Джон Бью0.0 Clement Attlee was a slightly-built, bald, pipe-smoking and unassuming man who presided over the radical administration of 1945-51 and is sometimes referred to as Britain's greatest peace-time Prime Minster.
His cocooned suburban childhood and standing at university as 'the man who couldn't quite' were unlikely preparations for such a figure. Yet Attlee was often underestimated: he won over those who compared him unfavourably to his rival, Churchill, and undercut their doubt with dry wit and proof of his steady and ethical leadership.
His political awakening volunteering in the East End of London was instrumental in redrawing his map of Britain's class and economic system. Growing up in the comfortable coda of the Victorian era, he foresaw an epoch of change - one that he was pivotal to bring about in the post-war years. After serving at Gallipoli during the First Word War he rose through the ranks of the Labour Party and during the Second World War became Britain's first Deputy Prime Minister. In 1945, in the glow of Churchill's great war victory, Attlee won the election by a landslide. Alongside Bevin, Nye and Truman, his governance saw the end of the Empire in India, the foundation of the NHS and Britain's places in NATO and the nuclear arms race.
John Bew's brilliant biography will pierce the reticence of Attlee and explore the intellectual foundations and core beliefs of one of the most important, and least understood, figures in the history of the United Kingdom. It will reveal a public servant and patriotic socialist, who never lost sight of the national interest and whose view of humanity and belief in solidarity was grafted onto the Union Jack.
Гэри Янг4.7 On an average day in America, seven children and teens will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during one such day. It could have been any day, but he chose November 23, 2013. Black, white, and Latino, aged nine to nineteen, they fell at sleepovers, on street corners, in stairwells, and on their own doorsteps. From the rural Midwest to the barrios of Texas, the narrative crisscrosses the country over a period of twenty-four hours to reveal the full human stories behind the gun-violence statistics and the brief mentions in local papers of lives lost.
This powerful and moving work puts a human face—a child’s face—on the “collateral damage” of gun deaths across the country. This is not a book about gun control, but about what happens in a country where it does not exist. What emerges in these pages is a searing and urgent portrait of youth, family, and firearms in America today.
Дж. Д. Тейлор0.0 What is life like on this island? With a tent and a rusty bike, J.D. Taylor set off to find out.
No other subject has spilt so much ink as Britain today. But whilst assuming a monopoly on national identity, a London-based elite has proven a poor forecaster of the political weather around the island.
Skeptical and inquisitive, Taylor instead cycled all round Britain, interviewing and staying with strangers from all walks of life. Without a map and travelling with the most basic of gear, the journey revels in serendipity and schadenfreude.
Island Story weaves histories, experiences and ideas to tell another kind of story: one of rebellion and retail parks, migration and inertia, pessimism and disappearing ways of life, and a fiery, unrealized desire for collective belonging and power.
Think you know the island? Island Story will have you think again.
Тим Шипман0.0 'Tim Shipman's dispatches from the political front line are a must read’ NICK ROBINSON
Politics was turned upside down during 2016. This book by Sunday Times political editor Tim Shipman is the first to tell the full story of how and why Britain voted to leave the European Union and how the vote shattered the political status quo.
Based on unrivalled access to all the key politicians and their advisors – including Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, George Osborne, Nigel Farage and Dominic Cummings, the mastermind of Vote Leave – Shipman has written a political history that reads like a thriller, and offers a gripping, day-by-day account of what really happened behind-the-scenes in Downing Street, both Leave campaigns, the Labour Party, Ukip and Britain Stronger in Europe.
Shipman gives his readers a ringside seat on how decisions were made, mistakes justified and betrayals perpetrated. Filled with stories, anecdotes and juicy leaks the book does not seek to address the rights and wrongs of Brexit but to explore how and why David Cameron chose to take the biggest political gamble of his life and explain why he lost.
This is a story of calculation, attempted coups, individuals torn between principles and loyalty. All the events are here – from David Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum, through to the campaign itself, his resignation as prime minister, the betrayals and rivalries that occurred during the race to find his successor to the arrival of Theresa May in Downing Street as Britain’s second female prime minister.
All Out War is a book about leaders and their closest aides, the decisions they make and how and why they make them, as well as how they feel when they turn out to be wrong. It is about men who make decisions that are intellectually consistent and – by their own measure – morally sound that are simultaneously disastrous for themselves and those closest to them. It is about how doing what you know has worked before doesn’t always work again. Most of all it is about asking the question: how far are you prepared to go to win?
Хишам Матар4.0 WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE - The acclaimed memoir about fathers and sons, a legacy of loss, and, ultimately, healing--one of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year, winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times - The Washington Post - The Guardian - Financial Times
When Hisham Matar was a nineteen-year-old university student in England, his father went missing under mysterious circumstances. Hisham would never see him again, but he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. Twenty-two years later, he returned to his native Libya in search of the truth behind his father's disappearance. The Return is the story of what he found there.
