Aaron Shapiro

Aaron T Beck

Aaron Vallance

Aaron Young was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, and read Politics and Communications at The University of Liverpool. He is a BAFTA-nominated director, producer and executive producer with over 20 years of experience across projects for the BBC, PBS, Channel 4, Channel 5, UKTV, UK Film Council and Arts Council England. A long-time collaborator of acclaimed historian, James Holland, he is the producer and director of the BAFTA-shortlisted BBC titles ‘Battle of Britain: The Real Story’ and, ‘Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the German Dams’, as well as ‘The Battle for Malta’, ‘Normandy ’44: The Battle Beyond D-Day’, the RTS-nominated ‘Imphal &amp; Kohima: Britain’s Greatest Battle.’, and the 3-part series, 'Normandy '44: D-Day and the Battle for France. His most recent credits include 'Hidden Histories of WWII', 'Lost Temples of Cambodia', the RTS-winning ‘Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany’, and ‘Prue Leith: Journey with My Daughter’. Aaron was named in the inaugural list of BAFTA ‘Brits to Watch.’ He is the co-owner of award-winning film and television production company, Bright Button Productions, and lives with his wife and children in Poundbury, Dorset.

Aaron Young

Aatish Taseer

Abbe Prevost

Abbey Bryant is an NYC-based award-winning illustrator. With her BFA in Children's Book Illustration, her notable illustrated books include Nautilus award winner Hazel Mist, Hypnotist as well as an Enchanted Fairy House Kit with Scholastic's Klutz! 
 
As a queer illustrator, LGBTQ+ themes and stories hold a spot near to her heart. Most days she can be found around the city drawing New Yorkers or sketching trees at the park.

Abbey Bryant

Abbey Clancy is a model, television presenter and the host of chart-topping podcast The Therapy Crouch. She was the runner-up of Britain's Next Top Model in 2006, winner of Strictly Come Dancing in 2013 and went on to present Britain's Next Top Model. Later this year she will host Celebrity Homes on ITV.

Abbey Clancy

Abbie Greaves studied at Cambridge University before working in a literary agency for a number of years. She was inspired to write her first novel, The Silent Treatment, after reading a newspaper article about a boy in Japan who had never seen his parents speak to one another before. 
 
Abbie lives in Brighton with her boyfriend.

Abbie Greaves

Abbie Ross is a British author and psychotherapist. Her first book, Hippy Dinners, a funny and poignant memoir of her bohemian childhood in 1970s North Wales, has been optioned by Baby Cow, who are developing it into an 8-part television series. 
Before turning to writing, Abbie had a successful career as a producer at Aardman Animations, the acclaimed studios behind Wallace &amp; Gromit and the film Chicken Run. 
Today, she divides her time between her thriving psychotherapy practice in Bristol, and her writing, and finds that the two careers complement each other perfectly.

Abbie Ross

Abbie Spallen

Abbie Taylor lives in Dublin. She works as a doctor and has two daughters.

Abbie Taylor

Abby L Yates co-founded the Ghostbusters with Erin Gilbert. Ghosts from Our Past was her first book, now finally back in print.

Abby L Yates

Abby Lee

Abby Rawlinson is an integrative therapist with a private practice based in east London, UK. Her work mixes traditional psychotherapeutic theories with cutting-edge, evidence-based techniques into a style that feels relatable, down-to-earth, and compassionate. Abby regularly contributes to articles, including but not limited to Stylist, Elle, BBC, Harpers Bazaar, Sheerluxe, Women's Health, and Psychologies. She can be found on Instagram @therapywithabby or online at therapywithabby.co.uk

Abby Rawlinson

Abby Wambach is a two-time Olympic gold medallist, FIFA World Cup champion, six-time winner of the U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year award and one of Time’s Most Influential People. She is a founder of Treat Media, an award-winning media company that makes art for humans who want to stay human. Abby is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Wolfpack and the New York Times bestseller Forward. Named one of the ‘50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting,’ she is co-host of the chart-topping podcast We Can Do Hard Things, which has received over a half billion plays. Abby is an executive producer of the Sundance award-winning film Come See Me in the Good Light, part owner of the NWSL’s Angel City Football Club and sits on multiple boards. Her most recent book, We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life’s 20 Questions, created with Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle and Treat Media, is being hailed as ‘the guidebook for being alive.’

