Culture & Society

Nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: these are the seven things that have made our world and will shape its future. In making these ...

Pristine lawns, tennis whites, strawberries and cream, tennis is synonymous with the upper echelons of society, but scratch beneath the surface and...

This book is about our history. Not the history of kings, queens, chiefs, emirs, great moguls, emperors, tsars, presidents, or dictators, but our o...

The crucial 'difference', of course, was slavery. Here he examines its roots in the colonial era, early racial attitudes, the new Revolutionary com...

The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magni...

When eleven climbers died on K2 in 2008, two Sherpas survived. Their astonishing tale became the stuff of mountaineering legend. This white-knuckle...

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson g...

Six thousand years ago, there were no cities on the planet. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and that number i...

Translated by Laurent Dubois In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-fr...

Well-behaved women don't make history: difficult women do. Helen Lewis argues that feminism's success is down to complicated, contradictory, imperf...

One day in the early 1950s, Walt Disney stood looking over 240 acres of farmland in Anaheim, California, and imagined building a park where people ...

Lynsey Hanley was born and raised just outside of Birmingham on what was then the largest council estate in Europe, and she has lived for years on ...

During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge,...

Featuring everything from sports stadiums to shopping malls, hundreds of new cities in China stand empty, with hundreds more set to be built by 203...

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan is a complete, two-volume set of one of the most outstanding books on 19th century Japanese history and culture. Thoug...

Hong Kong is in turmoil, with a new generation of young and politically active citizens shaking the regime. From the Umbrella Movement in 2014 to t...

The sixties: a decade of space travel, utopian dreams and - above all - sexual revolution. It liberated a generation. But mostly men. Meet dollybir...

It was the year that saw the release of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and of debut albums from the Doors, the Grateful Dead, ...

Today's unprecedented pace of change leaves many people wondering what new technologies are doing to our lives. Has social media robbed us of our p...

From its earliest incarnations 7,000 years ago to the megalopolises of today, the story of the city is the story of civilisation. Although cities h...

It is where Castro raised the money to overthrow Batista. It is where generations of Castro's enemies raised armies to overthrow him, without succe...

Where to start with this mysterious, sometimes terrifying country? Perhaps with some hard facts--which are notoriously difficult to come by. Ruth A...

A member of the unique generation of African writers and intellectuals who came of age in the last days of colonialism, Wole Soyinka has witnessed ...

In this highly-acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering orientalism as a power...

Maps have a mysterious hold over us. Whether ancient, crumbling parchments or generated by Google, maps tell us things we want to know, not only ab...

Today we take it for granted that Japan is a forge of the world's fantasies: the birthplace of Transformers and Pokemon, of food trends like ramen ...

illustrated by Julia Scheele Activist-academic Meg John Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ ac...

edited by Andrew Van Der Vlies The most significant nonfiction writings of Zoe Wicomb, one of South Africa's leading authors and intellectuals, are...

100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the ba...

illustrated by David Casanaveedited by David Vanderneulen One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth....

Brutal slavery existed all over the New World, but only America followed emancipation with a twisted system of segregation. The Accident of Color a...

Can one of the most divided nations on the planet become its next superpower? James Crabtree reveals the titans of politics and industry shaping In...

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is the highly-influential, timeless work behind much of our past and present understanding of Japanese culture. "Wh...

Published in 1967, as the early triumphs of the Civil Rights movement yielded to increasing frustration and violence, The Crisis of the Negro Intel...

George Ewart Evans, who wrote the classic Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, was one of the pioneers of oral history. This anthology is drawn from hi...

After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean became fascinated by a mysterious local crime that has gone unsolved since it was carried out on the morn...

Considered by many to be one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, The Lonely Crowd opened exciting new dimensions in our underst...

The Myth of the Lazy Native is Syed Hussein Alatas' widely acknowledged critique of the colonial construction of Malay, Filipino and Javanese nativ...

In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a...

Under the guiding eye of cultural anthropologist Franz Boas, these scientist-explorers - most of them women - made intrepid journeys into far-flung...

translated by Richard Dixon The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: "the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else," wrote Italo Calv...

From 1915 to 1970, an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America. With stunning historical detail, Pulitzer prize-winning...

Aspirations for a better - even a perfect - society have existed throughout history, often imagined in intricate detail by philosophers, poets, soc...

Decades after the colonial powers withdrew Africa is still struggling to catch up with the rest of the world. When the same colonists withdrew from...

In this landmark book, Nancy Isenberg argues that the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of the Ame...

The apparent glamour of the Indian Raj continues to fascinate long after the British quit the subcontinent. But along with the beauty of the Indian...