A. J. Liebling, born in Manhattan in 1904, joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1935 and contributed innumerable articles to the magazine throughout his lifetime, on subjects ranging from food to boxing and France to horse racing. As a war correspondent during the Second World War, he reported from France, England and Algeria, and participated in the Normandy landings. In later life he married the writer Jean Stafford, his third wife. He died in 1963.

A. J. Liebling

A. J. Rosen is an author of YA fantasy and is known as @agatharoza on Wattpad.

A. J. Rosen

A. K. Davidson

A. O. Scott has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000. His writing has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Review of Books, Slate, the New Yorker and the Nation. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2010, Scott is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Criticism at Wesleyan University. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York. 
 
@aoscott

A. O. Scott

A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

A. S. Byatt

A. T. Williams won the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2013 for his book A Very British Killing: The Death of Baha Mousa. He lives in Warwickshire.

A. T. Williams

A. W. Chase

Dubbed ‘The new queen of spy fiction’ by the Guardian newspaper, and ‘the real thing’ by the Washington Post, A.C. 'Ava' Glass is the CWA Dagger-shortlisted author of Alias Emma (The Chase), The Traitor and The Trap. The Traitor was a 2023 Richard and Judy Bookclub pick. Alias Emma was a Barnes and Noble book of the month. A former crime reporter and communications consultant, for five years Ava worked closely with spies. Her time in that world fascinated her, and the people she met back then inspire every book she writes.

A.C. Glass

A.E. Housman

Arthur Edward Waite was the designer and co-creator of the now famous Rider Waite Tarot deck. 
 
An American-born British poet and scholarly mystic, his strong interest in all esoteric matters - divination, magic, Kabbalism, alchemy and Freemasony - led to him penning a number of books. These include the Key to the Tarot, The Book of Ceremonial Magic and A New Encyclopedia of Freemasony.

A.E. Waite

A.E. Warren is the author of the Tomorrow's Ancestors series, which consists of Subject Twenty-One, The Hidden Base, The Fourth Species and The Final Rising. 
 
After spending eight years working as a lawyer, she began to write in the evenings and early mornings as a form of escapism from life in a very small cubicle with lots of files. She self-published her first novels in her spare time, which were picked up by Del Rey UK which is the science fiction/fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. 
 
 She is an avid reader, occasional gamer and fair-weather runner. She lives in the UK with her husband, daughter and hopefully, one day, a wise border terrier named Austen.

A.E. Warren

A.G.D. Maran

A.J. Ayer

A K Benedict writes crime and speculative fiction in a room filled with clowns, mannequins and Doctor Who figures. Her first novel, The Beauty of Murder, was nominated for an eDunnit award and is in development for a major 8-part TV series by Company Pictures. Her second, Jonathan Dark or The Evidence of Ghosts, came out in February 2016. She's written Torchwood audio dramas for Big Finish and her short stories have featured in anthologies including Great British Horror and Best British Short Stories. She lives in St Leonards-on-Sea with her dog, Dame Margaret Rutherford.

A.K.Benedict

A. L. Kennedy has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and has won a host of other awards – including the Costa Book of the Year for her novel Day. She lives in Essex.

A.L. Kennedy

A.M. Ellis is a speculative fiction author and lover of everything steeped in myth and mystery. Her stories often lean into diverse voices, not only in her identity as a Black woman, but in exploring neurodivergence and mental health. A proud introvert and nostalgic gamer, she lives in Maryland, USA, with her husband and three children. Angelica is also the author of Hunt A Killer, a PERFECT SCORE novel, under the pen name A.M. Ellis, which she wrote as an IP for Scholastic in the US.

A.M. Ellis

A.N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for much of his work. He lives in North London.

A.N. Wilson

A.T. Emerald

A.W. Priest

A.B.C. Merriman-Labor was a barrister, writer and munitions worker born in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1877. His published works include A Series of Lectures on the Negro Race and The Story of the African Slave in a Nutshell. He also edited two editions of the Handbook of Sierra Leone. He arrived in the UK in 1904 to study law. In 1907, he organised a centenary commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade in Westminster Abbey. He later embarked on an 'entertainment-lecture' tour called Life and Scenes in Britain, travelling across thousands of miles of West, South West and Central Africa, which he expanded on to create Britons Through Negro Spectacles.