Abby Wambach

Abel &amp; Cole’s story starts in 1988 with Keith Abel flogging potatoes door-to-door. ‘Of course potatoes are organic,’ he thought, ‘they’re vegetables’. However, he quickly discovered how unnecessarily complicated our food system had become and, consequently, realised the huge benefits of going organic and never looked back. In fact, Abel &amp; Cole still get veg from the farm where Keith's first organic spuds came from. 
To this day, their priorities remain the same. Now, selling 100% organic produce, Abel &amp; Cole believe that organic farming (a holistic system that encourages biodiversity) is the very best way to go. It protects our countryside and the critters that inhabit it, insists on the very best animal welfare, supports your local community and, frankly, tastes heaps better. Abel &amp; Cole think so anyway.

Abel & Cole Limited

Abhijit Banerjee, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics, is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2011, he was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers. Banerjee served on the U.N. Secretary-General’s High-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda.

Abhijit V. Banerjee

Abhishek Mukherjee, 30, is a Delhi-based journalist. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Delhi University, a post-graduate diploma in journalism from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Raipur. He also likes dogs.

Abhishek Mukherjee

Abi Elphinstone grew up in Scotland where she spent most of her childhood running wild across the moors, hiding in tree houses and building dens in the woods. After being coaxed out of her tree house, she studied English at Bristol University and then worked as an English teacher in Africa, Berkshire and London. She is the bestselling and multi-award shortlisted author of RUMBLESTAR (first in The Unmapped Chronicles), SKY SONG &amp; THE DREAMSNATCHER TRILOGY, published by S&amp;S. When she's not writing, Abi volunteers for Beanstalk, speaks in schools and travels the world looking for her next story.

Abi Elphinstone

Abi Falase is a Black British writer and director, reimagining fundamental societal concepts in inventive new worlds. Abi has written and directed a number of plays, including The Village and Rush with the Almedia Theatre, as well as Rift for Immediate Theatre and was shortlisted for the BBC Scriptworks ‘A Thousand Stories’ scriptwriting competition in 2021.

Abi Falase

Abi Titmuss

Abie Longstaff is the eldest of six children and grew up in Australia, Hong Kong and France. She knows all about squabbling, chaos and bossing younger sisters around. So she logically began her career as a barrister. She started writing when her children were born. Her favourite childhood books were Hating Alison Ashley, A Little Princess, Maura's Angel and The Black Stallion and she sneakily reads them again sometimes. Abie lives in Hove with her family.

Abie Longstaff

Abigail Ahern

Abigail is a Brighton-based writer, illustrator and creative producer. Original storytelling has always been at the heart of Abigail's career and she has spent a decade leading social media campaigns for some of the biggest TV &amp; entertainment clients in the world. Abigail also used to perform stand-up comedy and won several tiny trophies for her onstage humour; which involved life-size illustrations, ridiculous songs and rambling stories about her family.

Abigail Balfe

Abigail Docherty

Abigail Foster is a Chartered Accountant and founder of Elent Finance, a financial education company designed to demystify the world of finance and empower you to achieve financial wellbeing. 
 
Abigail has worked with leading financial institutions across the UK, including HMRC, the Bank of England and Downing Street, and global companies such as Google and Goldman Sachs. She hosts a weekly money segment on LBC radio and has also appeared as a finance expert on ITV, Channel 5 and Sky News.

Abigail Foster

Abigail Owen is the #1 New York Times and #1 USA Today bestselling author of 30+ books that range from upper YA (18+) epic romantasy to new adult modern mythic romantasy to super spicy adult paranormal romance. She loves magical worlds with plots that move hot and fast, feisty heroines with sass, heroes with heart, a dash of snark, and oodles of HEAs! Other titles include: wife, mother, Star Wars geek, ex-competitive skydiver, AuDHD, spreadsheet lover, Jeopardy! fanatic, organizational guru, true classic movie buff, linguaphile, wishful world traveler, and chocoholic. Abigail currently resides in Austin, Texas, with her own swoon-worthy hero, their (mostly) angelic teenagers, and an adorable fur baby.