The Pulitzer Prize citation hailed The Return as "a first-person elegy for home and father." Transforming his personal quest for answers into a brilliantly told universal tale of hope and resilience, Matar has given us an unforgettable work with a powerful human question at its core: How does one go on living in the face of unthinkable loss?
Praise for The Return
"A tale of mighty love, loyalty and courage. It simply must be read."--The Spectator (U.K.)
"Wise and agonizing and thrilling to read."--Zadie Smith
"[An] eloquent memoir . . . at once a suspenseful detective story about a writer investigating his father's fate . . . and a son's efforts to come to terms with his father's ghost, who has haunted more than half his life by his absence."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"This outstanding book . . . roves back and forth in time with a freedom that conceals the intricate precision of its art."--The Wall Street Journal
"Truly remarkable . . . a book with a profound faith in the consolations of storytelling . . . a testament to [Matar's] father, his family and his country."--The Daily Telegraph (U.K.)
"The Return is a riveting book about love and hope, but it is also a moving meditation on grief and loss. . . . Likely to become a classic."--Colm Toibin
"Matar's evocative writing and his early traumas call to mind Vladimir Nabokov." --The Washington Post
"Utterly riveting."--The Boston Globe
"A moving, unflinching memoir of a family torn apart."--Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian
"Beautiful . . . The Return, for all the questions it cannot answer, leaves a deep emotional imprint."--Newsday
"A masterful memoir, a searing meditation on loss, exile, grief, guilt, belonging, and above all, family. It is, as well, a study of the shaping--and breaking--of the bonds between fathers and sons. . . . This is writing of the highest quality."--The Sunday Times (U.K.)
FEATURED IN THE OBSERVER'S SPORTS WRITERS' BOOKS OF THE YEAR
On 15 April 1989, 96 people were fatally injured on a football terrace at an FA Cup semi-final in Sheffield. The Hillsborough disaster was broadcast live on the BBC; it left millions of people traumatised, and English football in ruins.
And the Sun Shines Now is not a book about Hillsborough. It is a book about what arrived in the wake of unquestionably the most controversial tragedy in the post-war era of Britain's history. The Taylor Report. Italia 90. Gazza's tears. All seater stadia. Murdoch. Sky. Nick Hornby. The Premier League. The transformation of a game that once connected club to community to individual into a global business so rapacious the true fans have been forgotten, disenfranchised.
In powerful polemical prose, against a backbone of rigorous research and interviews, Adrian Tempany deconstructs the past quarter century of English football and examines its place in the world. How did Hillsborough and the death of 96 Liverpool fans come to change the national game beyond recognition? And is there any hope that clubs can reconnect with a new generation of fans when you consider the startling statistic that the average age of season ticket holder here is 41, compared to Germany's 21?
Perhaps the most honest account of the relationship between the football and the state yet written, And the Sun Shines Now is a brutal assessment of the modern game.
Гидеон Рахман3.8 The West’s domination of world politics is coming to a close. The flow of wealth and power is turning from West to East and a new era of global instability has begun.
Easternisation is the defining trend of our age – the growing wealth of Asian nations is transforming the international balance of power. This shift to the East is shaping the lives of people all over the world, the fate of nations and the great questions of war and peace.
A troubled but rising China is now challenging America’s supremacy, and the ambitions of other Asian powers – including Japan, North Korea, India and Pakistan – have the potential to shake the whole world. Meanwhile the West is struggling with economic malaise and political populism, the Arab world is in turmoil and Russia longs to reclaim its status as a great power.
We are at a turning point in history: but Easternisation has many decades to run. Gideon Rachman offers a road map to the turbulent process that will define the international politics of the twenty-first century.
Рут Дадли Эдвардс0.0 "Highly entertaining and engagingly irreverent."
—New York Review of Books
"Ruth Dudley Edwards offers astute portraits of the leaders of the 1916 Rebellion. Her analysis of how these complex men, idealistic but also uncompromising, led a rebellion is a superb introduction to this period of momentous change in Irish history."
—Colm Tóibín, bestselling author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster
On Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, the seven men who made up the Military Council of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood gathered in Dublin’s Liberty Hall. By noon, the Proclamation of the Irish Republic had been taken to the printers. Each man knew that he had signed his own death warrant. Carnage, destruction, humiliation and posthumous glory followed. As did an Ireland that would have satisfied none of them – partitioned, sectarian, mean-spirited, hostile to challenge or creativity and governed by narrow self-interest.
One hundred years on, award-winning writer Ruth Dudley Edwards explores how the lives of Ireland's founding fathers converged and how they came to espouse violence.
A brilliant, thought-provoking reassessment, THE SEVEN provides a scrupulous examination of each of these men, challenging us to judge their actions and to find an answer to the question of what their legacy should be.
Naomi Alderman3.7 Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - teenage girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman's extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed.
