John Sackville

One winter morning, Lorimer Black - young, good-looking, but with a somewhat troubled expression - goes to keep a perfectly routine business appointment and finds a hanged man. A bad start to the day, by anyone's standards, and an ominous portent. For Lorimer works in the only-slightly corrupt business of financial adjusting, and he is about to learn that it is much uglier - and even more crooked - than he ever imagined. Suddenly, he's being unfairly blamed for all kinds of irregularities. Next, his life is threatened. And, lastly, he's coming to realise that the life he has led till now - the one someone wants to rub out - is one big fat lie... 

In this compelling book, highly acclaimed author and broadcaster Laurence Rees tells the definitive history of the most notorious Nazi institution of them all. We discover how Auschwitz evolved from a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners into the site of the largest mass murder in history - part death camp, part concentration camp, where around a million Jews were killed. 

Auschwitz examines the mentality and motivations of the key Nazi decision makers, and perpetrators of appalling crimes speak here for the first time about their actions. Fascinating and disturbing facts have been uncovered - from the operation of a brothel to the corruption that was rife throughout the camp. 

This is the story of murder, brutality, courage, escape and survival, and a powerful account of how human tragedy of such immense scale could have happened.

Battle for the Island Kingdom reveals the life-and-death struggle for power which changed the course of history. The six decades leading up to 1066 were defined by bloody wars and intrigues, in which three peoples vied for supremacy over the island kingdom. In this epic retelling, Don Hollway recounts the clashes of Vikings, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, their warlords and their conniving queens.

We are a wonder of evolution. Powerful yet dextrous, instinctive yet thoughtful, we are expert communicators and innovators. Our exceptional abilities have created the civilisation we know today. But we're also deeply flawed. Our bodies break, choke and fail, whether we're kings or peasants. Diseases thwart our boldest plans. Our psychological biases have been at the root of terrible decisions in both war and peacetime. This extraordinary contradiction is the essence of what it means to be human - the sum total of our frailties and our faculties.

And history has played out in the balance between them. Now, for the first time, Lewis Dartnell tells our story through the lens of this unique, capricious and fragile nature. He explores how our biology has shaped our relationships, our societies, our economies and our wars, and how it continues to challenge and define our progress. Being Human is history made flesh. It will change the way you see the world.

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis, along with his teenage son Fritz. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Based on Gustav's secret diary and meticulous archive research, this book tells his and Fritz's story for the first time - a story of courage and survival unparalleled in the history of the Holocaust.

Jonathan Harris's classic text chronologically surveys Byzantine history in the time of the Crusades. The book reveals the attitudes of the Byzantine ruling elites towards the Crusades and their ultimate inability to adapt to the challenges this presented. Using evidence amassed in a wealth of primary sources, Harris successfully makes the point that Byzantine interactions with Western Europe, the Crusades and the crusader states is best understood in the nature of the Byzantine Empire and the ideology which underpinned it, rather than in any generalised hostility between the peoples.

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings.

This book celebrates the immense drama and beauty of the car. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis's short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling.

The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis's stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers.

Shipcott is a close knit community where no stranger goes unnoticed. So when an elderly woman is murdered in her bed, village policeman Jonas Holly is doubly shocked. But Jonas finds himself sidelined as the investigation is snatched away from him by a senior detective. But this isn't the end of it for Jonas, because someone in the village is taunting him, blaming him for the tragedy, and watching every move he makes...

Covid-19, mpox, bird flu, SARS, HIV, AIDS, Ebola; we are living in the Age of Pandemics - one that we have created. As the climate crisis reaches a fever pitch and ecological destruction continues unabated, we are just beginning to reckon with the effects of environmental collapse on our global health.

Fevered Planet exposes how the way we farm, what we eat, the places we travel to and the scientific experiments we conduct create the perfect conditions for deadly new diseases to emerge and spread.

Drawing on the latest scientific research, former Guardian environment editor John Vidal takes us into deep, disappearing forests in Gabon and the Congo, valleys scorched by wildfire near Lake Tahoe and our densest, polluted cities to show how closely human, animal and plant diseases are now intertwined with planetary destruction.

Across Exmoor, children are being stolen from cars. There are no explanations, no ransom demands... and no hope. Policeman Jonas Holly faces a precarious journey into the warped mind of the kidnapper if he's to stand any chance of catching him.

Lama Yeshe didn't see a car until he was 15-years-old. In his quiet village, he and other children ran in fields with yaks and mastiffs. The rhythm of life was anchored by the pastoral cycles. Food was carefully apportioned and eaten together, everyone was family. The arrival of Chinese army cars one day in 1959 changed everything. In the wake of the deadly Tibetan Uprising, he escaped to India through the Himalayas to start over as a refugee. One of only 13 survivors out of 300 travellers, he spent the next few years in America, experiencing the excesses of the Woodstock generation before reforming in Europe.