ABC Merriman-Labor

AJ Cronin

AJ Molloy

Aabria Iyengar is an American actress and author.

Aabria Iyengar

Aaliya Jaleel is a freelance illustrator, designer, and visual development artist, currently majoring in Animation at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is also the illustrator of Under My Hijab and Muslim Girls Rise. You can visit her online at www.aaliyamj.com.

Aaliya Jaleel

Aaron Allston

After more than fifteen years of experience as a clinical psychotherapist, Dr Aaron Balick has taken the amazing insights from psychology and psychotherapy out of the consultation room and made them accessible to the wider world. 
 
He has been an ‘agony uncle’ for many years for both CBBC and BBC Radio 1, as well as on television, including BBC Worldwide, BBC 3 and BBC Learning.

Aaron Balick

Aaron Carroll

Aaron Dignan is the founder of The Ready--a global organizational transformation and coaching practice--that helps companies large and small adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. Clients include Johnson &amp; Johnson, Microsoft, Lloyds Bank, Citibank, Boeing, Mailchimp, Airbnb, Dropbox, and charity: water. 
 
He is also the founder of Murmur--a SaaS startup that helps teams scale culture through the magic of working agreements. The Murmur platform will allow every team on the planet to define and share their ways of working. 
 
Dignan is the author of Brave New Work (2019) and Game Frame (2011), co-host of the Brave New Work podcast, and a friend to misfit toys.

Aaron Dignan

Aaron Edwards is a senior lecturer in defence and international affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, specialising in terrorism and counter-insurgency. He is the author and editor of several books, including Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain’s Small Wars Since 1945, and has lectured all over the world on aspects of national and international security. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, n+1, The Point, and Literary Hub, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Aaron Robertson

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Neil Oliver

For longer than recorded history there have been tales of spirits and of places where our hackles rise and our skin turns cold. 
 
Bestselling historian Neil Oliver travels the British Isles on a deliciously spine-chilling tour that spans several centuries and explores more than 20 sites - castles, vicarages and towers, lonely shorelines and forgotten battlefields - to unpick their stories.. 
 
Oliver invokes his family's history alongside that of kings and queens past as he probes why our emotions and senses are heightened in certain locations where the separation between dimensions seems gossamer thin. Our landscape is riven with these places, creaking from the weight of the secrets they hold, the echoes of tragedy and dark deeds . From Inverness to Devon, Co Dublin to Norfolk, Hauntings casts an enjoyably eerie glow with stories that, told generation after generation, are inextricable from place - and considers why they matter.

Hauntings

A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them Across 25 Eerie British Locations

Joachim C. Häberlen

In post-war Europe, protest was everywhere. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Paris to Prague, Milan to Wroclaw, ordinary people took to the streets, fighting for a better world. Their efforts came to a head most dramatically in 1968 and 1989, when mass movements swept Europe and rewrote its history. 
 
In the decades between, Joachim C. Häberlen argues, new movements emerged that transformed the nature of protesting. Activism moved beyond traditional demonstrations, from squatting to staging 'happenings' and camping out at nuclear power plants. People protested in the way they dressed, the music they listened to, the lovers they slept with, the clubs where they danced all night. New movements were born, notably anti-racism, women's liberation, gay liberation and environmentalism. And protest turned inward, as activists experimented with new ways of living and feeling, from communes to group therapy, in their efforts to live a better life in the here and now. 
 
Some of these struggles succeeded, others failed. But successful or not, their history provides a glimpse into roads not taken, into futures that did not happen. The stories in Häberlen's book invite us to imagine different futures; to struggle, to fail, and to try again. In a time when we are told that there are no alternatives, they show us that there could be another way.

Beauty is in the Street

Protest and Counterculture in Post-War Europe

Christopher de Hamel

The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. But we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. 
 
This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years. A monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America - all of them were participants in what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club. 
 
This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel's unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion which crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been. 
 
In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript 'at a bookseller's in a back alley'. This was his reaction: 'The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold - as many of them were - cannot be told.' The members of de Hamel's club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style, and a lifetime's experience.

