Oscar Wilde once wrote “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” This book is your opportunity to discover a compendium of the most celebrated, revelatory, notorious and heart-wrenching diaries from the great, the good and the truly evil.
Oscar Wilde once wrote “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” This book is your opportunity to discover a compendium of the most celebrated, revelatory, notorious and heart-wrenching diaries from the great, the good and the truly evil.
100 Diaries that Chronicled World Events introduces us to the world’s greatest diarists. Including the historical journals of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank; snapshots of culture in the diaries of Frida Kahlo and Kurt Cobain; and windows into the past from Queen Victoria and John Adams.
These published journals present a unique insight into their time and place, featuring a diverse range of accounts from all over the world. Discover the doomed log of Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the philandering antics of Samuel Pepys: as well as the less well-known diary of Jakob Walter, a foot soldier who gave a vivid insight into the Napoleonic wars, or Mary Chesnut, a privileged planter’s wife in South Carolina, who chronicled the South’s decline in the Civil War.
When a noxious hospital consultant dies of a heart attack, fellow doctor Eitan Rose smells foul play. But nobody else does, including some quite crucial players like the police and the coroner. Eitan’s colleagues are already treating him with suspicion following his recent breakdown, and are sceptical of his increasingly wild theories. When another doctor dies in similar circumstances, Eitan becomes convinced there is more to these deaths than meets the eye. Is there really a killer marauding the wards or is Eitan losing the plot?
Deftly told and deathly funny, A Particularly Nasty Case is the unputdownable debut novel from Adam Kay, BAFTA-winning writer and author of multi-million global bestseller This is Going to Hurt.
PRAISE FOR ADAM KAY
‘Richly comic. Kay’s writing is a constant pleasure’ Daily Express
‘Spectacularly brilliant’ Cathy Rentzenbrink
‘Piercingly funny’ Tanya Gold, Daily Telegraph
‘One of Britain’s funniest writers’ Grace Dent
‘Extraordinary’ Observer
A three-thousand year history of the world that examines the causes of war and the search for peace
In three thousand years of history, China has spent at least eleven centuries at war. The Roman Empire was in conflict during at least 50 per cent of its lifetime. Since 1776, the United States has spent over one hundred years at war. The dream of peace has been universal in the history of humanity. So why have we so rarely been able to achieve it?
In A Political History of the World, Jonathan Holslag has produced a sweeping history of the world, from the Iron Age to the present, that investigates the causes of conflict between empires, nations and peoples and the attempts at diplomacy and cosmopolitanism. A birds-eye view of three thousand years of history, the book illuminates the forces shaping world politics from Ancient Egypt to the Han Dynasty, the Pax Romana to the rise of Islam, the Peace of Westphalia to the creation of the United Nations.
This truly global approach enables Holslag to search for patterns across different eras and regions, and explore larger questions about war, diplomacy, and power. Has trade fostered peace? What are the limits of diplomacy? How does environmental change affect stability? Is war a universal sin of power? At a time when the threat of nuclear war looms again, this is a much-needed history intended for students of international politics, and anyone looking for a background on current events.
In 2000, Elizabeth Gilbert met Rayya. They became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. They were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.
What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?
The illuminating memoir of Academy Award-winning film director, screenwriter and author Neil Jordan.
THE LADY BEST BOOKS OF 2024
A haunted record of a life devoted to the visual art of the cinema and the written word, by Ireland’s greatest director and one of her finest novelists.
In this vivid, moving and strange memoir, Neil Jordan – the author of classic fiction like The Past, Sunrise with Sea Monster and Night in Tunisia, and the creator of celebrated movies like Angel, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire – reaches deep into his own past and that of his family.
His mother was a painter, his father an inspector of schools who was visited by ghosts, and Jordan grew up on the edge of an abandoned aristocratic estate in north Dublin whose mysterious ruins fed his imagination. Passionate about music, he played in bands and theatre groups and met, at University College Dublin, a young radical called Jim Sheridan. Together they staged unforgettable dramatic productions that hinted at their future careers.
His first collection of stories and first novel, Night in Tunisia and The Past, were met with acclaim, but Jordan was also drawn to the freedom and visual richness of film, and worked with the great English director John Boorman on his Arthurian epic Excalibur. His own first movie with Stephen Rea, Angel, was a brilliant angular take on the horrific violence of the Troubles, and in the years since then his films have combined in a unique way, intense supernatural elements with reflections on violence and sexuality.
Jordan describes his work with Stephen Rea, Jaye Davidson, Bob Hoskins, Tom Cruise and many others, but this is not a conventional story of life in the movies. The book is an eerie meditation on loss, love and creativity, on inspiration and influence, by one of the most unusual artists Ireland has produced.
An explosive new biography of Bill Gates that delves behind the façade of his carefully crafted public image, and questions the dominance of billionaires in contemporary society.
*LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD*
Chosen by WATERSTONES as one of their BEST POLITICS BOOKS of 2024
‘Anupreeta Das tracks the ups and downs of Bill Gates’s career in her eye-opening book’ The Times
Bill Gates is one of the most powerful figures of the past four decades. But the world-famous public image he has so carefully crafted is not the whole truth. In this explosive new book, Anupreeta Das (finance editor of the New York Times) takes you behind the façade.
From his early years, when he was a divisive figure in the burgeoning tech industry, we see the Microsoft co-founder morph into a ruthless capitalist, only to change yet again when he fashions himself into a global do-gooder. But as Das’s revelatory reporting shows us: billionaires have secrets and philanthropy can have a dark side.
Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and those with insight into the Gates universe, Das delves into Gates’s relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates and others to uncover the man behind the persona. In telling Gates’s story, Das also provides a new way to think about how billionaires wield their influence, manipulate their image and pursue philanthropy to achieve their own ends.
Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King is a gripping story of wealth, power and reputation; it will open your eyes to the ways in which the world’s richest people hold us in their thrall.
For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare — poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself from a depressed, overweight young man with no future into a U. S. Armed Forces icon and one of the worlds top endurance athletes. the only man in history to complete elite training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller, he went on to set records in numerous endurance events, inspiring Outside magazine to name him “the Fittest (Real) Man in America. ”In Cant Hurt Me, he shares his astonishing life story and reveals that most of us tap into only 40% of our capabilities. Goggins calls this the 40% Rule, and his story illuminates a path that anyone can follow to push past pain, demolish fear, and reach their full potential.
The extraordinary and riveting story of separated Chinese twins, with one twin seized by the authorities and adopted into America, by the Samuel Johnson-winning author of Nothing to Envy. In 2000, a Chinese woman gave birth to twins in a bamboo grove, trying to avoid detection by the government because she already had two daughters. Two years later, an American couple travelled to Shaoyang to adopt a Chinese toddler they thought had been abandoned. Their understanding had been that China’s brutal one-child policy was leading to hundreds of abandoned girls, desperate for the care of adopted parents. What they didn’t know – and what award-winning journalist Barbara Demick uncovered in 2007, while working as a correspondent in Beijing – was that their daughter had been snatched from her beloved family and her identical twin. Under China’s one-child policy hundreds of poor Chinese were giving up their children due to soaring fines and threats of violence. More sinister still, international demand for adoptees was sky-rocketing, and local officials were forcibly seizing children and trafficking them to orphanages, who were selling them abroad. Daughters of the Bamboo Grove tells the gripping story of separated twins, their respective fates in China and the USA, and Barbara Demick’s role in reuniting them against huge odds. Painting a rich portrait of China’s history and culture, it asks questions about the roots, impact and consequences of China’s one-child policy, the ethics of international adoption, and, ultimately, the assumptions and narratives we hold about the quality of lives lived in the East and the West.
Published to celebrate the life of Oliver Sacks, 10 years after his death
‘A must-read for all the people who loved Oliver Sacks’s books.
Published to celebrate the life of Oliver Sacks, 10 years after his death
‘A must-read for all the people who loved Oliver Sacks’s books. The ending made me cry’ Temple Grandin
“Dear Dr. Sacks . . . You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. I told you that I thought I could . . . But, I was wrong.”
When Susan Barry first wrote to Oliver Sacks, she never expected a response, let alone the friendship that blossomed over ten years of letters.
Sue, herself a neuroscientist, wrote to share an extraordinary development in her own medical history. Born with problems with her vision, Sue had been told she would never acquire the ability to see in 3D – and yet she did, a development at odds with decades of research. Within days, Oliver replied, “Your letter fills me with amazement and admiration.”
Sharing an interest in visual perception and a deep love of science, Sue and Oliver began exchanging letters, delving deeper into the mysteries of sight and marvelling at the adaptive capacity of the human body. But in a painful twist of fate, as Sue’s vision improved, Oliver’s declined, and his characteristic typed letters shifted to handwritten. Sue later recognised this as an early sign of the cancer that ultimately ended his extraordinary life.
A funny and intimate glimpse of the great Oliver Sacks, Dear Oliver is also a love letter to scientific inquiry, and a testimony to the power of friendship at any time in life.
Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history.
Half a century after their deaths, the dictatorships of Stalin and Hitler still cast a long and terrible shadow over the modern world. They were the most destructive and lethal regimes in history, murdering millions. They fought the largest and costliest war in all history. Yet millions of Germans and Russians enthusiastically supported them and the values they stood for. In this first major study of the two dictatorships side-by-side Richard Overy sets out to answer the question: How was dictatorship possible? How did they function? What was the bond that tied dictator and people so powerfully together? He paints a remarkable and vivid account of the different ways in which Stalin and Hitler rose to power, and abused and dominated their people. It is a chilling analysis of powerful ideals corrupted by the vanity of ambitious and unscrupulous men.