Politics & Social Sciences

Of course, nobody needs telling that there isn't enough time. We're obsessed by our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling....

Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us....

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws....

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....

We all have a random collection of the things that made us—photos, tickets, clothes, souvenirs, stuffed in a box, packed in a suitcase, crammed into a drawer....

There is a formula for success that's been followed by the icons of history...a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities....

A riveting, deeply personal account of history in the making - from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy....

By self-development coach Roxie Nafousi, this is the essential guide to anyone and everyone wanting to feel more empowered in their lives. In just seven simple steps, you can understand the true art of manifestation and create the life you have always dreamed of....

Robert Greene is a master guide for millions, distilling ancient wisdom and philosophy into essential texts for seekers of power, understanding and mastery. Now he turns to the most important subject of all - understanding people's drives and motivations....

Former forest monk Björn Natthiko Lindeblad shares timeless wisdom about how to handle the uncertainty that is a natural part of life. Infusing the everyday with heart and grace, I May Be Wrong is an audiobook to help us all navigate the realities of modern life....

At some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then, we imagined wonderful days to come, free from disease, work and want, in television series like Star Trek or events such as the 1939 Futurama World Fair.... 

Written in Greek by an intellectual Roman emperor without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a wide range of fascinating spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the leader struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe....

For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days—even hours—of when you decided you wanted it....

Bill Browder returns with another gripping thriller chronicling how he exposed Vladimir Putin's campaign to steal and launder hundreds of billions of dollars from Russia—and how Putin is willing to kill anyone who stands in his way....

Few ancient works have been as influential as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Filled with wisdom, practical guidance and profound understanding of human behaviour, it remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written....

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, envisions a not-too-distant world in which we face a new set of challenges....

The heart-wrenchingly honest new book about life and death from forensic pathologist and best-selling author of Unnatural Causes, Dr Richard Shepherd....

Using essays and the personal experiences of the widely travelled author, Prisoners of Geography offers an essential insight into one of the major factors that determines world history....

Our world is largely built for and by men, in a system that can ignore half the population. This audiobook will tell you how and why this matters.... 

In June 1992, Chris Patten went to Hong Kong as the last British governor, to try to prepare it not—as other British colonies over the decades—for independence, but for handing back in 1997 to the Chinese, from whom most of its territory had been leased 99 years previously....

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down....

Nothing but the Truth charts an outsider’s progress down the winding path towards practising at the Bar....

There are few people Gyles Brandreth doesn't know or hasn't met - from the queen to the Sex Pistols, Mandela and Marlene Dietrich to T. S. Eliot, he's the celebrities' celebrity, as familiar and welcome to us on radio and screens as biscuits are to a cup of tea....

One of Solve for Happy's key premises is that happiness is a default state....

In this stunning audiobook, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers" - the best and the brightest, the most famous, and the most successful. He asks the question: What makes high-achievers different? Listen to find out more....

Kissinger's six leaders are Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher. All of them were formed in a period when established institutions collapsed all over Europe, colonial structures gave way to independent states in Asia and Africa, and a new international order had to be created from the vestiges of the old. 

A student at Forest Park High School near Atlanta, Georgia, popular blonde-haired Sharon Marshall was at the top of her class. Serving as a Lt. Colonel in the ROTC, she earned a full scholarship to Georgia Tech University to study aerospace engineering. She was the ultimate girl next door, sweet, generous, and well-adjusted. But Sharon had disturbing secrets so shocking and unique, they took more than a decade to unravel....

When William the Conqueror died in 1087, he left the throne of England to William Rufus . . . his second son. The result was an immediate war as Rufus's elder brother Robert fought to gain the crown he saw as rightfully his; this conflict marked the start of 400 years of bloody disputes as the English monarchy's line of hereditary succession was bent, twisted, and finally broken when the last Plantagenet king, Richard III, fell at Bosworth in 1485.

Paul Thagard explores the physiological workings and metaphorical resonance of balance in the brain, the body, and society. He describes the neural mechanisms that keep bodies balanced and explains why their failures can result in nausea, falls, or vertigo. Thagard connects bodily balance with leading ideas in neuroscience, including the nature of consciousness. 

In this insightful and provocative book, comics-industry veteran Danny Fingeroth explores the backgrounds of the most well-known superheroes and their creators—largely young American Jewish men from Eastern European backgrounds. These innovators include Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. In Disguised as Clark Kent, Fingeroth explores how the creators’ Jewish backgrounds helped make superheroes the most familiar popular-culture icons of all.

Why are so many of the superhero myths tied up with loss, often violent, of parents or parental figures? What is the significance of the dual identity? What makes some superhuman figures “good” and others “evil”? Why are so many of the prime superheroes white and male? How has the superhero evolved over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? All these topics, and more, are covered in this lively and original exploration of the reasons why the superhero—in comic books, films, and TV—is such a potent myth for our times and culture.

Russia's relationship with its neighbors and with the West has worsened dramatically in recent years. Under Vladimir Putin's leadership, the country has annexed Crimea, begun a war in Eastern Ukraine, used chemical weapons on the streets of the UK, and created an army of Internet trolls to meddle in the US presidential elections. How can we understand this apparent relapse into aggressive imperialism and militarism?

 Offering a new view of one of America's most important, infamously strained, and widely misunderstood relationships of the postwar era, this book tells the history of America and Iran from the time the last shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was placed on the throne in 1941 to the 1979 revolution that brought the present Islamist government to power.

From nineteenth-century abolitionism to Black Lives Matter today, progressive social movements have been at the forefront of social change. Yet it is seldom recognized that such movements have not only engaged in political action but also posed crucial philosophical questions about the meaning of justice and about how the demands of justice can be met. Michele Moody-Adams argues that anyone who is concerned with the theory or the practice of justice—or both—must ask what can be learned from social movements. 

In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship—in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film—and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert."  

Between 1821 and 1826, the prolific writer and journalist William Cobbett travelled the countryside of the South of England on foot and horseback. Rural Rides is a fascinating account of his journeys, and depicts a way of life in transition, juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of the countryside with criticism of the poverty of agricultural workers. A man of radical politics who encouraged the rural rising of 1830, Cobbett went on to become MP for Oldham and sought to represent the interests of both industrial and agricultural workers. Above all, Rural Rides celebrates agrarian England.

This landmark treatise by the great economist Henry George was first published in 1879. George's work became the seminal analysis of the political economy which inspired most, if not all, the prominent thinkers of the Progressive Movement and many others of great influence: Upton Sinclair, John Dewey, George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Hayek, H. G. Wells, Clarence Darrow, and Leo Tolstoy, to name but a few. His analyses and proposals are referred to as "Georgism".

Locked away in refrigerated vaults, sanitized by gas chambers, and secured within bombproof caverns deep under mountains are America's most prized materials: the ever-expanding collection of records that now accompany each of us from birth to death. This data complex backs up and protects our most vital information against decay and destruction, and yet it binds us to corporate and government institutions whose power is also preserved in its bunkers, infrastructures, and sterilized spaces. 

When the eleven- and twelve-year-olds on the Cannon Street YMCA All-Star team registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1955, it put the team and the forces of integration on a collision course with segregation, bigotry, and the southern way of life. When all the White teams withdrew in protest, the Cannon Street team won the state tournament.

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.