The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club

Charlie Porter

Why do we wear what we wear? To answer this question, we must go back and unlock the wardrobes of the early twentieth century, when fashion as we know it was born. 
 
In Bring No Clothes, acclaimed fashion writer Charlie Porter brings us face to face with six members of the Bloomsbury Group-the collective of creatives and thinkers who were in the vanguard of a social and sartorial revolution. Each of them offers fresh insight into the constraints and possibilities of fashion today: from the stifling repression of E. M. Forster's top buttons to the creativity of Vanessa Bell's wayward hems; from the sheer pleasure of Ottoline Morrell's lavish dresses to the clashing self-consciousness of Virginia Woolf's orange stockings; from Duncan Grant's liberated play with nudity to John Maynard Keynes's power play in the traditional suit. As Porter carefully unpicks what they wore and how they wore it, we see how clothing can be a means of artistic, intellectual and sexual liberation, or, conversely, a tool for patriarchal control. 
 
As he travels through libraries, archives, attics and studios, Porter uncovers new evidence about his subjects, revealing them in a thrillingly intimate, vivid new light. And, as he begins making his own clothing, his own perspective on fashion-and on life-starts to change. In the end, he shows, we should all 'bring no clothes', embracing not just a new way with fashion but a new philosophy of living-one which activates the connections between the way we dress and the way we think, act and love.

Bring No Clothes

Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion

Anthony Bale

From the medieval bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses. 
 
Using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, north Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a living atlas that blurs the distinction between real and imagined places, offering the reader a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world.

A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages

The World Through Medieval Eyes

Ranulph Fiennes

Co-opted by the British military, archaeologist and adventurer Thomas Edward Lawrence became involved in the 1916 Arab Revolt, fighting alongside guerilla forces, and made a legendary 300-mile journey through blistering heat. He wore Arab dress, and strongly identified with the people in his adopted lands. 
 
 By 1918, he had a £20,000 price on his head. 
 
 Despite people's fascination, Lawrence has long remained unknowable, one of history's most enigmatic explorers. But with in-depth knowledge of what it takes to venture into the unknown, this authoritative biography from explorer Ranulph Fiennes at last brings enthralling insight and clarity to this remarkable life.

Lawrence of Arabia

The definitive 21st-century biography of a 20th-century soldier, adventurer and leader

Alice Albinia

The Britannias tells the story of Britain's islands and how they are woven into its collective cultural psyche. From Neolithic Orkney to modern-day Thanet, Alice Albinia explores the furthest reaches of Britain's island topography, once known (wrote Pliny) by the collective term, Britanniae. Sailing over borders, between languages and genres, trespassing through the past to understand the present, this book knocks the centre out to foreground neglected epics and subversive voices. 
 
The ancient mythology of islands ruled by women winds through the literature of the British Isles - from Roman colonial-era reports, to early Irish poetry, Renaissance drama to Restoration utopias - transcending and subverting the most male-fixated of ages. The Britannias looks far back into the past for direction and solace, while searching for new meaning about women's status in the body politic. Boldly upturning established truths about Britain, it pays homage to the islands' beauty, independence and their suppressed or forgotten histories.

The Britannias

And the Islands of Women

An Island Quest

Simon Heffer

‘An epic new history . . . a work of epic scholarship, breathtaking range, and piercing originality’ Daily Express 
‘An astonishing achievement of narrative history . . . I think the word is "magisterial".’ Spectator 
‘Excellent, thorough, detailed and combatively argued.’ Sunday Times______________________________________ 
 
Sing As We Go is an astonishingly ambitious overview of the political, social and cultural history of the country from 1919 to 1939. 
 
It explores and explains the politics of the period, and puts such moments of national turmoil as the General Strike of 1926 and the Abdication Crisis of 1936 under the microscope. It offers pen portraits of the era's most significant figures. It traces the changing face of Britain as cars made their first mass appearance, the suburbs sprawled, and radio and cinema became the means of popular entertainment. And it probes the deep divisions that split the nation: between the haves and have-nots, between warring ideological factions, and between those who promoted accommodation with fascism in Europe and those who bitterly opposed it. 
__________________________________________'Magisterial . . . an extraordinary achievement.’ Literary Review 
‘A masterful portrayal of political, social and cultural upheaval between the wars.’ Daily Mail

Sing As We Go

Britain Between the Wars

Christopher Somerville

Travelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville, author of The January Man and Ships of Heaven, sets out to discover how the land beneath our feet shapes our past, our present and our future. 
 