Abigail Owen

Abigail Ulman was born and raised in Melbourne. She has a BA in Creative Arts from the University of Melbourne/VCA and was a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. This is her first book.

Abigail Ulman

Abilio Estévez

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Martyn Rady

Central Europe is not just a space on a map but also a region of shared experience - of mutual borrowings, impositions and misapprehensions. From the Roman Empire onwards, it has been the target of invasion from the east. In the Middle Ages, Central Europeans cast their eastern foes as 'the dogmen'. They would later become the Turks, Swedes, Russians and Soviets, all of whom pulled the region apart and remade it according to their own vision. 
 
Competition yielded repeated cultural effervescences. This was the first home of the High Renaissance outside Italy, the cradle of the Reformation, the starting point of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the symphony and modern nationalism. It was a permanent battleground too for religious and political ideas. 
 
This new history embraces the whole of Central Europe, including the German lands as well as Ukraine and Switzerland. The story of Europe's Middle Kingdoms is a reminder of Central Europe's precariousness, of its creativity and turbulence, and of the common cultural trends that make these lands so distinctive.

The Middle Kingdoms

A New History of Central Europe

Christopher Clark

There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. As if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that had held sway since the defeat of Napoleon simply collapsed. 
 
Christopher Clark's spectacular new book recreates with verve, wit and insight this extraordinary period. Some rulers gave up at once, others fought bitterly, but everywhere new politicians, beliefs and expectations surged forward. The role of women in society, the end of slavery, the right to work, national independence and the emancipation of the Jews all became live issues. 
 
Clark conjures up both this ferment of new ideas and then the increasingly ruthless series of counter-attacks launched by regimes who still turned out to have many cards to play. But even in defeat, exiles spread the ideas of 1848 around the world and - for better and sometimes much worse - a new and very different Europe emerged from the wreckage.

Revolutionary Spring

Fighting for a New World 1848-1849

Buzzy Jackson

1940, Amsterdam. 
 
You're nineteen years old. The war has stolen your future and your country is under siege. The people you love are no longer safe. 
 
Will you stand aside as the menace of Nazi evil tightens its grip on your homeland? Or do you unleash your fury, joining forces with your enemies' enemies, plotting to strike? 
 
Because if not you, then who? 
 
You're drawn deep into a web of plots, disguises and assassinations. The Resistance trained you for this. You flash your enemies a smile and beckon them closer. 
 
Little do they know you've grown used to the weight of a gun in your hand... 
 
Soon they will all know your name. 
 
You're "the Girl with the Red Hair." A match for any Nazi soldier, a true threat, a target. 
 
_______ 
 
A tale of formidable defiance told through the eyes of a young heroine so notorious that Hitler himself personally ordered for her capture. Buzzy Jackson's debut is an unputdownable novel of love, loyalty, and the limits we confront when our deepest values are tested.

The Girl with the Red Hair

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

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

Katja Hoyer

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the iron curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. 
 
In Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West. 
 
Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall.

Beyond the Wall

East Germany, 1949-1990

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

Bernard Wasserstein

Decades ago, the historian Bernard Wasserstein set out to uncover the hidden past of the town forty miles west of Lviv where his family, especially his grandfather Berl, originated: Krakowiec (Krah-KOV-yets). In this book he recounts its dramatic and traumatic history. 'I want to observe and understand how some of the great forces that determined the shape of our times affected ordinary people.' 
 
Wasserstein traces the arc of history across centuries of religious and political conflict, as armies of Cossacks, Turks, Swedes and Muscovites rampaged through the region. In the Age of Enlightenment, the Polish magnate Ignacy Cetner built his palace at Krakowiec and, with his vivacious daughter, Princess Anna, created an arcadia of refinement and serenity. Under the Habsburg emperors after 1772, Krakowiec developed into a typical shtetl, with a jostling population of Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. In 1914, disaster struck. 'Seven years of terror and carnage' left a legacy of ferocious national antagonisms. During the Second World War the Jews were murdered in circumstances harrowingly described by Wasserstein. After the war the Poles were expelled and the town dwindled into a border outpost. Today, the storm of history once again rains down on Krakowiec as hordes of refugees flee for their lives from Ukraine. 
 