Now in his seventies and a leading monk at the Samye Ling monastery in Scotland - the first Buddhist centre in the West - Lama Yeshe casts a hopeful look back at his momentous life. From his learnings on self-compassion and discipline to his trials and tribulations with loss and failure, his poignant story mirrors our own struggles. Written with erudition and humour, From a Mountain in Tibet shines a light on how the most desperate of situations can help us to uncover vital life lessons and attain lasting peace and contentment.

This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of thirty years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. 

Using previously unpublished, startling eyewitness testimony from soldiers of the Red Army and Wehrmacht, civilians who suffered during the conflict and those who knew both men personally, bestselling historian Laurence Rees - probably the only person alive who has met Germans who worked for Hitler and Russians who worked for Stalin - challenges long-held popular misconceptions about two of the most important figures in history. This is a master work from one of our finest historians.

Homelands is a stunning blend of contemporary history reportage and memoir by our greatest writer about European affairs. Drawing on half a century of interviews and experience Homelands tells the story of Europe in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries - how having emerged from its wartime hell in 1945 it slowly recovered and rebuilt liberated and united to come close to the ideal of a Europe 'whole free and at peace'. And then faltered. Humane expert and deeply felt Homelands is full of encounters conversations and anecdote.

It is also highly personal: Timothy Garton Ash has spent a lifetime studying and thinking about Europe and this book is full of life itself from his father's experience on D-Day to his teenage French exchange to interviewing Polish dockers Albanian guerillas and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris as well as advising prime ministers chancellors and presidents in the UK Europe and the US. Homelands is both a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong all the way from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. It culminates in an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

Tom Nash has rebuilt his life after a turbulent career in the Secret Intelligence Service. His past, though, is less willing to leave him behind. When a midnight intruder tries to kill him, Tom knows it is just a matter of time before another assassination attempt is made.

Religion is both unique - as far as we can judge - and universal to humans. Our species diverged from the great apes about six to eight million years ago and since then, along with language, our propensity towards spiritual thinking and ritual emerged. How, when and why did this occur, and how did the earliest, informal shamanic practices evolve into the world religions familiar to us today? What is the evolutionary purpose of religion, and are some individuals more inclined than others to be religious?

Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, explores these and other key questions, mining the distinctions between religions of experience - as practised by hunter-gatherer societies since the earliest human history - and doctrinal religions, from Judaism, Christianity and Islam to Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and their many derivatives. Examining religion's origins, social function, the effects of religious practice or feeling on the brain and body, and its place in the modern era, How Religion Evolved offers a fascinating and far-reaching analysis of this quintessentially human impulse - to believe.

In the immediate aftermath of a loss, sometimes it is all we can do to keep breathing. With his signature clarity and compassion, Thich Nhat Hanh will guide you through the storm of emotions surrounding the death of a loved one.

How To Live When A Loved One Dies offers powerful practices such as mindful breathing that will help you reconcile with death and loss, feel connected to your loved one long after they have gone and transform your grief into healing and joy.

For years we've been told that successful weight loss is a simple matter of willpower and calorie control. But this argument fails to take into account how our brains and bodies respond to food - in particular, to the ultra-processed foods that seem inescapable in modern life.

Bariatric surgeon Dr Andrew Jenkinson gives us a game-changing blueprint to free us from our biological impulses. Even though our brains are hardwired to seek out quick rewards in salty and sugary foods, he demonstrates how to escape our default behaviours to create long-lasting change. With cutting edge metabolic science, mental reprogramming strategies, easy lifestyle changes and even delicious recipes, maintaining a healthy weight never felt so good.

The King's English is Kingsley Amis's authoritative and witty guide to the use and abuse of the English language.

A scourge of illiteracy and a thorn in the side of pretension, Amis provides indispensable advice about the linguistic blunders and barbarities that lie in wait for us, from danglers, four-letter words to jargon and even Welsh rarebit. If you have ever wondered whether it's acceptable to start a sentence with 'and', to boldly split an infinitive, or to cross your sevens in the French style, Amis has the answer - or a trenchant opinion.

By turns reflective, acerbic and provocative, The King's English is for anyone who cares about how the English language is used.

In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation.

Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary into models for the United States.

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 have only ever been inhabited by a tiny minority of humanity, the heat they generate has sparked most of our political, social, commercial, scientific and artistic revolutions. It is these world-changing, epoch-defining moments that are the focus of Ben Wilson's book, as he takes us on a thrilling global tour of the key metropolises of history, from Urk, Athens, Alexandria and Rome, to Baghdad, Lübeck and Venice, to Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, Paris, New York, LA, Shanghai and Lagos. 