Taking a journey of a thousand miles, Christopher Somerville begins in the far north, at the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, formed when the world was still molten, and travels south-eastwards to the furthest corner of Essex, where new land is being formed. Crossing bogs, scaling peaks and skirting quarry pits, he unearths the stories bound up in the layers of rock beneath our feet, and examines how they have influenced everything from how we farm to how we build our houses, from the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. 
 
Told with characteristic humour and insight, this gripping exploration of the British landscape and its remarkable history cannot fail to change the way you see the world beyond your door. 
 
&lsquo;Somerville is a walker&rsquo;s writer&rsquo; Nicholas Crane

Walking the Bones of Britain

A 3 Billion Year Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary

Tommy Conlon

Ronan McGreevy

November 1983. As top supermarket executive Don Tidey sets out on the school run, he is snatched from his car and driven away at speed. The IRA, using kidnapping to fund its armed campaign, has its latest victim. 
 
What follows is a massive manhunt and, twenty-three days later, a chaotic rescue in a Leitrim wood. No one emerges unscathed – not the man at the centre of the drama, not the local community, not the police, not the Irish state. And especially not the families of the soldier and the young police officer killed as Tidey is freed. 
 
Powerful, intimate and searching, The Kidnapping is a brilliantly reported account of an iconic episode and the shadow it still casts.

The Kidnapping

A hostage, a desperate manhunt and a bloody rescue that shocked Ireland

James Holland

'Richly impressive, hard to surpass' William Boyd 
'A notable account of an epic human experience' Max Hastings 
&lsquo;James Holland brings every inch of this battle vividly to life&rsquo; History Revealed 
&lsquo;This excellent book&hellip;The Savage Storm reinforces Holland&rsquo;s reputation as certainly the busiest and probably the most popular military historian of the second world war working today&rsquo; Spectator 
&lsquo;A must for anyone wanting to better understand the brutal campaign&hellip; thoroughly deserves a place on the bookshelf&rsquo; Soldier Magazine 
_____________________ 
 
From the bestselling author of Brothers in Arms comes the story of the most pivotal Allies campaign of World War II. 
 
With the invasion of France the following year taking shape, and hot on the heels of victory in Sicily, the Allies crossed into Southern Italy in September 1943. They expected to drive the Axis forces north and be in Rome by Christmas. And although Italy surrendered, the German forces resisted fiercely and the swift hoped-for victory descended into one of the most brutal battles of the war. 
 
Even though shipping and materiel were already being safeguarded for the D-Day landings, there were still huge expectations on the progress of the invading armies, but those shortages were to slow the advance with tragic consequences. As the weather closed in, the critical weeks leading up to Monte Cassino would inflict a heavy price for every bloody, hard fought mile the Allied troops covered. 
 
Chronicling those dark, dramatic months in unflinching and insightful detail, The Savage Storm is unlike any campaign history yet written. James Holland has always recounted the Second World War at ground level, but this version telling brings the story vividly to life like never before. Weaving together a wealth of letters, diaries, and other incredible documents, Holland traces the battles as they were fought - across plains, over mountains, through shattered villages and cities, in intense heat and, towards the end, frigid cold and relentless rain - putting readers at the heart of the action to create an entirely fresh and revealing telling of this most pivotal phase of the war. 
_____________________ 
 
Praise for James Holland 
 
'Impeccably researched and superbly written' Observer 
'Holland has something new to say.... Filled with insight and detail' Neil Oliver 
'James Holland is the best of the new generation of WW2 historians' Sebastian Faulks 
'[A] captivating and dramatic account. . . Drawn from letters and diaries, Holland&rsquo;s immersive narrative is told through the eye-level perspectives... Readers will be enthralled' Publishers Weekly 
&lsquo;A remarkable achievement by a historian at the height of his powers. Holland has successfully illustrated both the significance and the savagery of the Italian campaign... through a powerful and compelling narrative&rsquo; Military History Matters

The Savage Storm

The Brutal Battle for Italy 1943

David Mitchell

This will be the most refreshing, entertaining history of England you'll have ever read. 
 