In the lives of Wasserstein's own family and the many others he has rediscovered, the people of Krakowiec become a prism through which we can feel the shocking immediacy of history. Original in conception and brilliantly achieved, A Small Town in Ukraine is a masterpiece of recovery and insight.

A Small Town in Ukraine

The place we came from, the place we went back to

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

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

Paul McCartney

'More often than I can count, I've been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. The one thing I've always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.' 
 
In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 161 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs' lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney's personal archive - drafts, letters, photographs - never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. 
 
We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page. There has never been a book about a great musician like it.

The Lyrics

1956 to the Present

Serhii Plokhy

On 24 February 2022, Russia shocked the world by launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the midst of checking on loved ones who were now on the front lines of Europe's largest conflict since the Second World War, acclaimed Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plokhy inevitably found himself attempting to understand the deeper causes of the invasion, analysing its course and contemplating the wider consequences. 
 
The Russo-Ukrainian War is the comprehensive history of a conflict that has burned since 2014, and that, with Russia's attempt to seize Kyiv, exploded a geo-political order that had been cemented since the end of the Cold War. With an eye for the gripping detail on the ground, both in the halls of power and down in the trenches, as well as a keen sense of the grander sweep of history, Plokhy traces the origins and the evolution of the conflict, from the collapse of the Russian empire to the rise and fall of the USSR, and on to the development in Ukraine of a democratic politics soon loathed by its neighbour in the east. 
 
Plokhy argues that Ukraine's defiance of Russia, and the West's demonstration of unity and strength, has presented a profound challenge to Putin's Great Power ambition, and further polarized the world along a new axis. A riveting, enlightening account, this is present-minded history at its best.

The Russo-Ukrainian War

From the bestselling author of Chernobyl

Peter Heather

In the fourth century AD, a new faith exploded out of Palestine. Overwhelming the paganism of Rome, and converting the Emperor Constantine in the process, it resoundingly defeated a host of other rivals. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But, as Peter Heather shows in this compelling history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise to Europe-wide dominance. 
 
In exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Heather shows how Christendom constantly battled against both so-called 'heresies' and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction, to the astonishing revolution in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention and willingness to mobilize well-directed force. 
 
Christendom's achievement was not, or not only, to define official Christianity, but - from its scholars and its lawyers, to its provincial officials and missionaries in far-flung corners of the continent - to transform it into an institution that wielded effective religious authority across nearly all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe. This is its extraordinary story.

Christendom

The Triumph of a Religion

Malcolm Gaskill

One of the last criminal trials using the 1735 Witchcraft Act was, improbably, in London in 1944. The accused was Helen Duncan, a middle-aged Scotswoman. This is her extraordinary story. 
 
Helen Duncan - known since childhood as 'Hellish Nell', for her uncontainable nature - was one of the most popular mediums of the twentieth century, holding seances around the country where she was believed to manifest the spirits of the dead. 
 
What happens when we die? It was the question of the age for a generation which had endured one world war and now was living through another. Mrs Duncan's seances offered an answer. But when she started foretelling naval disasters, she also attracted the unwelcome attention of the secret service. And so just weeks before the Normandy landings, absurdly, anachronistically, she was prosecuted for witchcraft and jailed. Was Nell a conjurer, a martyr or a security risk? 
 
Hellish Nell was first published in 2001 to widespread acclaim. It remains in this revised edition a fascinating window into the unsettled spiritual and psychological mood of the times: a sensational tale of spectacle, credulity and cruelty, and of Britain's last witch.

Hellish Nell

Last of Britain's Witches

Ian Kershaw

The modern era saw the emergence of individuals who had command over a terrifying array of instruments of control, persuasion and death. Whole societies were re-shaped and wars fought, often with a merciless contempt for the most basic norms. At the summit of these societies were leaders whose personalities had somehow given them the ability to do whatever they wished. 
 
