Non-fiction

Within days of the D-Day landings, the Das Reich 2nd SS Panzer Division marched north through France to reinforce the front-line defenders of Hitler's Fortress Europe. Veterans of the bloodiest fighting of the Russian Front, 15,000 men with their tanks and artillery, they were hounded for every mile of their march by saboteurs of the Resistance and agents of the Allied Special Forces. Along their route they took reprisals so savage they will live for ever in the chronicles of the most appalli...

In the introduction to her new collection of essays, Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, Michiko Kakutani writes: “In a world riven by political and social divisions, literature can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures and religions, national boundaries and historical eras. It can give us an understanding of lives very different from our own, and a sense of the shared joys and losses of human experience.” Readers will discover novels and memoirs by some of the...

Even in his youth as a prince among thousands of princes, Mohammed bin Salman nurtured sweeping ambitions. He wanted power - enough of it to reshape his hyper-conservative, insular Islamic kingdom. When his elderly father took the throne in 2015, MBS got his chance. As the hands-on-ruler, he made seismic changes, working doggedly to overhaul the kingdom's economy, loosen its strict Islamic social codes and confront nearby enemies, especially Iran. His vision initially won fans at home and abr...

Born in Philadelphia to a Jewish father and an enigmatic Puerto Rican mother, Quiara Alegria Hudes had a love-and-trouble-filled upbringing, haunted by the unspoken, untold family secrets of the barrio. In the face of real world wounds, the powerful, Orisha-like women of her family possessed a strength, joy and sensuality that left a young Quiara awe struck. She vowed to tell their stories. But confronted by a world that treated her like an outsider, Quiara knew she must find a new language, ...

New York has always been one of the world's most filmed cities, with its apartments housing tenants like Rosemary's Baby and the Royal Tenenbaums, its skyscrapers scaled by the likes of King Kong and graffiti artists and its rubble-strewn streets prowled by everyone from Travis Bickle to Carrie Bradshaw. In this illustrated pocket guide to New York and its movies, Mark Asch explores the Big Apple block by block and neighbourhood by neighbourhood, jogging past the iconic bench from Manhattan, ...

Imagine that two doctors in the same city give different diagnoses to identical patients - or that two judges in the same court give different sentences to people who have committed matching crimes. Now imagine that the same doctor and the same judge make different decisions depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday, or they haven't yet had lunch. These are examples of noise: variability in judgements that should be identical. In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, ...

In 1937, Adam Nicolson's father answered a newspaper ad for a small cluster of three islands-The Shiants (Gaelic meaning "holy" or "enchanted")-which lie east of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Sheer black cliffs drop five hundred feet into the cold, dark, rip currents of the Minch, lounging seals crowd at their feet and thousands upon thousands of sea birds swarm overhead in the sky. Nicolson inherited the islands when he was twenty-one and in this spellbinding and luminous book, he recalls ...

Is it possible to believe in God and be gay? How does it feel to be excluded from a religious community because of your sexuality? Why do some people still believe being LGBT is a sin? The Book of Queer Prophets contains modern-day epistles from some of our most important thinkers, writers and activists: Jeanette Winterson tackles religious dogma, Amrou Al-Kadhi writes about trying to make it as a Muslim drag queen in London, John Bell writes about his decision to come out later in life, Tams...

'What can one person do?' In this vibrant, galvanizing memoir, human rights advocate and Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Samantha Power offers an urgent response to this question. As she traces her path from Irish immigrant to war correspondent and activist to eventually becoming the youngest-ever US Ambassador to the United Nations, Power writes with a unique blend of suspenseful storytelling, vivid character portraits and disarming honesty. Her account illuminates the challenges of navigating...

In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder. Soon after his rise to power, Hitler-a failed...

There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story - but few have used a scientific approach. In this incisive, thought-provoking book, award-winning writer Will Storr demonstrates how master storytellers manipulate and compel us. Applying dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to the foundations of our myths and archetypes, he shows how we can use these tools to tell better stories - and make sense of our chaotic modern world. Paperback: 320 PagesProdu...

In The Secret War, Max Hastings presents a worldwide cast of characters and extraordinary sagas of intelligence and Resistance to create a new perspective on the greatest conflict in history. The book links tales of high courage ashore, at sea and in the air to the work of the brilliant 'boffins' battling the enemy's technology. Here are not only the unheralded codebreaking geniuses of Bletchley Park, but also their German counterparts who achieved their own triumphs and the fabulous espionag...

Much has been written about Berdis Baldwin's son James, about Alberta King's son Martin Luther and Louise Little's son Malcolm. But virtually nothing has been said about the extraordinary women who raised them, each fighting their own battles, born into the beginning of the twentieth century and a deadly landscape of racial prejudice, Jim Crow, exploitation, unpoliced violence and open police vitriol. It was a society that would deny their sons' humanity from the beginning as it had denied th...

We think we know the history of faith: how the ratio of Christian believers has declined and a secular age dawned. In this startlingly original history, Alex Ryrie puts faith in the dock to explore how religious belief didn't just fade away. Rather, atheism bloomed as a belief system in its own right. Unbelievers looks back to the middle ages when it seemed impossible not to subscribe to Christianity, through the crisis of the Reformation and to the powerful, challenging cultural currents of ...

When F. W. Murnau brought Nosferatu to the screen in 1922 he ushered in the bloody reign of cinema's most venerable villain - the vampire. Nocturnal, fanged and insatiable for human blood, the vampire has infected the public consciousness like no other movie monster. In this illustrated pocket guide, Charles Bramesco goes vampire hunting across a century of cinema, stalking around lonely Transylvanian castles, dusty New York apartments and rain-soaked Washington woods to discover why the vamp...

Wes Anderson is a distinctive auteur of modern American cinema, known for having created a personal universe out of pastel colour palettes, meticulous set design, nostalgic soundtracks and a troupe of familiar actors - all seen in films such as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of Dogs. In this illustrated pocket guide Sophie Monks Kaufman delves beneath Anderson's pristine surfaces to examine his emotional preoccupations with family, romance, failure, adventur...

The times and circumstances in which people were raised often shape them - yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In this follow-up to the bestselling business classic The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz turns his attention to a question crucial to every organisation: How do you create and sustain the culture you want? This book is a journey through cultures ancient to modern, spotlighting models of leadership and culture-building from the samurai to prison gangs. Alo...