Certainly, the funniest. 
 
Because David Mitchell will explain how it is not all names, dates or ungraspable historical headwinds, but instead show how it's really just a bunch of random stuff that happened with a few lucky bastards ending up on top. Some of these bastards were quite strange, but they were in charge, so we quite literally lived, and often still live, by their rules. 
 
It's a great story. And it's our story. If you want to know who we are in modern Britain, you need to read this book.

Unruly

A History of England's Kings and Queens

Brendan O'Leary

A century ago the resolution to Ireland’s long struggle for independence was a settlement that saw six of its northern counties remain in the United Kingdom while the other twenty-six formed the new Republic of Ireland. Since partition the unification of the two parts of the island has seemed impossible, particularly because of the bloody legacy of past conflict. 
 
However, by 2030, if not sooner, the demographic and electoral advantages of Ulster Unionists – who identify as British – will be over. Political developments on both sides of the Irish border, and within Great Britain, make calls for unification referendums increasingly likely. Yet even those who want these to happen are not prepared. 
 
Making Sense of a United Ireland is a remarkable exploration of this most contentious of issues by Professor Brendan O'Leary, a global expert on divided places, who has worked on the Irish question for nearly forty years.

Making Sense of a United Ireland

Should it happen? How might it happen?

Ciarán Murphy

The GAA is Ireland's largest civil society organisation, woven into the fabric of families and communities - and yet most books about Gaelic games focus on the greatest players and inter-county teams. This is the Life is a book about the 99%: a witty and provocative look at grassroots GAA from the most intelligent and interesting Gaelic games pundit at work today. 
 
Ciarán Murphy - of Second Captains and the Irish Times - has an unmatched feel for the timeless elements of this world and a finger on the pulse of change. He looks at the plight of rural clubs that are losing their players to the cities - and he does so not only as a journalist but as a footballer who made the same move himself. He writes about working as an assistant in the clothing shop owned by the family of Jarlath Fallon - both Ciarán's sporting hero and the local postman. And he looks a things we usually prefer not to talk about, like the role of social class in the GAA. 
 
This is the Life is a book about the places the GAA comes from, the places it can take a person, and theings that make a local club worth fighting for.

This is the Life

Days and Nights in the GAA

Rowland White

'Captivating' Daily Telegraph 
'Stunning' James Holland 
'Superb' Daily Express 
'Wonderful' John Nichol 
'Remarkable' RAF News 
_________________________________Built of lightweight wood, powered by two growling Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, impossibly aerodynamic, headspinningly fast and armed to the teeth, the de Havilland Mosquito was the war-winning wonder that should never have existed: the aircraft the RAF didn't think it wanted then couldn't do without. 
 
Flying on operations barely eighteen months after a single prototype was ordered off the drawing board, it was the answer to its pilots' prayers: a stunningly versatile warplane capable of leaving the Luftwaffe in its wake to attack when and where the enemy was least expecting it. 
 
Excelling as a spyplane, night-fighter and pathfinder for Bomber Command's heavies the Mossie's reputation was cemented by a series of daredevil bombing raids across occupied Europe, including on Berlin itself, where only surprise, speed and precision could ensure success. 
 
So when Churchill's top secret Special Operations Executive needed to destroy the Gestapo HQ in the centre of downtown Copenhagen to prevent a devastating Nazi last stand that might prolong the war for many months, there was only one machine for the job. 
 
This is the story of that legendary aircraft told through that one impossible mission. 
 
Like Rowland White's previous books, Mosquito is an unputdownable mix of utterly compelling storytelling, incredible human stories and fascinating technological detail, which sheds never-before-told light on a pivotal mission that helped bring the war to its bloody and brutal close. 
_________________________________ 
 
Praise for Mosquito 
 
’10/10' Helen Fry 
'Excellent ... provides thrilling accounts' The Past 
'A brilliant read' Army Rumour Service Book Club 
'A triumph' Damcasters podcast 
'A tremendous book ... can't recommend it more highly' We Have Ways podcast 
'An addictive, moving and tenaciously researched tale ... his best book to date' Flypast 
'Mosquito reads like a thriller... Unreservedly recommended' Aviation Historian 
'It's like the best adventure stories except this one is the real thing' Best of British 
'A fascinating insight into one of the aircraft's most dramatic episodes' History of War 
'White immerses the reader in the action from the first page ... a must read' Flight International 
'Thrilling... A multi-layered, painstakingly assembled narrative... an instant classic' Warships IF

