Freedom & Security

Becoming Bulletproof means transforming yourself into a stronger, more confident and more powerful person....

Trans people in Britain today have become a culture war 'issue'. Despite making up less than one per cent of the country's population, they are the subjects of a toxic and increasingly polarised 'debate', which generates reliable controversy for newspapers and talk shows....

Ranging from the age of slavery to contemporary injustices, this groundbreaking history of race, gender and class inequality by the radical political activist Angela Davis offers an alternative view of female struggles for liberation....

The world’s foremost cultural commentator and international best-selling author Douglas Murray shows how far political discourse has strayed in Europe and America from its stated goals: justice and equality....

This explosive book is a story of scandal, betrayal and misuse of intelligence at the highest levels of UK and US governments—which has had direct, horrifying impact on terror attacks in the West and the shape of the Middle East today....

A thrilling Cold War story about a KGB double agent, by one of Britain's greatest historians - now with a new afterword.... 

A vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators but also of everyday heroism, The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grand masterwork.... 

In Putin's People, former Moscow correspondent and investigative journalist Catherine Belton tells the untold story of the rise of Vladimir Putin and the small group of KGB men surrounding him....

Full of passionate, personal and keenly felt argument, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race is a wake-up call to a nation in denial about structural and institutional racism....

November 2009. Sergei Magnitsky is led to an isolation cell in a Moscow prison and beaten to death by eight police officers....

A shocking true story of murder, extreme politics and the deep scars left by the Troubles in Ireland of the 1970s and the human consequences. A taut tale of murder, extreme politics, institutionalised violence and the deep scars left by such turmoil....

The riveting memoirs of the outstanding moral and political leader of our time....

The incredible story of the greatest female spy in history, from one of Britain's most acclaimed historians....

Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War....

In this vivid and powerful collection of essays, Emilie Pine boldly confronts the past to better understand herself, her relationships and her role in society. She speaks to the business of living as a woman in the 21st century - its extraordinary pain and its extraordinary joy....

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction....

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. It offers a reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization....

GCHQ is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the UK, and has existed for 100 years - but we still know next to nothing about it....

In this compelling book, highly acclaimed author and broadcaster Laurence Rees tells the definitive history of the most notorious Nazi institution of them all.... 

During WW2, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France. This is the story of her heroic personal resistance to Nazi Germany....

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Coddling of the America Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, read by Jonathan Haidt....

Zero day: a software bug that allows a hacker to break in and scamper through the world’s computer networks invisibly until discovered....

Discover the stories of the brave men and women who worked, trained and fought across the UK, from Bletchley Park in southern England all the way to Arisaig in northern Scotland, in an unbelievable effort to defeat the Nazis and win the Second World War.

Meet the Lazarus Group, a shadowy cabal of hackers accused of working on behalf of the North Korean state. They form one of the most effective criminal enterprises on the planet, having stolen more than one billion dollars in an international crime spree....

An engaging guide to the various ways in which war is now waged - and how to adapt to this new reality....

By the late 1970s, the fishermen of the Texas Gulf Coast were struggling. The bays that had sustained generations of shrimpers and crabbers before them were being poisoned by nearby petrochemical plants, oil spills, pesticides, and concrete. But as their nets came up light, the white shrimpers could only see one culprit: the small but growing number of newly resettled Vietnamese refugees who had recently started fishing. Turf was claimed. Guns were flashed. Threats were made. 

From renowned scholar Dr. Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory explains the centrality of race in American history and politics, and how the often mischaracterized intellectual movement became a political necessity. Ray draws upon the radical thinking of giants such as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to clearly trace the foundations of critical race theory in the Black intellectual traditions of emancipation and the civil rights movement.

The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding the Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. 'Y service' was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world.

Congress and the Constitution are under attack all around the world. Muzzled and muffled are the voices of virtue and reason under a medical face mask. All that remains is confusion, chaos, and COVID. 

There is a new vocabulary of injustice and inequality emerging out of society’s advances in technology. We are finding evermore outlandish ways of persecuting and violating the rights of citizens based on race, identity, and social bias. For some, the experiences of these injustices are commonplace; for others, they are completely foreign. Jim Code is a new glossary of technological injustice meant to inform and inspire the next generation of social activists and human and civil rights leaders. 

In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual offers a more balanced understanding of American criminal justice, and cautions against discarding traditional crime control measures. A powerful combination of research, data-driven policy journalism, and the author's lived experiences, this book explains what many reform advocates get wrong, and illustrates how the misguided commitment to leniency places America's most vulnerable communities at risk. 

While the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land, it is also a source of great controversy. It establishes the fundamental framework of our system of government, while differences in how to understand and interpret it often divide people. The United States Constitution: A History takes a fresh look at the Constitution, its origins, and controversies, from the founding of the country and its creation at the Constitutional Convention to the present. It examines the various controversies that divided the convention.

In The Listeners, Brian Hochman shows how the wiretap evolved from a specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of life. He explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games and tracks the use of telephone taps in the US government's wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. While high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike.

As Mark Zuckerberg once put it, "the Age of Privacy is over." But Zuckerberg and others who say "privacy is dead" are wrong. In Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards explains that privacy isn't dead, but rather up for grabs. Richards shows how the fight for privacy is a fight for power. If we want to preserve our commitments to these precious yet fragile values, we will need privacy rules. Pithy and forceful, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in a topic that sits at the center of so many current problems. 

This book describes the turbulent lives, loves, and perilous missions of the greatest Mossad lohamot, the female warriors of the Israeli Secret Service. The stunning feats of these strong, bold women prove that they are equal to men, and often even better. Beside the nation's enemies, they had to fight a painful solitude, an awkward attitude of their male colleagues, and often give up their dream of marriage and children. And still, they brilliantly carried out their missions. 

A sobering and fascinating study on war in the modern era, Unrestricted Warfare carefully explores strategies that militarily and politically disadvantaged nations might take in order to successfully attack a geopolitical super-power like the United States. American military doctrine is typically led by technology; a new class of weapon or vehicle is developed, which allows or encourages an adjustment in strategy. Military strategists Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argue that this dynamic is a crucial weakness in the American military.

Daniel Levin was at his office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days. 

East Germans were the first to give the crisis a name: Mauerkrankheit, or “wall disease.” The afflicted—everyday citizens living on both sides of the Berlin wall—displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, excitability, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The Berlin Wall is no more, but today there are at least seventy policed borders like it. What are they doing to our minds? Jessica Wapner investigates, following a trail of psychological harm around the world. 

In 2012, an Oregon mother named Julie Keith opened up a package of Halloween decorations. The cheap foam headstones had been five dollars at Kmart, too good a deal to pass up. But when she opened the box, something shocking fell out: an SOS letter, handwritten in broken English. 

It’s easy to say that racism is wrong. But it’s surprisingly hard to agree on what it is. Does a tired stereotype in your favorite movie make it racist? Does watching it anyway mean you’re racist? Even among like-minded friends, such discussions can quickly escalate to hurt feelings all around—and when they do, we lose valuable opportunities to fight racism. Patricia Roberts-Miller is a scholar of rhetoric—the art of understanding misunderstandings. In Speaking of Race, she explains why the subject is a “third rail” and how we can do better.