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From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year's Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

The breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of optimism around the world, but Russia today is actively involved in subversive information warfare, manipulating the media to destabilize its enemies. How did a country that embraced freedom and market reform 25 years ago end up as an autocratic police state bent once again on confrontation with America? A winner of the Orwell Prize, The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the cold war to tell the story of Russia's stealthy and largely unchronicled counter revolution.
A highly regarded Moscow correspondent for the Economist, Arkady Ostrovsky comes to this story both as a participant and a foreign correspondent. His knowledge of many of the key players allows him to explain the phenomenon of Valdimir Putin - his rise and astonishing longevity, his use of hybrid warfare and the alarming crescendo of his military interventions. One of Putin's first acts was to reverse Gorbachev's decision to end media censorship and Ostrovsky argues that the Russian media has done more to shape the fate of the country than its politicians. Putin pioneered a new form of demagogic populism --oblivious to facts and aggressively nationalistic - that has now been embraced by Donald Trump.

An Economist Best Book of the Year
“Sweeping . . . an ambitious synthesis . . . [Evans] writes with admirable narrative power and possesses a wonderful eye for local color . . . Fascinating.”—Stephen Schuker, The Wall Street Journal
From the bestselling author of The Third Reich at War, a masterly account of Europe in the age of its global hegemony; the latest volume in the Penguin History of Europe series
Richard J. Evans, bestselling historian of Nazi Germany, returns with a monumental new addition to the acclaimed Penguin History of Europe series, covering the period from the fall of Napoleon to the outbreak of World War I. Evans’s gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. Among the great themes it discusses are the decline of religious belief and the rise of secular science and medicine, the journey of art, music, and literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the replacement of old-regime punishments by the modern prison, the end of aristocratic domination and the emergence of industrial society, and the dramatic struggle of feminists for women’s equality and emancipation. Uniting the era’s broad-ranging transformations was the pursuit of power in all segments of life, from the banker striving for economic power to the serf seeking to escape the power of his landlord, from the engineer asserting society’s power over the environment to the psychiatrist attempting to exert science’s power over human nature itself.
The first single-volume history of the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the reader a magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the rest of the globe.

A timely examination by a leading scientist of the physical, psychological, and moral effects of inequality.
The levels of inequality in the world today are on a scale that have not been seen in our lifetimes, yet the disparity between rich and poor has ramifications that extend far beyond mere financial means. In The Broken Ladder psychologist Keith Payne examines how inequality divides us not just economically; it also has profound consequences for how we think, how we respond to stress, how our immune systems function, and even how we view moral concepts such as justice and fairness.
Research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has not only revealed important new insights into how inequality changes people in predictable ways but also provided a corrective to the flawed view of poverty as being the result of individual character failings. Among modern developed societies, inequality is not primarily a matter of the actual amount of money people have. It is, rather, people's sense of where they stand in relation to others. Feeling poor matters—not just being poor. Regardless of their average incomes, countries or states with greater levels of income inequality have much higher rates of all the social maladies we associate with poverty, including lower than average life expectancies, serious health problems, mental illness, and crime.
The Broken Ladder explores such issues as why women in poor societies often have more children, and why they have them at a younger age; why there is little trust among the working class in the prudence of investing for the future; why people's perception of their social status affects their political beliefs and leads to greater political divisions; how poverty raises stress levels as effectively as actual physical threats; how inequality in the workplace affects performance; and why unequal societies tend to become more religious. Understanding how inequality shapes our world can help us better understand what drives ideological divides, why high inequality makes the middle class feel left behind, and how to disconnect from the endless treadmill of social comparison.

What Are You Looking At? by Will Gompertz - a wonderfully lively and accessible history of Modern Art by the BBC Arts Editor. "An essential primer not only for art lovers but for art loathers too". (Express). What is modern art? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it worth so much damn money? Join Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art. You will learn: not all conceptual art is bollocks; Picasso is king (but Cezanne is better); Pollock is no drip; Dali painted with his moustache; a urinal changed the course of art, why your 5-year-old really couldn't do it. Refreshing, irreverent and always straightforward, What Are You Looking At? cuts through the pretentious art speak and asks all the basic questions that you were too afraid to ask. Your next gallery trip is going to be a little less intimidating and a lot more interesting. "Robert Hughes' The Shock of the New redone a la Bill Bryson". (Telegraph). This book is essential reading for sceptics, art lovers, and the millions of us who visit art galleries every year - and are confused. It will also be enjoyed by readers of The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich and is a perfect primer to the subject for the student or beginner. Will Gompertz is the BBC Arts Editor and probably the world's first art history stand-up comedian. He was a Director at the Tate Gallery for 7 years. He has a particular interest in modern art and has written about the arts for The Times and the Guardian for over 20 years. In 2009, he wrote and performed a sell-out one-man comedy show about modern art at the Edinburgh Festival. He was recently voted one of the world's top 50 creative thinkers by New York's Creativity Magazine.