Mosquito

The RAF's Legendary Wooden Wonder and its Most Extraordinary Mission

Aoife Moore

Sinn Féin, long widely-regarded as the political wing of the Provisional IRA, is the most popular political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic. A movement once synonymous with a paramilitary campaign is on the brink of taking real power through purely democratic means. But if Sinn Féin has mastered the art of electoral politics, it remains strangely opaque. Who really runs the party? How is it funded? And what can we expect of it as a party of government? 
 
Aoife Moore, Irish Journalist of the Year 2021. explores these and other burning questions in The Long Game. Drawing on exclusive interviews with current and former members of Sinn Féin, she builds up a picture of a party undergoing a profound, and still incomplete, transformation. She looks at the key individuals and moments that put the party on its present course, and she explores tensions within the party and the wider republican movement. 
 
Packed with revelatory details, The Long Game is a groundbreaking telling of contemporary Ireland's biggest and most elusive political story.

The Long Game

Inside Sinn Féin

Sally Bedell Smith

Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents' letters and diaries and those of their close friends and family, Sally Bedell Smith brings the love story of this iconic royal couple to life. Deeply researched and revealing, this book shows how a devoted marriage helped the King and Queen meet the challenges of World War II, lead a nation, solidify the public's faith in the monarchy, and raise their daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. 
 
Sally Bedell Smith gives us an inside view of the lives, struggles, hopes, and triumphs of King George VI and Elizabeth during a dramatic time in history.

George VI and Elizabeth

The Marriage That Shaped the Monarchy

Nigel Townson

'Spain is different,' proclaimed the Franco regime in the 1940s, keen to attract foreign tourists. For the most part, the world has agreed. From the end of its 'glorious empire' in 1898 to the dazzling World Cup victory in 2010, the prevailing narrative of modern Spain has emphasized the country's peculiarity. Generations of historians and readers have been transfixed by its implosion into civil war in the 1930s, seduced by the valiant struggle of the republicans, horrified by the barbarity of the dictatorship which followed. Franco's Spain was seen as an anomaly in the midst of prosperous and permissive post-war Western Europe. But, as Nigel Townson shows in this richly layered and exciting new history, beyond the familiar image, there lies a radically different history of Spain: of a dynamic and progressive society that fits firmly into the narrative of modern Europe. 
 
Drawing on over forty years of post-Franco scholarship, The Penguin History of Modern Spain transforms our knowledge of Spain and its politics, society, economics and culture. It interweaves cutting-edge Spanish-led research - never before published in English - and testimonies of peasants, housewives, soldiers, workers, entrepreneurs, feminists and worker-priests, for an original and surprising portrait, which allows us, at last, to discern the country behind the veil of propaganda and romantic myths which still endure today

The Penguin History of Modern Spain

1898 to the Present

Noreen Masud

Noreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes - their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the 'flat place' she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain's landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. 
 
Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape - a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.

A Flat Place

Linda Yueh

Since America's Wall Street Crash of 1929, the global economy has weathered the most tumultuous century in financial history. From the currency crises of the 1980s, to Japan's housing meltdown, the dot com boom and bust, the global financial crash and the COVID pandemic, crash after crash has sent shockwaves through our world. 
 
The Great Crashes tells the stories of ten of these historic financial events. They serve as a series of cautionary tales, each with their own lessons to be learnt. With clear-eyed analysis, renowned economist Professor Linda Yueh uses these meltdowns to extract a critical three-step framework to help recognise the early signs of a crash, mitigate the effects and even prevent them in the future. There is very little that is certain in economics, except for this: there will be another financial crisis. Combining her in-depth knowledge with her compelling storytelling, The Great Crashes is essential reading that offers urgent lessons for the modern world.