Ian Kershaw's new book is a compelling, lucid and challenging attempt to understand these rulers, whether operating on the widest stage (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini) or with a more national impact (Tito, Franco). What was it about these leaders and the times they lived in that allowed them such untrammelled and murderous power? And what brought that era to an end? In a contrasting group of profiles, from Churchill to de Gaulle, Adenauer to Gorbachev, and Thatcher to Kohl, Kershaw uses his exceptional skills to think through how other, strikingly different figures wielded power.

Personality and Power

Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe

Hakim Adi

Despite the best efforts of researchers and campaigners, there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush, and continues mostly apart from a distinct British history, overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest. 
 
Yet, as acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England, 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the globe. And, as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power, it was African and Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns. 
 
Charting a course through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people, Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage, our victory over fascism, the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women, and how, in understanding our history in these terms, we are more able to fully understand our present moment.

African and Caribbean People in Britain

A History

Richard Vinen

For over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production and full employment that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham. 
 
Vinen roots his sweeping story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran, and also about those that everyone ought to have heard of. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub - were caught up in the convulsions of social change. 
 
Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it.

Second City

Birmingham and the Forging of Modern Britain

On 24 February 2022, the lives of Ukrainians were devastatingly altered. Since that day, many of Ukraine's writers have attempted to fathom what is happening to them and to their country. This anthology brings together writing from inside Ukraine, by Ukrainians, available in English for the first time. Here they document everyday life, ponder the role of culture amid conflict, denounce Russian imperialism and revisit their relations with the world, especially Europe and its ideals, as they try to comprehend the horrors of war. 
 
From tearing-downs of Russia's use of culture as justification of the war to moving descriptions of nights spent sheltering in corridors, poignant snatched moments with a husband on his single night away from the army, to descriptions of the eerie weather in the months leading up to the invasion, as if nature was trying to warn Ukraine, these essays reveal the texture, rawness and reality of life in Ukraine under war as never before.

Ukraine 22

Ukrainian Writers Respond to War

Maggie Brookes

A nation torn apart by war. One woman steps into the crossfire. 
 
'This amazing book has everything in it: love, war, history and relevance to today. Gripping.' Russell Kane 
'I insist you read this intelligent empathetic novel. You won't regret it.' Frost Magazine 
'Extraordinary events sensitively told.' Lucy Jago, A Net For Small Fishes 
'I couldn't put it down.' Gill Paul, The Collector's Daughter 
'A heartrending tale of love, courage and sacrifice.' Nikki Marmery, On Wilder Seas 
____________ 
 
1936. Civil war in Spain. A world on the brink of chaos ... 
 
Twenty-one-year-old Lucy is frustrated with her constrained life in Hertfordshire, teaching and keeping house for her domineering father. But she is happy to be living next door to Tom and Jamie, two brothers she has known since childhood, and whom she loves equally. 
 
But her life is turned upside down when Tom decides he must travel to Spain to fight in the bloody Spanish Civil War. He is quickly followed by Jamie who, much to Lucy's despair, is supporting General Franco. 
 
To the dismay of her irascible father, Lucy decides that the only way to bring her boys back safely is to travel to Spain herself to persuade them to come home. 
 
Yet when she sees the horrific effects of the war, she quickly becomes immersed in the lifesaving work the Quakers are doing to help the civilian population, many of whom are refugees. 
 
As the war progresses and the situation becomes increasingly perilous, Lucy realises that the challenge going forward is not so much which brother she will end up with, but whether any of them will survive the carnage long enough to decide ... 
____________ 
 
More praise for Acts of Love and War ... 
 
'Be prepared to lose your heart in the simmering heat of war-torn Spain.' Miranda Malins, The Puritan Princess 
'This is a marvellous book on any level, I thoroughly enjoyed it and could hardly put it down.' Deborahjs 
'Wide in scope and told with honesty, insight and tenderness, a moving and unputdownable story' Judith Allnatt, The Poet's Wife 
'Accomplished and expansive' Anne Morgan, Reading The World 
'Insightful and moving' Katherine Clements, The Crimson Ribbon 
'One of historical fiction's most lyrical and intelligent voices' Rachel McMillan, The London Restoration 
'Emotionally captivating and authentic ... an unforgettable story' Susan Meissner, The Nature of Fragile Things 
_______________ 
 
Readers can't get enough of Acts of Love and War ... 
 
