Showing titles in Europe

A Day Like Today charts John’s journey from the poverty of his post-war childhood in Cardiff, leaving school at 15, to the summits of broadcasting. Humphrys was the BBC’s youngest foreign correspondent, the first reporter at the catastrophe of Aberfan, an experience that marked him for ever; he was in the White House when Richard Nixon became the first American president to resign, in South Africa during the dying years of apartheid, and in war zones around the globe throughout his career. John was also the first journalist to present the Nine O’Clock News on television.

Sinn Féin 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 in 2021, explores these and other burning questions in The Long Game.

Labour has shifted from the New Left, to New Labour, to Corbynista Labour. Now, it may see power again with a most unlikely group of activists from the 1970s becoming the fourth generation to win power since 1945. Only Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair have won power from a sitting Conservative government. Of the 10 general elections since 1979, Labour has won three, all under Blair. This record of failure, if applied to any other walk of life, would raise the fundamental question of why continue to fight a losing battle?

A dazzling new history of the modern world, as told through the remarkable story of population change. Every phase since the advent of the industrial revolution - from the fate of the British Empire, to the global challenges from Germany, Japan and Russia, to America's emergence as a sole superpower, to the Arab Spring, to the long-term decline of economic growth that started with Japan and has now spread to Europe, to China's meteoric economy, to Brexit and the presidency of Donald Trump - can be explained better when we appreciate the meaning of demographic change across the world.

At a time when politics in Britain is experiencing unprecedented turmoil, this Very Short Introduction audiobook examines the past, present, and possible future of British politics. Tony Wright puts current events into a longer and larger perspective, ranging from political ideas to political institutions and offering an overview of the British political tradition.

George Friedman has forecasted the coming trends (politics, technology, population, and culture) of the next century in The Next 100 Years, and focused his predictions on the coming ten years in The Next Decade. Now, in Flashpoints, Friedman zooms in on the region that has, for 500 years, been the cultural hotbed of the world - Europe - and examines the most basic and fascinating building block of the region: culture.

In 2008, the universe of Western finance outgrew planet Earth. When Wall Street imploded, a death embrace between insolvent banks and bankrupt states consumed Europe. Half a dozen national economies imploded, and several more came close. But the storm is far from over.... From the aftermath of the Second World War to the present, Varoufakis recounts how the eurozone emerged not as a route to shared prosperity but as a pyramid scheme of debt.

The headlines may be all COVID now; as a few short months ago, they were all Brexit, but breakdown of the UK's political sphere has been a long time coming and it is a symptom of a much deeper malaise. We seem to have lost our faith in all our social institutions, from parliament and the press to banking and religion. It is this wider disillusionment that All in It Together, a cultural, political and social history of Britain from 2000 to 2015, explains.

In the fifteenth century, even before the city states of the Apennine Peninsula began to coalesce into what would become, several centuries later, a nation, "Italy" exerted enormous influence over all of Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Viewing the Italy (the many Italies?) of that time through the lens of today allows us to gather a fragmented, multi-faceted, and seemingly contradictory history into a single unifying narrative that speaks to our current reality as much as it does to a specific historical period. This is what the French historian Fernand Braudel achieves here.

Shortlisted for the Audiobook Download of the Year, 2007.
A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age - rival idealisms - came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity, and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders have thought they knew what they were doing, but found themselves confounded. Every time, the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted.

THE INSIDE STORY OF THE MILIBAND AND CORBYN YEARS, AND HOW THEY LED TO THE LABOUR LEFT'S DEMISE. For 42 years, Chris Williamson was a Labour Party member. In 2010, he was elected to Parliament to represent his home town. However, in 2019, he was unceremoniously suspended from the party after being subjected to a smear campaign, and he later resigned in protest at the betrayal. In this forensic memoir - free of his Labourist clutches - Williamson provides a unique ringside view.

Throughout the century since partition the unification of the two parts of the island seemed impossible. Many still feel that it is, particularly because of the bloody legacy of past conflict. However, by 2030, if not sooner, Ulster unionists' demographic and electoral advantages will be over. And in the light of Brexit, the rising popularity of Sinn Féin, political developments both sides of the border, and within Great Britain, Irish unification referendums will become increasingly likely. Yet even those who want these to happen are not prepared.

This book is Khodorkovsky's account of what is happening in Russia today and what could happen in the future. Putin will not last forever: sooner or later, there will be a post-Putin era. But Russia's history has been deeply shaped by an autocratic trap: a revolution against an autocracy has produced another autocracy, followed by another revolution and another autocracy, and so on. If Russia is to find its place as a constructive partner in a global community of civilized nations, then it has to escape this vicious cycle.

As a young civil servant, Caroline Slocock became the first ever female private secretary to any British Prime Minister and was at Margaret Thatcher's side for the final 18 months of her premiership. A left-wing feminist, Slocock was no natural ally, and yet she became fascinated by the woman behind the Iron Lady façade and by how she dealt with a world dominated by men. As events inexorably led to Margaret Thatcher's downfall, Slocock observed the vulnerabilities and contradictions of the woman considered by many to be the ultimate anti-feminist.

Emerging from a collection of disparate city states 150 years ago, no other country has had as turbulent a history as Germany or enjoyed so much prosperity in such a short time frame. Today, as much of the world succumbs to authoritarianism and democracy is undermined from its heart, Germany stands as a bulwark for decency and stability. Mixing personal journey and anecdote with compelling empirical evidence, this is a searching and entertaining exploration of the country many in the West still love to hate.

For centuries, British identity has been shaped by ideas of exceptionalism, grandeur and competence. Yet British democracy is failing. Governments supported by a minority of voters are elected with enormous majorities under a deeply unrepresentative first-past-the-post system. The result has been failed leaders delivering wounding blows to the country's economy, prosperity and international image. Britain Is Better Than This explores what lies beneath this sense of malaise, revealing the structural and constitutional failures at the heart of a sclerotic political system.

Once a more sedate affair, since 2016, British politics has witnessed a barrage of crises, resignations and general elections. As Brexit became logjammed, Theresa May's premiership was the most turbulent of all. In her darkest hour, following the disastrous 2017 election, she turned to Gavin Barwell to restore her battered authority. He would become her chief of staff for the next two years - a period punctuated by strained negotiations, domestic tragedy and intense political drama.

Discover the prodigious global influence of il bel paese in this star-studded retelling of Italy's past-from a foremost author of historic Italy. The Shortest History books deliver thousands of years of history in one riveting, fast-paced book.

The 2010s were a decade of foodbanks, riots, and the rebirth of political alternatives. Looking to escape a future of rising debt, falling living standards and climate meltdown, a set of movements were born. A new wave of optimistic, radical young people were building mass movements outside the political bubble, rejecting the neo-liberal consensus and the enrichment of the 1%, and laying the foundations of a new left. Eight years later, Bernie Sanders was favorite to clinch the Democratic Party nomination, and Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum had taken over the Labour Party in Britain.

How Britain Ends is a book about history, but also about the strange, complicated identity of Britishness. In the past, it was possible to live with delightful confusion: one could be English, or British, Scottish or Irish and a citizen/subject of the United Kingdom (or Great Britain). For years that state has been what Gavin Esler calls a 'secret federation', but without the explicit federal arrangements that allow Germany or the USA to survive. Now the archaic state, which doesn't have a written constitution, is coming under terrible strain.