This intriguing analysis shows how the British secret services grew from the real threat of Queen Victoria's assassination, and intensified during the Abdication crisis.
Kampfner began his career as a journalist reporting from East Berlin. Since then he has quartered the city, searched archives, interviewed widely. He loves this city. His last book - Why the... read more
A human rights lawyer charts both the history of how the powerful have tried to get inside our heads and also provides a framework to understand how our agency is undermined nowadays.
An elegant exploration of how British Prime Ministers, from Eden to Blair and beyond, have engaged in the Middle East under the misconception that they could help solve disputes because they... read more
On his death in 2014, George Lucas left his diaries - spanning 60 years and pertaining not to his career as a civil servant but to his after-hours pursuits - to their editor.
The story of PayPal, a Silicon Valley startup with a few scruffy tech-heads at the helm. It is now one of the most successful and ubiquitous companies in the world, whose alumni aren't doing... read more
The 'special relationship' was dreamt up by Churchill to keep Britain afloat geopolitically when faced with the loss of empire. Buruma takes a shrewd look at Churchill and FDR, JFK and Macm... read more
By looking at the work and methods of thirteen C20th anthropologists, LM shows how they ended by changing how we see ourselves as much as the 'primitive' societies they were studying.
Nellie Melba, the diva from Queensland who transfixed the world for three decades in the roles of Violetta, Juliette, Rosina, Mimi and co... She was adored by gossip columnists and honoured ... read more
A vulnerable young man travels to Rome in 1934 with his family for his sister's wedding. The car journey is full of mishaps and squabbles, with tempers fraying over divided attitudes towards... read more
LB could turn straw into gold. Here she describes chancing across the writings of a rather obscure Greek philosopher, and the wonders and illuminations that followed. Transformative.
An emergency to rival climate change: all of life on earth as we know it relies on insects, and their numbers are in free-fall. Unnerving and important reminder that global pollution and agr... read more