***** 'A tale of passion and passionate caring, and how that can manifest in very different ways.' 
***** 'A masterpiece.' 
***** 'Highly recommended if you enjoy historical fiction.' 
***** 'An amazing and compelling read.' 
***** 'An immersive and powerful story.'

Acts of Love and War

A nation torn apart by war. One woman steps into the crossfire.

Alison Bashford

In his early twenties, poor, depressed, stranded in the Coral Sea on the HMS Rattlesnake, hopelessly in love with the young Englishwoman Henrietta Heathorn, Thomas Henry Huxley was a nobody. And yet together he and Henrietta would return to London and go on to found one of the great intellectual and scientific dynasties of their age. 
 
The Huxley family through four generations profoundly shaped how we all see ourselves, as individuals and as a species. They worked as scientists, novelists, mystics, film-makers, poets and above all, as public lecturers, educators and explainers. 
 
Their speciality was evolution in all its forms. But perhaps their greatest subject was themselves. Alison Bashford's engaging and original book interweaves the Huxleys' momentous public achievements with their private triumphs and tragedies. The result is the history of a family, but also a history of humanity grappling with its place in nature. This book shows how much we owe - for better or worse - to the unceasing curiosity, self-absorption and enthusiasms of a small, strange group of men and women.

An Intimate History of Evolution

The Story of the Huxley Family

Frank Close

In the summer of 1964, a reclusive young professor at the University of Edinburgh wrote two scientific papers which have come to change our understanding of the most fundamental building blocks of matter and the nature of the universe. Peter Higgs posited the existence an almost infinitely tiny particle - today known as the Higgs boson - which is the key to understanding why particles have mass, and but for which atoms and molecules could not exist. 
 
For nearly 50 years afterwards, some of the largest projects in experimental physics sought to demonstrate the physical existence of this boson. Sensationally, confirmation came in July 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. The following year Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. 
 
This revelatory book is 'not so much a biography of the man but of the boson named after him'. It brilliantly traces the course of much of twentieth-century physics from the inception of quantum field theory to the completion of the 'standard model' of particles and forces, and the pivotal role of Higgs's idea in this evolution. Drawing on conversations with Higgs over a decade (a figure generally as elusive as his particle) this is a superb study of a scientist and his era - and of how scientific knowledge advances.

Elusive

How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass

Ben Macintyre

Colditz Castle: a forbidding Gothic tower on a hill in Nazi Germany. You may have heard about the prisoners and their daring and desperate attempts to escape, but that's only part of the real story. In Colditz: Prisoners of the Castle, bestselling historian Ben Macintyre takes us inside the walls of the most infamous prison in history to meet the real men behind the legends. 
 
Heroes and bullies, lovers and spies, captors and prisoners living cheek-by-jowl for years in a thrilling game of cat and mouse - and all determined to escape by any means necessary. Deeply researched and full of incredible stories, this is a tale of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances - and will change how you think about Colditz forever.

Colditz

Prisoners of the Castle

Peter Caddick-Adams

'Magisterial . . . [a] fine, balanced and superb account. It deserves to be read for many years to come.' Telegraph 
 
March 1945. Allied troops are poised to cross the Rhine and sweep on into Germany. Victory is at last within their grasp. But if they believe this victory can be easily won, they face swift disillusionment. The final I00 days of the Second World War will prove to be bitterly and bloodily fought, village by village, town by town. 
 
This is the extraordinary and gripping story of those final I00 days. 
_________________________________________________ 
 
'Superbly written and full of wisdom and deep understanding, this will stand as a defining work on these darkest months of the conflict.' JAMES HOLLAND 
 
'This is the most vivid and detailed narrative of the subject that we are likely to see.' MILITARY HISTORY MAGAZINE 
 
'An impressive work. Lively, informative and comprehensively researched.' CAROLINE MOOREHEAD, SPECTATOR 
 
'An important contribution to military history. A great read.' BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE

1945: Victory in the West

Sinclair McKay

Throughout the twentieth century, Berlin stood at the centre of a convulsing world. This history is often viewed as separate acts: the suffering of the First World War, the cosmopolitan city of science, culture and sexual freedom Berlin became, steep economic plunges, the rise of the Nazis, the destruction of the Second World War, the psychosis of genocide, and a city rent in two by competing ideologies. But people do not live their lives in fixed eras. An epoch ends, yet the people continue - or try to continue - much as they did before. Berlin tells the story of the city as seen through the eyes not of its rulers, but of those who walked its streets. 
 
