The past is another country, the old saying goes. The same might be said of the future. But which country? For Europeans and Americans today, the answer is Russia.
Today's Russia is an oligarchy propped up by illusions and falsities. But it also represents the fulfilment of tendencies already present in the West. And if Moscow's drive to dissolve Western states and values succeeds, this could become our reality too.
In this visionary work of contemporary history, Timothy Snyder shows how Russia works within the West to destroy the West; by supporting the far right in Europe, invading Ukraine in 2014, and waging a cyberwar during the 2016 presidential campaign and the EU referendum. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the creation of Donald Trump, an American failure deployed as a Russian weapon.
But this threat presents an opportunity to better understand the pillars of our freedoms, confront our own complacency and seek renewal. History never ends, and this new challenge forces us to face the choices that will determine the future: equality or oligarchy, individualism or totalitarianism, truth or lies.
The Road to Unfreedom helps us to see our world as if for the first time. It is necessary reading for any citizen of a democracy.
Spanning the millennia and the continents - from India to Andalusia and from the bazaars of Cairo to the streets of Oxford, this is a story of a Jewish world immersed in and imprinted by the peoples among whom they have dwelled, from the Egyptians to the Greeks, from the Arabs to the Christians.
This work abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. Diamond focuses on what ancient people were endowed with in the way of land, animals and plants, and on the confrontations between less and more advanced people to see how this led to today's inequalities.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE SELECTED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, MAIL ON SUNDAY AND OBSERVER Belonging is a magnificent cultural history abundantly alive with energy, character and colour. From the Jews' expulsion from Spain in 1492 it tells the stories not just of rabbis and philosophers but of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; an opera composer in nineteenth-century Germany. The story unfolds in Kerala and Mantua, the starlit hills of Galilee, the rivers of Colombia, the kitchens of Istanbul, the taverns of Ukraine and the mining camps of California. It sails in caravels, rides the stage coaches and the railways; trudges the dawn streets of London, hobbles along with the remnant of Napoleon's ruined army.
The Jewish story is a history that is about, and for, all of us. And in our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews' search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever.
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER AWARD A magisterial and acclaimed history of post-war Europe, from Germany to Poland, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, selected as one of New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year Europe in 1945 was drained. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another. Today, the Soviet Union is no more and the democracies of the European Union reach as far as the borders of Russia itself. Postwar tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here, demystifying Europe's recent history and identity, of what the continent is and has been.
'It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written...All in all, a real masterpiece' Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler
Chronicles the American West from 1860-1890. The book tells the stories of such famous Red Indian warriors and tribal chieftains as Sitting Bull, Cochise, Crazy Horse and Geronimo.
A magisterial new history book about the bloodlands - the lands that lie between Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany - where 14 million people were killed during the years 1933 - 1944 In the middle of Europe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered fourteen million people in the bloodlands between Berlin and Moscow.In a twelve-year-period, in these killing fields - today's Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Western Russia and the eastern Baltic coast - an average of more than one million citizens were slaughtered every year, as a result of deliberate policies unrelated to combat.
In his revelatory book Timothy Snyder offers a ground-breaking investigation into the motives and methods of Stalin and Hitler and, using scholarly literature and primary sources, pays special attention to the testimony of the victims, including the letters home, the notes flung from trains, the diaries on corpses. The result is a brilliantly researched, profoundly humane, authoritative and original book that forces us to re-examine the greatest tragedy in European history and re-think our past.
Tells the official story that has inspired the British film, The Imitation Game, a nail-biting race against time following Alan Turing the pioneer of modern-day computing and credited with cracking the German Enigma code and his brilliant team at Britain's top-secret code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II.
From the bestselling author of Wild Swans and Mao: The Unknown Story In this groundbreaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi - the most important woman in Chinese history - brought a medieval empire into the modern age. Under her, the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state and it was she who abolished gruesome punishments like 'death by a thousand cuts' and put an end to foot-binding. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a diehard conservative and cruel despot andalso takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing's Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs - with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences.
Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world's population, and as a unique stateswoman.
'Powerful' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'Truly authoritative' New York Times 'Wonderful' Sunday Times Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize
The twentieth century comes to life as an age of ideas - a time when, for good and for ill, the thoughts of the few reigned over the lives of the many. This title presents the triumphs and the failures of prominent intellectuals, adeptly explains both their ideas and the risks of their political commitments.
In spite of the perpetrators' intentions, the Tokyo gas attack left only twelve people dead, but thousands were injured and many suffered serious after-effects. This title features the author's interviews with the victims to tried and established precisely what happened on the subway that day.
What has made women unhappy in the last decade? Faludi writes 'is not their equality' - which they don't yet have - but the rising pressure to halt, even worse, women's quest for that equality.
