"[An] executive summary of modern political history studded with sweeping assertions and telling anecdotes." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Thought-provoking." -- Kirkus Reviews
"The Wake-Up Call argues that Covid-19 has exposed not just one president's shortcomings but a much more profound degeneration of governance dating back long before 2016...You will read no more interesting book on the political consequences of the pandemic than this." -- Niall Ferguson, author of Civilization: The West and the Rest
An urgent and informed look at the challenges America and world governments will face in a post Covid-19 world.
The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that governments matter again, that competent leadership is the difference between living and dying. A few governments proved adept at handling the crisis while many others failed. Are Western governments healthy and strong enough to keep their citizens safe from another virulent virus—and protect their economies from collapse? Is global leadership passing from the United States to Asia—and particularly China?
The Wake-Up Call addresses these urgent questions. Journalists and longtime collaborators John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge identify the problems Western leaders face, and outline a detailed plan to help them become more vigilant, better prepared, and responsive to disruptive future events.
The problems that face us are enormous; as The Wake-Up Call makes clear, governments around the world must re-engineer the way they operate to successfully meet the challenges ahead.

This study focuses on the role of institutions and organizations in the development of corporate finance from the Italian merchant banks of the Renaissance through the formation of conglomerates and leveraged-buy-out partnerships in contemporary Wall Street. It also puts forth a compelling argument for the closer integration of historical and quantitative research methodologies in financial theory. The epilogue contains an original algorithm that explains the relationship between the short-term, firm-specific factors and longer-term environmental elements that have shaped the historical development of finance.

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'Trollope did not write for posterity,' observed Henry James. 'He wrote for the day, the moment; but these are just the writers whom posterity is apt to put into its pocket.' Considered by contemporary critics to be Trollope's greatest novel, The Way We Live Now is a satire of the literary world of London in the 1870s and a bold indictment of the new power of speculative finance in English life. 'I was instigated by what I conceived to be the commercial profligacy of the age,' Trollope said.
His story concerns Augustus Melmotte, a French swindler and scoundrel, and his daughter, to whom Felix Carbury, adored son of the authoress Lady Carbury, is induced to propose marriage for the sake of securing a fortune. Trollope knew well the difficulties of dealing with editors, publishers, reviewers, and the public; his portrait of Lady Carbury, impetuous, unprincipled, and unswervingly devoted to her own self-promotion, is one of his finest satirical achievements.
His picture of late-nineteenth-century England is a portrait of a society on the verge of moral bankruptcy. In The Way We Live Now Trollope combines his talents as a portraitist and his skills as a storyteller to give us life as it was lived more than a hundred years ago.
注：两个封面随机采购

At a time when men and women were prepared to kill—and be killed—for their faith, the Reformation tore the western world apart. Acclaimed as the definitive account of these epochal events, Diarmaid MacCulloch's history brilliant re-creates the religious battles of priests, monarchs, scholars and politicians, from the zealous Luther to the radical Loyola, from the tortured Cranmer to the ambitious Philip II.

Weaving together the many strands of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, ranging widely across Europe and even to the New World, MacCulloch also reveals as never before how these upheavals affected everyday lives—overturning ideas of love, sex, death and the supernatural, and shaping the modern age.

Here, in a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history, a distinguished political philosopher firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era. Larry Siedentop argues instead that liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church. Beginning with a moral revolution in the first centuries CE, when notions about equality and human agency were first formulated by St. Paul, Siedentop follows these concepts in Christianity from Augustine to the philosophers and canon lawyers of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and ends with their reemergence in secularism—another of Christianity’s gifts to the West.
Inventing the Individual tells how a new, equal social role, the individual, arose and gradually displaced the claims of family, tribe, and caste as the basis of social organization. Asking us to rethink the evolution of ideas on which Western societies and government are built, Siedentop contends that the core of what is now the West’s system of beliefs emerged earlier than we commonly think. The roots of liberalism—belief in individual freedom, in the fundamental moral equality of individuals, in a legal system based on equality, and in a representative form of government befitting a society of free people—all these were pioneered by Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages who drew on the moral revolution carried out by the early Church. These philosophers and canon lawyers, not the Renaissance humanists, laid the foundation for liberal democracy in the West.

The key to good and efficient writing lies in the intelligent organisation of ideas and notes. This book helps students, academics and nonfiction writers to get more done, write intelligent texts and learn for the long run. It teaches you how to take smart notes and ensure they bring you and your projects forward. The Take Smart Notes principle is based on established psychological insight and draws from a tried and tested note-taking-technique. This is the first comprehensive guide and description of this system in English, and not only does it explain how it works, but also why. It suits students and academics in the social sciences and humanities, nonfiction writers and others who are in the business of reading, thinking and writing. Instead of wasting your time searching for notes, quotes or references, you can focus on what really counts: thinking, understanding and developing new ideas in writing. It does not matter if you prefer taking notes with pen and paper or on a computer, be it Windows, Mac or Linux. And you can start right away.