The Great Crashes

Lessons from Global Meltdowns and How to Prevent Them

Chips Channon

'The greatest British diarist of the 20th century. An astonishing achievement. By turns frivolous and profound.' Ben Macintyre, The Times 
 
'Wickedly entertaining.' Andrew Marr, New Statesman 
 
'An irresistible, saucy read . . . One of the most impressive editions of our time.' The Telegraph 
 
'They're among the most glittering and enjoyable diaries ever written' Observer 
____________________________________ 
Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. 
 
Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. Whether describing the antics of London society in the interwar years, or the growing scandal surrounding his close friends Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson during the abdication crisis, or the mood in the House of Commons in the lead up to the Munich crisis, his sense of drama and his eye for the telling detail are unmatched. These are diaries that bring a whole epoch vividly to life.

Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1)

1918-38

Anna Funder

Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own, and when she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why - and how - was she written out of the story? 
 
Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells' marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WW II in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell's private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer - and what it is to be a wife. 
 
Compelling and utterly original, Wifedom speaks to the unsung work of women everywhere today, while offering a breathtakingly intimate view of one of the most important literary marriages of the 20th century. It is a book that speaks to our present moment as much as it illuminates the past.

Wifedom

Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life

Mariana Mazzucato

Rosie Collington

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and hollowed-out, risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies' reliance on companies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown. The 'Big Con' is possible in today's economies because of the unique power that consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks - as advisors, legitimators and outsourcers - and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. The Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies. 
 
Mazzucato and Collington expertly debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy. With a wealth of original research, they argue brilliantly for investment and collective intelligence within all organizations and communities, and for a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good. We must recalibrate the role of consultants and rebuild economies and governments that are fit for purpose.

The Big Con

How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies

Chris Patten

In June 1992 Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not - as other British colonies over the decades - for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously. Over the next five years he kept this diary, which describes in detail how Hong Kong was run as a British colony and what happened as the handover approached. The book gives unprecedented insights into negotiating with the Chinese, about how the institutions of democracy in Hong Kong were (belatedly) strengthened and how Patten sought to ensure that a strong degree of self-government would continue after 1997. Unexpectedly, his opponents included not only the Chinese themselves, but some British businessmen and civil service mandarins upset by Patten's efforts, for whom political freedom and the rule of law in Hong Kong seemed less important than keeping on the right side of Beijing. The book concludes with an account of what has happened in Hong Kong since the handover, a powerful assessment of recent events and Patten's reflections on how to deal with China - then and now.

The Hong Kong Diaries

Isabel Hardman

Since its foundation in 1948, the NHS has come to define our national identity, making history (and the headlines) again and again - from cutting edge discoveries like the first 'test tube baby', to its heroic response to the Coronavirus crisis. But the NHS has also become a battleground for some of the fiercest political contests of our time, perceived either as a national treasure, or as a lumbering piece of state machinery in need of renovation. 
 
In Fighting for Life, bestselling journalist Isabel Hardman cuts through the sentimentality and sloganeering on all sides of the political spectrum. Packed with gripping stories from the people at the beating heart of this venerated institution - its nurses, doctors, patients and the politicians who decide its fate - this is the essential book for understanding our NHS, and who we are as a nation.

Fighting for Life

The Twelve Battles that Made Our NHS, and the Struggle for Its Future

Peter H. Wilson

Iron and Blood is a startlingly ambitious and absorbing book, encompassing five centuries of political, military, technological and economic change to tell the story of the German-speaking lands, from the Rhine to the Balkan frontier, from Switzerland to the North Sea. Wilson's narrative considers everything from weapons development to recruitment to battlefield strategy. 
 
Germans' military impact on the rest of Europe has been immense. If there is one constant it has been the sense of being beset by seemingly more powerful enemies - France or Russia or Turkey - and the need to strike a rapid knockout blow to ensure a favourable result. Almost inevitably, this has in practice meant protracted, relentless and often unwinnable wars, and - in 1939-1945 - moral catastrophe. 
 
The author of definitive books on the Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years War, Peter Wilson has with Iron and Blood written his masterpiece.

Iron and Blood

A Military History of the German-speaking Peoples Since 1500

Ryan Gingeras

The Ottoman Empire had been one of the major facts in European history since the Middle Ages. Stretching from the Adriatic to the Indian Ocean, the Empire was both a great political entity and a religious one, with the Sultan, as Caliph, the successor to Mohammed. 
 
