Adventures in democracy

the turbulent world of people power

Democracy is a living, breathing thing and Erica Benner has spent a lifetime thinking about the role ordinary citizens play in keeping it alive: from her childhood in post-war Japan, where democracy was imposed on a defeated country, to working in post-communist Poland, with its ...

The revolutionary temper

Paris, 1748-1789

A brilliant account of the coming of the French Revolution, and the culminating work of this most distinguished historian 'Events do not come naked into the world. They come clothed - in attitudes, assumptions, values, memories of the past, anticipations of the future, hopes and fears ...

Who's Afraid of Gender?

From a global icon, a bold, essential account of how a fear of gender is fuelling reactionary politics around the world Judith Butler, the ground-breaking philosopher whose work has redefined how we think about gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on gender that have become ...

The end of Enlightenment

empire, commerce, crisis

The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was ...

Magus

the art of magic from Faustus to Agrippa

A revelatory new account of the magus - the learned magician - and his place in the world of Renaissance Europe At the heart of the extraordinary ferment of the High Renaissance stood a distinctive, strange and beguiling figure: the magus. An unstable mix of scientist, bibliophile ...

The machine age

an idea, a history, a warning

A sweeping history of and meditation on humanity's relationship with machines, showing how we got here and what happens next Faith in technological fixes for our problems is waning. Automation, which promised relief from toil, has reactivated the long-standing fear of job redundancy. Information ...

Underground empire

how America weaponized the world economy

An explosive new vision of geopolitics from two trail-blazing political scientists Deep beneath our feet, vast and sprawling, lies one of the most sophisticated empires the world has ever known. At first glance, it might not look like much - it is made up of fibre ...

The identity trap

a story of ideas and power in our time

The origins, consequences and limitations of an ideology that has quickly become highly influential around the world. For much of their history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. It is no surprise then that many who passionately believe in social justice have ...

Going infinite

the rise and fall of a new tycoon

From the #1 bestselling author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the high-octane story of the enigmatic figure at the heart of one of the 21st century’s most spectacular financial collapses. ‘I asked him how much it would take for him to sell ...

Revolutionary spring

fighting for a new world 1848-1849

There can be few more exciting or frightening moments in European history than the spring of 1848. Almost as if by magic, in city after city, from Palermo to Paris to Venice, huge crowds gathered, sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent, and the political order that ...

The new Leviathans

thoughts after liberalism

'One of the most important thinkers alive' The Times Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of ...

Doppelganger

a trip into the mirror world

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all? When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically ...

Crack-up capitalism

market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports ...

The crisis of democratic capitalism

We are living in an age when economic failings have shaken faith in global capitalism. Political failings have undermined trust in liberal democracy and in the very notion of truth. The ties that ought to bind open markets to free and fair elections are being ...

The Penguin history of modern Spain

1898 to the present

A revelatory new history of Spain, from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first '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 ...

The middle kingdoms

a new history of Central Europe

The dramatic history of Europe's shape-shifting centre, from the author of The Habsburgs 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 Russo-Ukrainian War

On 24 February 2022, Russia stunned the world by launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the midst of checking on the family and friends who were now on the front lines of Europe's largest conflict since the outbreak of the Second World War, acclaimed ...

Free and equal

what would a fair society look like?

This is the revolutionary thought experiment proposed by the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John Rawls. As economist and philosopher Daniel Chandler argues in this hugely ambitious and exhilarating intervention, it is by rediscovering Rawls that we can find a way out of the ...

The economic government of the world

1933-2023

An epic history of money, trade and development since 1933 In 1933, Keynes reflected on the crisis of the Great Depression that arose from individualistic capitalism: 'It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous - and it doesn ...

The Big Con

how the consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments and warps our economies

There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today which must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies' reliance on companies such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG and ...