If the only thing necessary to the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, how can he keep silent?
If a decade of diplomatic life had taught Toby Bell one thing, it was to treat every crisis as normal and soluble.
A covert counter-terror operation codenamed "Wildlife" to be mounted on the Rock of Gibraltar. This one is right off the books. The target codenamed "PUNTER". Our boys on land, the American mercenaries by sea. Kit Probyn, Foreign Office upright veteran with a safe pair of hands and no previous experience of the dark arts, to be the Minister's eyes and ears on the ground. His "red telephone".
Toby Bell, rising Foreign Office star and the Minister's Personal Private Secretary, has been kept out of the loop. Why? Whispers of private armies, bounty, dicey intelligence, corporate wars.
A disgraced Special Forces Soldier who took part in "Wildlife" delivers a message from the dead. The worlds of Toby Bell and Kit Probyn collide. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, at what point do these two good men become guilty bystanders?
A Delicate Truth is a furiously paced story of moral dilemma, personal guilt, bold action and unexpected love.

How Music Got Free is a riveting story of obsession, music, crime, and money, featuring visionaries and criminals, moguls and tech-savv y teenagers. It’s about the greatest pirate in history, the most powerful executive in the music business, a revolutionary invention and an illegal website four times the size of the iTunes Music Store.
Journalist Stephen Witt traces the secret history of digital music piracy, from the German audio engineers who invented the mp3, to a North Carolina compact-disc manufacturing plant where factory worker Dell Glover leaked nearly two thousand albums over the course of a decade, to the high-rises of midtown Manhattan where music executive Doug Morris cornered the global market on rap, and, finally, into the darkest recesses of the Internet.
Through these interwoven narratives, Witt has written a thrilling book that depicts the moment in history when ordinary life became forever entwined with the world online — when, suddenly, all the music ever recorded was available for free. In the page-turning tradition of writers like Michael Lewis and Lawrence Wright, Witt’s deeply-reported first book introduces the unforgettable characters—inventors, executives, factory workers, and smugglers—who revolutionized an entire artform, and reveals for the first time the secret underworld of media pirates that transformed our digital lives.
An irresistible never-before-told story of greed, cunning, genius, and deceit, How Music Got Free isn’t just a story of the music industry—it’s a must-read history of the Internet itself.

Back in 2006, hunched over spreadsheets, hedge fund titan John Paulson realised that the housing market was vastly overstretched. Fuelled by sub-prime mortgages, it was a classic bubble ready to burst. He had waited his whole life for this perfect trade. Paulson, who had never dealt in real-estate before, struggled to convince bullish Wall Street investors about the coming crash. But as house prices began to falter and the financial system collapsed, he reaped the rewards. He made a now-legendary series of trades, executed with technical skill and perfect timing. The results were spectacular. In a single morning in late 2007 Paulson made $1.25bn from a five-point fall in the markets. Across the year he earned $15 billion for his fund, including $4 billion for himself - more than the incomes of J.K Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods put together. It was the largest trading windfall in history by far, securing his place in the history books alongside Warren Buffet and George Soros. Written with the exclusive co-operation of the highly secretive Paulson, "The Greatest Trade Ever" tells the full story of his trade for the first time. Like Barbarians at the Gate 20 years ago, it also tells a wider story of staggering wealth accumulation, hubris and financial whizzery. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of the markets - and trying to spot the next bubble.

Review
“In prose that is clean, crisp, and cutting, Kendall reveals how feminism has both failed to take into account populations too often excluded from the banner of feminism and failed to consider the breadth of issues affecting the daily lives of millions of women. . . . Throughout, Kendall thoughtfully and deliberately takes mainstream feminism to task . . . [but] if Hood Feminism is a searing indictment of mainstream feminism, it is also an invitation. For every case in which Kendall highlights problematic practices, she offers guidance for how we can all do better.”
—NPR.org
“A deeply personal portrait of want and a polemic that brings race and gender into the discussion of poverty.”
—The Washington Post
“A searing indictment of . . . the modern feminist movement’s failure to support marginalized women and to integrate issues of race, class and sexual orientation.”
—USA Today
“This book is an act of fierce love and advocacy, and it is urgently necessary.”
—Samantha Irby, author of Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
“Mikki’s book is a rousing call to action for today’s feminists. It should be required reading for everyone.”
—Gabrielle Union, author of We’re Going to Need More Wine

Back in 2006, hunched over spreadsheets, hedge fund titan John Paulson realised that the housing market was vastly overstretched. Fuelled by sub-prime mortgages, it was a classic bubble ready to burst. He had waited his whole life for this perfect trade. Paulson, who had never dealt in real-estate before, struggled to convince bullish Wall Street investors about the coming crash. But as house prices began to falter and the financial system collapsed, he reaped the rewards. He made a now-legendary series of trades, executed with technical skill and perfect timing. The results were spectacular. In a single morning in late 2007, Paulson made $1.25bn from a five-point fall in the markets. Across the year, he earned $15 billion for his fund, including $4 billion for himself - more than the incomes of J.K Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods put together. It was the largest trading windfall in history by far, securing his place in the history books alongside Warren Buffet and George Soros. Written with the exclusive co-operation of the highly secretive Paulson, "The Greatest Trade Ever" tells the full story of his trade for the first time. Like Barbarians at the Gate 20 years ago, it also tells a wider story of staggering wealth accumulation, hubris and financial whizzery. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the inner workings of the markets - and trying to spot the next bubble.