brought old friends together for one more daring adventure.
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In the 1970s, a network of radical extremists terrorised the West with plane hijackings and hostage-takings. Among them were the beautiful young Leila Khaled with her jewellery made from grenade rings, the hard-drinking philanderer Carlos the Jackal sporting shades and open-neck shirts, and the radical leftists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. They sought to liberate the Palestinians and overthrow western imperialism, orchestrating spectacularly violent attacks that held governments to ransom and the world gripped to their television screens. Drawing on decades of research, declassified archive material and original interviews with witnesses and participants, Jason Burke provides a masterful account of their exploits over the course of this dark decade.
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On remote Tuga de Oro, vet Charlotte Walker’s caseload of donkeys, cows, and ailing lizards has only increased. She still can’t believe the humiliating truth about her father. Probably, she ought to feel worse than she does. But the islanders have taken Charlotte to their hearts and somehow, between days on the farms and nights with a new love interest, she’s content to remain in blissful retreat from her real life in London. Just for now. But real life hits the island with the force of a tropical storm: Charlotte’s mother arrives. Lucinda Compton-Neville knows an identity crisis when she sees one, and has come to haul her daughter back on course: back to England, back to her career, back home where she belongs.
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One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
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Eleni put an arm around him and said: ‘Come, come, life is ahead of us. Raise your soul now. We have much to do’. This is a book about how the great forces of history shape us – and how world-famous political activist Yanis Varoufakis was inspired by the resilience and the courage of his family, from his mother Eleni and grandmothers Anna and Trisevgeni, to his partner Danae. It is both an intimate portrait of a political awakening and a dramatic sweep through Greece’s history of post-colonial independence, Nazi occupation, communist partisan resistance, Cold War fracture, civil war, fascist dictatorship, socialist revival and tumultuous present-day economic collapse.
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In the Burning Ghats of Calcutta where the dead are laid to rest, a man is found murdered, his throat cut from ear to ear. The body is that of a popular patron of the arts, a man who was, by all accounts, beloved by all: so what was the motive for his murder? Despite being out of favour with the Imperial Police Force, Detective Sam Wyndham is assigned to the case and finds himself thrust into the glamorous world of Indian cinema.
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It is summer, and Sebastian is in treatment following a breakdown that has left him with a fragile hold on reality and a persistent hunger to connect with the mother who abandoned him as a child. His therapist, Martin, is also facing challenges, including his adopted daughter Olivia’s tenuous relationship with her biological mother – a predicament that makes Sebastian’s struggle feel uncannily close to her own. Olivia is producing a radio series on natural disasters, which itself seems to be running parallel to the events unfolding in her personal life, as her best friend Lucy faces a grave diagnosis and her husband, Francis, pursues his mission of rewilding the world. Over the course of the next year their fates collide in outrageous and poignant ways, as each of their destinies is revealed in a marvellous new light.
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How have secrets changed over the generations, and what does that tell us about ourselves and our world? In her intimate new book, bestselling social historian Juliet Nicolson uncovers one of the most enigmatic yet revealing aspects of human behaviour. According to a leading American psychotherapist most of us are keeping 13 secrets at any one time. Secrets can thrill, but they are just as likely to torment; and the deepest ones echo far down the generations. The secrets we keep inside reflect the conventions and taboos of the world outside. As women traditionally sit at the heart of family life, their secrets can open a unique window onto wider society. The book unlocks a period of significant transformation for women, from the restrictions just after WWII, through the emancipation of the 1960s and 1970s, to the opportunities and dangers women meet online today.
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Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young – young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him?
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On the run after an act of violence against the American government, twenty-five-year-old Jenny Shimada is drawn into caring for three younger fugitives. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a San Francisco millionaire, has become a national celebrity for joining her captors’ revolutionary cell. Yet as Jenny and her charges pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York to California, isolation turns to paranoia and their radical ideals soon begin to fracture.
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After the fall of France in June 1940, only Britain stood between Hitler and total victory. Desperate for allies, Winston Churchill did everything he could to bring the United States into the conflict, drive the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany apart and persuade neutral countries to resist German domination. By 1942, after the German invasion of Russia and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the British-Soviet-American alliance was in place. Yet it was an improbable and incongruous coalition, divided by ideology and politics and riven with mistrust and deceit. Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin were partners in the fight to defeat Hitler, yet they were also rivals who disagreed on strategy, imperialism and the future of liberated Europe. Only by looking at their points of conflict, as well as of co-operation, are we able to understand the course of the war and world that developed in its aftermath.
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On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Beholden to the expectations of home and family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever.