Yet the Empire's fateful decision to support Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914 doomed it to disaster, breaking it up into a series of European colonies and what emerged as an independent Saudi Arabia. 
 
Ryan Gingeras's superb new book explains how these epochal events came about and shows how much we still live in the shadow of decisions taken so long ago. Would all of the Empire fall to marauding Allied armies, or could something be saved? In such an ethnically and religiously entangled region, what would be the price paid to create a cohesive and independent new state? The story of the creation of modern Turkey is an extraordinary, bitter epic, brilliantly told here.

The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire

Elaine Farrell

Leanne McCormick

Ireland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a good place to be a woman. Among the wave of emigrants from Ireland to North America were many, many young women who travelled on their own, hoping for a better life. Some lived lives of quiet industry and piety. Others quickly found themselves in trouble - bad trouble, and on an astonishing scale. 
 
Elaine Farrell and Leanne McCormick, creators of the celebrated 'Bad Bridget' podcast, have unearthed a world in which Irish women actually outnumbered Irish men in prison, in which you could get locked up for 'stubbornness', and in which a serial killer called Lizzie Halliday was described by the New York Times as 'the worst woman on earth'. They reveal the social forces that bred this mayhem and dysfunction, through stories that are brilliantly strange, sometimes funny, and often moving. From sex workers and thieves to kidnappers and killers, these Bridgets are young women who have gone from the frying pan of their impoverished homeland to the fire of vast North American cities.

Bad Bridget

Crime, Mayhem and the Lives of Irish Emigrant Women

Jeremy Black

King of Britain for sixty years and the last king of what would become the United States, George III inspired both hatred and loyalty and is now best known for two reasons: as a villainous tyrant for America's Founding Fathers, and for his madness, both of which have been portrayed on stage and screen. 
 
In this concise and penetrating biography, Jeremy Black turns away from the image-making and back to the archives, and instead locates George's life within his age: as a king who faced the loss of key colonies, rebellion in Ireland, insurrection in London, constitutional crisis in Britain and an existential threat from Revolutionary France as part of modern Britain's longest period of war. 
 
Black shows how George III rose to these challenges with fortitude and helped settle parliamentary monarchy as an effective governmental system, eventually becoming the most popular monarch for well over a century. He also shows us a talented and curious individual, committed to music, art, architecture and science, who took the duties of monarchy seriously, from reviewing death penalties to trying to control his often wayward children even as his own mental health failed, and became Britain's longest reigning king.

George III (Penguin Monarchs)

Madness and Majesty

Robert Tombs

The English first came into existence as an idea, before they had a common ruler and before the country they lived in even had a name. They have lasted as a recognizable entity ever since, and their defining national institutions can be traced back to the earliest years of their history. 
 
Since those precarious days of invasion and conquest, with many spectacular changes of fortune, their political, economic and cultural contacts have left traces for good and ill across the world. This book describes the history of the English and its meanings, from the earliest beginnings in wetlands and monasteries to the cosmopolitan energy of today's England. Robert Tombs draws out important threads running through the story, including participatory government, language, law, religion, ever-changing relations with other peoples, and the diverse and sometimes conflicting ways the English have understood their own history. 
 
This book, the first single-volume work on this scale for more than half a century, presents a challenging modern account, bringing out the strength and resilience of English government, the deep patterns of division, and yet also the persistent capacity to come together in the face of danger.

The English and their History

Updated with two new chapters

A Private Thriller

A series of children's modern classic novels by renowned 20th century children's writers. All the titles in this series have the A Puffin Book logo, contemporary-style covers, and child-friendly endnotes.

A Puffin Book

A Ripley Novel

A Slice of the Moon

A Victorian Mystery

A Walk in...

A Women’s Murder Club Thriller

A chef Paul Delamare Mystery

Aberrations

Across the Universe

Actiphons

Adelia Aguilar

Adrian Mole

Adventures in Time

Aftermath

Against War

Age of X

Agent 21

Agent Z

Detective Aidan Waits is a troubled junior detective haunted by his past. Facing an uncertain future, and disconnected from his history, DC Waits and his partner, Detective Inspector Peter 'Sutty' Sutcliffe work on Manchester's streets to uncover the city's worst criminals among the grime of the underworld.

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