A New York Times Bestseller
An eye-opening adventure deep inside the everyday materials that surround us, packed with surprising stories and fascinating science
Why is glass see-through? What makes elastic stretchy? Why does a paper clip bend? Why does any material look and behave the way it does? These are the sorts of questions that Mark Miodownik is constantly asking himself. A globally-renowned materials scientist, Miodownik has spent his life exploring objects as ordinary as an envelope and as unexpected as concrete cloth, uncovering the fascinating secrets that hold together our physical world.
In Stuff Matters, Miodownik entertainingly examines the materials he encounters in a typical morning, from the steel in his razor and the graphite in his pencil to the foam in his sneakers and the concrete in a nearby skyscraper. He offers a compendium of the most astounding histories and marvelous scientific breakthroughs in the material world, including:
The imprisoned alchemist who saved himself from execution by creating the first European porcelain.
The hidden gem of the Milky Way, a planet five times the size of Earth, made entirely of diamond.
Graphene, the thinnest, strongest, stiffest material in existence—only a single atom thick—that could be used to make entire buildings sensitive to touch.
From the teacup to the jet engine, the silicon chip to the paper clip, the plastic in our appliances to the elastic in our underpants, our lives are overflowing with materials. Full of enthralling tales of the miracles of engineering that permeate our lives, Stuff Matters will make you see stuff in a whole new way.

„Die Konzentrationslager Hitlers und Himmlers sind heute historisch, sie sind nur ein Beispiel für vielfach andere, neuere Höllen; und wie Viktor Frankl seine Lager-Zeit überwand, das ist inzwischen anwendbar geworden auf viele, nicht nur deutsche Situationen, die Zweifel am Sinn des Lebens nahelegen.“
Hans Weigel im Vorwort

什么是经济学？经济学如何解释世界的现象？有没有什么事情经济学无法解释？经济学到底为何重要？让剑桥经济学家、畅销经济书作家张夏准告诉你！
看新闻的时候、读政治类书籍的时候、日常生活与柴米油盐打交道的时候，你或许都会遇到与经济相关的问题，有过上述种种疑问。剑桥经济学家张夏准（Ha-Joon Chang）以他一贯轻快的笔调、广博的知识、清楚专业的口吻，写了这一本经济学的入门书，书中包含各类的经济学议题：什么是经济学、国家的角色、不公与贫穷、工作与失业、金融与生产。
许多经济学家只喜欢谈自己的学派，但张夏准却带读者认识从古典主义到凯因斯等各类经济学理论，析论各家长短，又解释为何经济现象的解释方法不只一种。各章后头还有延伸阅读，方便有兴趣的读者进一步深入挖掘，即便是读经济的学生也会觉得相当受用。
新古典主义、新自由主义学当道，研究发展经济及全球化议题的经济学家张夏准却独排众议，提出《资本主义没告诉你的23件事》（23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism）还有《富国的糖衣：揭穿自由贸易的真相》（Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism），破解全球经济常见的迷思。张夏准目前在剑桥大学教授经济学，并替《卫报》撰写专栏。

这是一部百科全书式的经典巨著，书写了15至18世纪的资本主义发达史，由法国年鉴学派第二代领军人物、集大成者布罗代尔历时二十余年结撰而成。作者认为，资本主义并不是一朝一夕出现的，其基础只能在长时段的日常物质生活中去寻找。因此他以“总体史”为目标，以长达四百年的时段为整体对 象，从特定角度描述了世界物质文明和经济发展的历史。
全书共分三卷。第一卷《日常生活的结构：可能和不可能》好比“为世界过一次磅”，旨在确认前工业化时期世界的潜力限度，当时“物质世界”占据重要地位。
作为集大成之作，本书不仅展示出布罗代尔的博学广闻和驾驭浩瀚史料的非凡才能，也充分体现了年鉴学派对长时段发展和经济社会结构两个维度的重视与研究，而它在架构、概念、理论与论证方面所引发的争辩也使其更具长久的魅力。

A fine achievement by a huge new talent' - William Dalrymple, "Sunday Times". In 1857, the native troops of the Bengal army rose against their colonial masters. The ensuing insurrection was to become the bloodiest in the history of the British Empire. Combining formidable storytelling with ground-breaking research, Saul David narrates a tale at once heart-rendingly tragic and extraordinarily compelling. David provides new and convincing evidence that the true causes of the mutiny were much more complex, and disturbing, than previously assumed.