Full of passion and betrayal, murder and war, the first volume of an epic new series from bestselling historian Alison Weir, bringing five of England's medieval queens to life.
A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year Love, murder, war, betrayal This is the story of the five extraordinary queens who helped the Norman kings of England rule their dominions. Recognised as equal sharers in the royal authority, their story is packed with tragedy, high drama, even comedy.
Heroines, villains, stateswomen, lovers Beginning with Matilda of Flanders, who supported William the Conqueror in his invasion of England in 1066, and culminating in the turbulent life of the Empress Maud, whoc claimed to be queen of England in her own right and fought a bitter war to the end, the five Norman queens are revealed as hugely influential figures and fascinating characters.
In Alison Weir's hands, these pioneering women reclaim their rightful roles at the centre of English history.
''A remarkable, authentic and chilling expose of a global conspiracy that reads like a first-rate conspiracy thriller: a book of gripping, compulsive and disturbing impact'' William Boyd Dark Mirror is the ultimate inside account of the vast, global surveillance network that now pervades all our lives. Barton Gellman''s informant called himself ''Verax'' - the truth-teller. It was only later that Verax unmasked himself as Edward Snowden. But Gellman''s primary role in bringing Snowden''s revelations to light, for which he shared the Pulitzer prize, is only the beginning of this gripping real-life spy story. Snowden unlocked the door: here Gellman describes what he found on the other side over the course of a years-long journey of investigation. It is also the story of his own escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries after he discovered his own name on a file in the leaked document trove and realised that he himself was under attack. Through a gripping narrative of paranoia, clandestine operations and jaw-dropping revelations, Dark Mirror delineates in full for the first time the hidden superstructure that connects government espionage with Silicon Valley. Who is spying on us and why? Here are the answers.
Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction - his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed.
The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis's heroes Nabokov, Bellow and Larkin to brilliantly funny ruminations on sport, Las Vegas, John Travolta and the pornography industry. The collection includes his essay on Princess Diana and a tribute to his great friend Christopher Hitchens, but at the centre of the book, perhaps inevitably, are essays on politics, and in particular the American election campaigns of 2012 and 2016. One of the very few consolations of Donald Trump's rise to power is that Martin Amis is there to write about him.
In this age of emotional political conflict, there is less and less to agree upon. Experts are no longer respected as impartial; public debate is reduced to attack and counter-attack; the boundary between facts and propaganda seems to be dissolving. We live in a world not quite at war but nor exactly at peace.
How did things reach this point, and what can we do about it? In this enlightening, far-reaching and provocative book, William Davies explores how physical and emotional feeling came to reshape our world today, destabilising governments and placing us all on high-alert. Drawing on a 400-year history of scientific and political ideas, he shows how our sensations were once treated with suspicion, before being seized enthusiastically as a path to mass mobilisation in war.
As we enter a new technological and political era, this book reveals the origins of the nervous states in which we now live.
Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. A celebrated essayist as well as novelist, in this, his last collection, he explores many aspects of the modern world with irrepressible curiosity and wisdom written in his uniquely ironic voice.
Written by Eco as articles for his regular column in l'Espresso magazine, he brings his dazzling erudition, incisiveness and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as popular culture and politics, unbridled individualism, conspiracies, the old and the young, mobile phones, mass media, racism, good manners and the crisis in ideological values. It is a final gift to his readers - astute, witty and illuminating.
A collection of essays on the key texts that have shaped the Eco, the novelist and critic. After the opening essay on the general significance of literature, this book examines a number of major authors from the Western canon, such as French writer Nerval's masterpiece, "Sylvie", as well as the works of Cervantes, Swift, and Piero Camporesi.
Draws connections between a range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust to the challenge of 'evil' in understanding the European past. This book shows how much of our history has been sacrificed in the triumph of myth-making over understanding and denial over memory.
The American Civil War was one of the longest and bloodiest of modern wars. It is also one of the most mysterious. This book unpicks the geography, leadership and strategic logic of the war and takes us to the heart of the conflict.
Presenting a vision of Venice, this title charts the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and a trading empire, the wars against Napoleon and the tourist invasions.
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. This title narrates the stories of Henry VIII's six wives: Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleeves, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr.
Much of Peter Ackroyd's work has been concerned with the life and past of London but here, as a culmination, is his definitive account of the city. For him it is an organism with its own laws of growth and change, so he regards this as a "biography" rather than a history.
Characterised by Chomsky's informative style, the enlightening and wide-ranging discussions in this book are an ideal introduction to his work, as well as radical interpretations of political events of the past three decades for those who have been listening for years.
