History & Culture & Politics (GR)

A constant stream of impoverished women and girls have been, and are being, enslaved and abused in the Asia Pacific region. Slavery is not a historical issue - its happening today. History is repeating itself. Through Sylvia Yu Friedmans work in journalism, counter-trafficking and philanthropy, she has had rare and...

The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But there has been no comprehensive and entertaining, single-volume history of this great intellectual journey since 1945. With his characteristic clarity and elegance A....

An engrossing history of ancient Chinese philosophy and culture from an eminent Cambridge expert. We are often told that the twenty-first century is bound to become Chinas century. Never before has Chinese culture been so physically, digitally, economically or aesthetically present in everyday Western life. But how much do we...

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 century, and despite the passing of one Imperial dynasty to the next, it has maintained them for the eight centuries since. Even the European...

Currently in Bill Gates's bookbag and FT Books of 2018 Increasingly, the demands of identity direct the world's politics. Nation, religion, sect, race, ethnicity, gender: these categories have overtaken broader, inclusive ideas of who we are. We have built walls rather than bridges. The result: increasing in anti-immigrant sentiment, rioting...

Revised and updated fourth edition The world today rests on increasingly unstable fault lines. From the conflict in Ukraine or fresh upheavals in the Middle East to the threats posed to humanity by a global pandemic, climate change and natural disasters, the worlds danger zones once again draw their battle...

LONGLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION NON-FICTION CROWN A SUNDAY TIMES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Timely ... a long and engrossing survey of the library' FT 'A sweeping, absorbing history, deeply researched' Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors,...

WINNER OF THE 2022 EISNER AWARD FOR BEST COMICS-RELATED BOOK 'Magnificently marvellous' Junot Diaz 'An account of how a motley gang of accidental collaborators created a vernacular mythology out of the dodgiest of commercial occasions ... a revelation' Jonathan Lethem Every schoolchild recognises their protagonists: the Avengers, the X-Men, your...

Easily the most important book to be published this century. I find it hard to take any young activist seriously who hasnt at least familarised themselves with Zuboffs central ideas. - Zadie Smith, The Guardian The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the...

The time since the Second World War has been seen by some as the longest uninterrupted period of harmony in human history: the 'long peace', as Stephen Pinker called it. But despite this, there has been a military conflict ongoing every year since 1945. The same can be said for...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Shortlisted for the 2020 Cundill History PrizeRiveting and original ... a work enriched by solid scholarship, vivid personal experience, and acute appreciation of the concerns and aspirations of the contending parties in this deeply unequal conflict Noam ChomskyThe twentieth century for Palestine and the Palestinians...

For a century, the most divisive question in political thought has been about the size of the state. Should it expand and take an active role in all sorts of areas of life? Or is that just meddlesome and wasteful? Those questions might have made sense in the previous century....

Aprovocative bestseller that explains why the world is divided into nations with wildly differing levels of prosperity. Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award 2012. Why are some nations more prosperous than others? Why Nations Fail sets out to answer this question, with...

In The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama took us from the dawn of mankind to the French and American Revolutions. Here, he picks up the thread again in the second instalment of his definitive account of mankinds emergence as a political animal. This is the story of how state,...

Francis Fukuyamas most important book since the pathbreaking End of History Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted,...

The Earth is riven by dangerous and shifting faultlines. Since the previous edition of The World in Conflict, we have witnessed the apparent collapse of Isis in Syria and the reawakening of the Troubles in Ireland. Donald Trump first goaded and then mollified North Korea, the world's most enigmatic nuclear...

What if you could peer into the minds of an entire population? What if you could target the weakest with rumours that only they saw? In 2016, an obscure British military contractor turned the world upside down. Funded by a billionaire on a crusade to start his own far-right insurgency,...

You cannot understand power, wealth and poverty without knowing about Moneyland. Simon Kuper, New Statesman 2019: democracy is eating itself, inequality is skyrocketing, the system is breaking apart. Why? Because in 1962, some bankers in London had an idea that changed the world. That idea was called offshore. It meant...

Born in the Year of the Fire Tiger, Ann Wee moved to Singapore in 1950 to marry into a Singaporean Chinese family, entering into a new world of cultural expectations and domestic rituals. She went on to become a pioneer in Singapore's fledging social welfare department and is often described...

In Unsettling Absences, Eric Thompson argues that urbanism is a cultural force unbound from the city and is a pervasive presence in the Malaysian countryside. Transported to rural communities, urbanism has motivated migration, transformed the social lives of rural inhabitants, and created a deep ambivalence about personal identity. This has...