Books

Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping ...

'There's a new story in the making, one in which the consequences of our actions add up - and every contribution is meaningful.' If climate change ...

Happiness is one of life's greatest mysteries. But what even is happiness? Why does it mean so many different things to different people? And how c...

Friends do it, strangers do it and so do chimpanzees - and it's not just deeply embedded in our history and culture, it may even be written in our ...

The twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of hist...

Translated by Chris Andrews In 1936, a young dreamer named Edmond Charlot opened a modest bookshop in Algiers. Once the heart of Algerian cultural ...

Written in 1957, when North African independence movements were gaining momentum, The Colonizer and the Colonized studies the enduring legacy, poli...

The world can be an amazing place if you know the right questions to ask: How did carrots become orange? What's stopping us from having a four-day ...

The world can be an amazing place if you know the right questions to ask: How much does a ghost reduce a house's value? How are winemakers respondi...

Some questions you never think to ask. Others, you didn't know you didn't know. And some facts are so surprising they cry out for answers. What can...

In twenty years behind the till in The Bookshop, Wigtown, Shaun Bythell has met pretty much every kind of customer there is - from the charming, er...

From bestselling author Robert Greene comes a brilliant distillation of the strategies of war that can help us gain mastery in the modern world. Sp...

What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the average life expectancy in medieval Byzantium? The av...

The story of medicine in India is rich and complex: uniting cutting-edge technological developments with ancient cultural traditions. Aarathi Prasa...

Mark McCormack, dubbed 'the most powerful man in sport', founded IMG (International Management Group) on a handshake. It was the first and is the m...

Six years in the making, The Pink Line follows protagonists from nine countries all over the globe to tell the story of how "LGBT Rights" become on...

In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with ecc...

It feels like the world is falling apart. So how do we keep hold of our optimism? How do we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and bel...

Marx's Capital is one of the most important texts of the modern era. The three volumes, published between 1867 and 1883, changed the destiny of cou...

Seaweed is so familiar and yet its names - pepper dulse, sea lettuce, bladderwrack - are largely unknown to us. In this short, exquisitely illustra...

From imaginary numbers to the fourth dimension and beyond, mathematics has always been about imagining impossible things. In x+y, Eugenia Cheng dra...

We think of Voltaire as the archetypal figure of the enlightenment; in his own time he was also the most famous and controversial figure in Europe....

2008 saw one of the worst financial crises in generations, the global implications of which are still being felt today. Ten years later Ben Bernank...

Today, the language of science is English. But the dominance of this particular language is a relatively recent phenomenon - and far from a foregon...

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capi...

In the past decades, the pressure to perfect and design our bodies has been unprecedented. Men are encouraged to surgically pump up their pecs, bre...

Self-harm is increasingly prevalent in our society. But few of us understand why, or know what to do to help ourselves, friends or family in such s...

What does the Rosetta Stone tell us about the past? What treasures of Egyptian literature can now be read, thanks to its decipherment? What does it...

Lyndon Baines Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Gordon Brown, Theresa May, and Donald Trump: each had different m...

In Making Sense, David Crystal confronts the foe of many: grammar. Once taught relentlessly to all students in the English-speaking world, grammar ...

Democracy has died hundreds of times, all over the world. We think we know what that looks like: chaos descends and the military arrives to restore...

Mobius bagels, Euclid's flourless chocolate cake and apple pi - this is maths, but not as you know it. In How to Bake Pi, mathematical crusader and...

Even small children know there are infinitely many whole numbers - start counting and you'll never reach the end. But there are also infinitely man...

In the second decade of each century, a new global order commonly starts to assert itself. In the 19th, Napoleon's defeat gave birth to the world o...

America's political system isn't broken. The truth is scarier: it's working exactly as designed. In Why We're Polarized, Ezra Klein reveals the str...

At a time when the Middle East dominates media headlines more than ever - and for reasons that become ever more heartbreaking - Shifting Sands brin...

We shape ourselves, and are shaped in return, by the walls that contain us. Buildings affect how we sleep, work, socialise and even breathe. They c...

When Chris McDougall stumbled across the story of Churchill's 'dirty tricksters', a motley crew of English poets and academics who helped resist th...

China is one of the oldest states in the world. It achieved its approximate current borders with the Ascendancy of the Yuan dynasty in the 13th cen...

In 1939, as an art student, Ronald Searle volunteered for the army, embarking for Singapore in 1941. Within a month of his arrival he became a pris...

Maps fascinate us. They chart our understanding of the world and they log our progress, but above all they tell our stories. From the early sketche...

Nearly a century had passed since Languedoc had been put to the sword in the Albigensian Crusade, but the stain of Catharism still lay on the land....

Packed with violence, political drama and social and cultural upheaval, the years 1913-1923 saw the emergence in Ireland of the Ulster Volunteer Fo...

It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm fil...

Since the dawn of time, humans have worshipped the sun. And with good reason. Our biology is set up to work in partnership with it. From our sleep ...

Immersed in the world of dance from his childhood, he found his natural home in the Imperial Theatre and the Ballets Russes, he had a powerful spon...

Sarah and David are in love - the obsessive, uncertain love of teenagers on the edge of adulthood. At their performing arts school, the rules are m...

A deadly virus suddenly explodes into the population. A political movement gathers pace, and then quickly vanishes. An idea takes off like wildfire...