In this magisterial biography of a city and its inhabitants, bestselling historian Sinclair McKay sheds new light on well-known characters - from idealistic scientist Albert Einstein to Nazi architect Albert Speer - and draws on never-before-seen first-person accounts to introduce us to people of all walks of Berlin life. For example, we meet office worker Mechtild Evers, who in her efforts to escape an oncoming army runs into even more appalling jeopardy, and Reinhart Cruger, a 12-year-old boy in 1941 who witnesses with horror the Gestapo coming for each of his Jewish neighbours in turn. 
 
How did those ideologies - fascism and communism - come to flower so fully here? And how did their repercussions continue to be felt throughout Europe and the West right up until that extraordinary night in the autumn of 1989 when the Wall - that final expression of totalitarian oppression - was at last breached? You cannot understand the twentieth century without understanding Berlin; and you cannot understand Berlin without understanding the experiences of its people. McKay's latest masterpiece shows us this hypnotic city as never before.

Berlin

Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century

David Montenegro

"Occasionally, you and the team come within read of perfection, up there in the rarefied air of the skies. You never know when those moments will come, but it's what you yearn for as a pilot." 
 
The Red Arrows represent the very best speed, agility and precision aerobatic flying in the Royal Air Force, and the people who wear those iconic red flight suits are rigorously selected not just for their flying skills, lightning-fast reflexes and nerves of steel, but for their mental resilience, courage and humility. Written by the Officer Commanding and former Red 1 Team Leader, Wing Commander David Montenegro, and full of never-before-shared tales from pilots past and present, this thrilling history is both a faithful record and a fascinating account of not only what it takes, but what it means, to be a Red Arrow. 
_____________________________________ 
'Heart-pounding, exhilarating' SINCLAIR MCKAY 
'Inspirational . . . the ultimate in teamwork.' TIM PEAKE 
'An exhilarating read!' BEN MILLER 
'The team's place in our hearts is secure.' DAILY MAIL 
'A wild ride' TELEGRAPH

The Red Arrows

The Sunday Times Bestseller

Dominic Lieven

For millennia much of the world was ruled by emperors: a handful of individuals claimed no limit to the lands they could rule over and no limit to their authority, and indeed often claimed a superhuman or divine authority. In practice they ran the gamut from being some of the most remarkable men who ever lived, to being some of the worst and least remarkable. 
 
Dominic Lieven's marvellous new book, In the Shadow of the Gods, is the first to grapple seriously with this extraordinary phenomenon. Lieven compares the great emperors of antiquity, the caliphs and the warrior-emperors of the steppe before he turns to the Habsburg, Russian, Ottoman, Mughal and Chinese emperors, packing the book with extraordinary stories, astute observations and a sense of both delight and horror at these individuals' antics. The entire breadth of extreme human behaviour is here - from warlords to patrons of the arts, from political genius to feeble incapacity and pathological violence. 
 
As one of the great experts both on empires and on Russian history, Lieven is brilliantly qualified to write a book that brings to life a system of rule that dominated most of human history, as well as some of history's grandest and most dismaying figures.

In the Shadow of the Gods

The Emperor in World History

Philip Parker

Discover the 12 crucial moments in Britain's past that will answer the greatest questions for our future in this richly insightful and fascinating history 
 
'A richly entertaining canter through the country's past. Engrossing' INDEPENDENT 
___________ 
 
What is Britain? 
Where lie its boundaries? 
Why are they always changing? 
Are we a small island or a big idea? 
What will we look like next? 
 
In Small Island: 12 Maps that Explain the History of Britain, Philip Parker answers these and other crucial questions about this country and its peoples. 
 
By pondering our intertwined geography and history, he shows how the past has made Britain and how we might yet shape its future.

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