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe.
Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.

First published in 1976, this book is the first detailed examination of the history of British sea power since A.T. Mahan's classic The Influence of Sea Power on History , published in 1890. In analyzing the reasons for the rise and fall of Great Britain as a predominant maritime nation in the period from the Tudors to the present day, Professor Kennedy sets the Royal Navy within a framework of national, international, economic, political and strategical considerations.<br /><br />To this new paperback edition the author has added a new introduction that brings the discussion of naval power up to date, with special emphasis on today’s enormous U.S. Navy as the prime contemporary example of the use of naval forces to wield global influence.

Revised and updated throughout, this brilliant survey of European financial history from the earliest times to the present by internationally renowned scholar and author Charles P. Kindleberger offers a comprehensive account of the evolution of money in Western Europe, bimetallism and the emergence of the gold standard, the banking systems of the Continent and the British Isles, and overviews of foreign investment, regional and global financial integration, and private and public finance in Western Europe. The new edition features expanded coverage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and important new material on recent developments in European monetary integration.

Bildung und Kompetenz ihrer Einwohner bilden die Grundlage für die wirtschaftliche und technische Entwicklung jeder Nation und ihres Wohlstands. Kompetenzforscher vergleichen mitleidslos die gesamte Menschheit und finden dabei bestürzende Leistungsunterschiede. Die besten Schüler finden sich in Ostasien. Das Mittelmaßβ stellt die europäische Welt mit Ländern in Nordamerika, Europa und Ozeanien. Die Mehrheit der Länder, stellen die schlechtesten Schüler. Das heißt zwei Drittel der Menschheit haben kaum Chancen, weil in ihren Ländern die Expertise für den Aufbau von High-Tech-Branchen fehlt, ohne die es – jenseits von Rohstoffen – keinen Zugang zu den Weltmärkten gibt.
Die Förderung von Qualifikation und Kompetenz, wie auch eine geschickte Einwanderungspolitik gehört deshalb zu den dringlichsten Aufgaben der Politik, wenn sie das Wohlstandsniveau ihrer Nationen nicht gefährden wollen.
Gunnar Heinsohn beschreibt diese brisante These mit Lösungsansätzen eindrücklich in seinem neuen Buch.

This is a bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. In his previous book, "The Fabric of Reality", Deutsch describes the four deepest strands of existing knowledge - the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. Filled with startling new conclusions about human choice, optimism, scientific explanation, and the evolution of culture, "The Beginning of Infinity" is a groundbreaking book that will become a classic of its kind.

During 200 years the East India Company grew from a loose association of Elizabethan tradesmen into "the grandest society of merchants in the universe". As a commercial enterprise it came to control half the world's trade and as a political entity it administered an embryonic empire. Without it there would have been no British India and no British Empire. In a tapestry ranging from Southern Africa to north-west America, and from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of Victoria, bizarre locations and roguish personality abound. From Bombay to Singapore and Hong Kong the political geography of today is, in some respects, the result of the Company. This book looks at the history of the East India Company.

Accident investigation and risk assessment have for decades focused on the human factor, most notably in the form of 'human error'. Countless books and papers have been written about how to identify, classify, eliminate, prevent and compensate for 'human error'. This preoccupation with failure is near universal and can be found in all fields of application. One consequence of this has been a bias towards the study of performance failures, leading to a neglect of normal or 'error-free' performance. The common, unspoken assumption is that failures and successes have different origins and that there therefore is little to be gained from studying the latter. Erik Hollnagel argues strongly that this assumption is incorrect and that it is impossible to attain safety by eliminating risks and failures. Instead it is better to study why things go right, and to find ways to support and amplify that. The aim of this book is to present a single, simple but powerful principle for human performance that can be used to understand both positive and negative outcomes. The ETTO Principle reflects the common trait that people in their work naturally adjust what they do to match the conditions - to what has happened, to what happens, and to what may happen. It proposes that it is normal for people in work situations to adjust their performance by means of an efficiency-thoroughness trade-off (ETTO) - usually by sacrificing thoroughness for efficiency. The trade-off can be due to a lack of time, lack of resources, work and company pressures, lack of information, etc. The ability of people mutually to adjust their performance is the reason why things go right. Yet in some cases the adjustments may combine in an unforeseen way and lead to adverse outcomes. These outcomes are nevertheless due to the very same processes that produce successes, rather than to errors and malfunctions. The ETTO Principle obviates the need for specialised theories and models of failure and 'human error' and offers instead a viable basis for more effective and just approaches to both reactive and proactive safety management.