Showing titles in Politics & Activism

Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness is a re-examination of the life and thoughts of Jan Smuts. It is intended to remind a contemporary listenership of the remarkable achievements of this impressive soldier-statesman. The author, a former editor of The Star, argues that Smut's role in the creation of modern South Africa should never be forgotten, not least because of his lifetime of devoted service to this country. The book draws a parallel between Smuts and President Thabo Mbeki, both architects of a new South Africa, much lionised abroad yet often distrusted at home.   

From one of America’s greatest nonfiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. Richard Holbrooke was one of the most legendary and complicated figures in recent American history. Brilliant, utterly self-absorbed and possessed of almost inhuman energy and appetites, he was both admired and detested. From his days as a young adviser in Vietnam to his last efforts to end the war in Afghanistan, Holbrooke embodied the postwar American impulse to take the lead on the global stage.

Rudy Giuliani was hailed after 9/11 as “America’s Mayor,” a national hero who, at the time, was more widely admired than the pope. He was brilliant, accomplished—and complicated. He conflated politics with morality, made reckless personal choices, and engaged in self-destructive behavior. A series of disastrous decisions and cynical compromises, coupled with his need for power, money, and attention gradually ruined his reputation, cost him political support, and ultimately damaged the country.

Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement. Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no regrets: killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.” But that doesn’t mean his army wasn’t there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001.

It is rare in history that so many nations in the developed world are in crisis at the same time. There has been a disintegration of trust in political leaders and in the media that holds them to account. For all the progress humankind has made, for all the inventions and new technologies, our society is being undermined by inequality. We should care not simply because of its impact on productivity and growth, but because it's wrong. It's wrong that some don't have enough money to eat whilst others fly wagyu beef halfway across the planet for a couple of amusing mouthfuls.

Princess Margaret was one of the most controversial royal figures of the twentieth century. Widely admired as a young woman, she was famous for her beauty and charisma, but also for her sense of loyalty and duty. The charismatic Princess not only brought color and sex appeal into an otherwise colorless royal family, but did much to help bring the monarchy and its attitudes into the modern world. In recent years, dogged by accidents and ill-health, much of the Princess's youthful vigor and charm, not to mention her hard work, has been forgotten.

In Clouds of Glory: The Life and Legend of Robert E. Lee, Michael Korda, the New York Times best-selling biographer of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ulysses S. Grant, and T. E. Lawrence, has written the first major biography of Lee in nearly 20 years, bringing to life America's greatest and most iconic hero. Korda paints a vivid and admiring portrait of Lee as a general and a devoted family man

His charisma and glamour ensured him the status of a rock star prince. Yet Edward gave up the British throne, the British Empire and his position as Emperor of India to marry his true love, American divorcee Wallis Simpson. So much gossip and innuendo has been levelled at Wallis Simpson that it has become nearly impossible to discern the real woman. Many have wondered why, when Edward could have had anyone he desired, he was smitten with this unusual American woman.

Raised for vastly different futures, one burdened with the responsibility of becoming the future king and the other destined to live in his shadow, Charles and Andrew have spent their lives on different sides of the same coin. War of the Windsors tells, for the first time, the complete story of Charles and Andrew from their diverging childhoods to their current struggles.

Angela Merkel has always been an outsider. A pastor’s daughter raised in Soviet-controlled East Germany, she spent her 20s working as a research chemist, only entering politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And yet within 15 years, she had become chancellor of Germany and, before long, the unofficial leader of the West. Acclaimed author Kati Marton sets out to pierce the mystery of this unlikely ascent.

The Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, put a horrific closing note on a norm-shattering presidency, as the twice-impeached Donald Trump rode a wave of denial and resentment out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and crashed back at Mar-a-Lago—seemingly wounded, seemingly done. But he wasn’t. And what, exactly, was he building in there? Meridith McGraw vividly chronicles the incredible period of Trump’s exile in South Florida and brings us inside the gilded walls of his private club, where an alternate reality in which the 2020 election was stolen became Republican Party orthodoxy.

Things Can Only Get Worse is the personal story of one political activist helping Labour progress from its 1997 landslide to the unassailable position it enjoys today. Along the way he stood for Parliament against Theresa May; he was dropped from Tony and Cherie's Christmas card list after he revealed he always sent their card on to a friend from the SWP; and he campaigned for a new nonselective inner-city state school, then realised this meant he had to send his kids to a nonselective inner-city state school.

Eddie Chapman was a womaniser, blackmailer and safecracker. He was also a great hero - the most remarkable double agent of the Second World War. Chapman became the only British national ever to be awarded an Iron Cross for his work for the Reich. He was also the only German spy ever to be parachuted into Britain twice. But it was all an illusion: Eddie fooled the Germans in the same way he conned his victims in civilian life. He was working for the British all along.

As one of the world's leading experts on disaster, Lucy Easthope has been at the centre of the most seismic events of the last few decades - advising on everything from the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami to the 7/7 bombings, the Salisbury poisonings, the Grenfell fire and the COVID-19 pandemic. She has travelled across the world in this unusual role, seeing the very worst that people have to face and finding that even the most extreme of situations, we find the very best of humanity. In her moving memoir, she reveals what happens in the aftermath.

Adolf Hitler was an unlikely leader - fuelled by hate, incapable of forming normal human relationships, unwilling to debate political issues - and yet he commanded enormous support. So how was it possible that Hitler became such an attractive figure to millions of people? That is the important question at the core of Laurence Rees’ new book. The Holocaust, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the outbreak of the Second World War - all these cataclysmic events and more can be laid at Hitler’s door.

In this entertaining and engaging memoir, former ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles lifts the lid on embassy life throughout the world. For over 30 years Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished Foreign Office career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high-profile posts across the globe.

For decades, government pundits have dismissed these "coincidental" deaths, even regarding them as "myths" as "urban legends." Like most people, Richard and David were initially unsure about what to make of these 'coincidences'. After all, events don't "consult the odds" prior to happening; they simply happen. Then someone comes along later and figures out what the odds of it happening were. Some of the deaths seemed purely coincidental; heart attacks, hunting accidents.

'Never before had the world seen four such giants coexisting. Sometimes friends, more often enemies, always rivals, these four men together held Europe in the hollow of their hands.' The colourful story of the four very different men who created our modern world: Henry VIII, Francis I of France, Charles V of Spain and Suleiman the Magnificent: popular history at its best from John Julius Norwich.

In Alexander the Great, Anthony Everitt judges Alexander’s life against the criteria of his own age and considers all his contradictions. We meet the Macedonian prince who was naturally inquisitive and fascinated by science and exploration, as well as the man who enjoyed the arts and used Homer’s great epic, the Iliad, as a bible. As his empire grew, Alexander exhibited respect for the traditions of his new subjects and careful judgment in administering rule over his vast territory. But his career also had a dark side.

From the author of the Magellan biography, Over the Edge of the World, a mesmerizing new account of the great explorer. Christopher Columbus's 1492 voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in search of a trading route to China, and his unexpected landfall in the Americas, is a watershed event in world history.