Managing and re-imagining the city is already one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. With over half the world's population now living in cities, and with the cosmopolitanism of the major world metropolises under attack from revived nationalism and hostility to globalisation, it has never been more important to understand cities and the role they have played in making us who we are. Rich with individual characters, scenes and snapshots of daily life, Metropolis combines scholarship and storytelling in a terrifically engaging, stylishly written history of the world through an urban lens.

What do we really know about our cousins, the Neanderthals? For over a century we saw Neanderthals as inferior to Homo Sapiens. After new discoveries, the pendulum swung the other way and they are generally seen as our relatives: not quite human, but similar enough, and still not equal. Now, thanks to an ongoing revolution in palaeoanthropology in which he has played a key part, Ludovic Slimak shows us that they are something altogether different - and they should be understood on their own terms rather than by comparing them to ourselves. As he reveals in this stunning book, the Neanderthals had their own history, their own rituals, their own customs. Their own intelligence, very different from ours.

Ludovic Slimak has travelled around the world for the past thirty years to uncover who the Neanderthals really were. A modern-day Indiana Jones, he takes us on a fascinating archaeological investigation: from the Arctic Circle to the deep Mediterranean forests, he traces the steps of these enigmatic creatures, working to decipher their real stories through every single detail they left behind. A thought-provoking adventure story, written with wit and verve, The Naked Neanderthal shifts our understanding of deep history -- and in the process reveals just how much we have yet to learn.

In The Nazi Mind, bestselling author Laurence Rees combines history and the latest research in psychology to help answer some of the most perplexing questions surrounding the Second World War and the Holocaust. Ultimately, he delves into the darkness to explain how and why these people were capable of committing the worst crime in the history of the world.

Rees traces the rise and eventual fall of the Nazis through the lens of ‘twelve warnings’ – from talk about ‘them’ and ‘us’ to the escalation of racism – whilst also highlighting signs to look out for in present day leaders. Rees uses previously unpublished testimony from former Nazis and those who grew up in the Nazi system, and in-depth psychological insights including cutting edge work on obedience, authority and the brain. The Nazi Mind is a revelatory new way of understanding how so many people committed the most appalling crime of the 20th century.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . . This sparkling book is about that fact.

High on a Cornish cliff, Blake, a young woman of mysterious background, is acting as housesitter in a vast uninhabited mansion. The house has a panic room. Cunningly concealed, even Blake doesn’t know it’s there. But her remote existence is going to be invaded when people come looking for the house’s owner, missing rogue entrepreneur, Jack Harkness, and Blake is asked the sort of questions she can’t – or won’t – want to answer...

In 1975, as a child, Richard Beard was sent away from his home to sleep in a dormitory. So were David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

In those days a private boys' boarding school education was largely the same experience as it had been for generations: a training for the challenges of Empire. He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was to not let that show. Being separated from the people who love you is traumatic. How did that feel at the time, and what sort of adult does it mould?

This is a story about England, and a portrait of a type of boy, trained to lead, who becomes a certain type of man. As clearly as an X-ray, it reveals the make-up of those who seek power - what makes them tick, and why.

Just when Stanley Duke thinks it safe to sink into middle age, his son goes insane. As if that wasn't terrible enough, Stanley finds himself beset on all sides by women - neurotic, cantankerous, half-baked or just plain capricious. As one by one they gnaw away at his composure, Stanley wonders whether insanity is not something with which all women are intimately acquainted.

Competition is stiff for the position of sub-librarian in Aberdarcy Library. For John Lewis, the situation is complicated by the attentions of daunting and desirable village socialite, Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams, who is married to a member of the local Council.

Pursuing an affair with her whilst keeping his job prospects alive is John's predicament, as he finds himself running down Welsh country lanes at midnight in a wig and dress, resisting the advances of local drunks and suffering the long speeches of a 'nut-faced' clergyman.

The author views the Titanic as a paradigm of Edwardian society. At the bottom of the ship was the steerage class, filled with emigrants hoping for a better life in the New World. Above them were the second class citizens bouyed-up by their prosperous respectability. And on the upper decks were the rich.

J M W Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life. Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst, a near mythical figure in his own lifetime. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence.

Our modern-day cities might seem to represent our separation from the natural world. In fact as Ben Wilson reveals in this captivating re-examination of urban landscapes around the world nature has always been at the heart of the city. Wilson explores the wild side of cities past present and future: the middens abandoned sites and strips of land alongside railway lines. For much of history wild patches in cities provided essential food fuel medicine and places of recreation and escape for city-dwellers and the dividing line between city and countryside was blurred.

Even our post-industrial cities are much wilder places that we might imagine with booming animal and plant populations if we know where to look. In today's urbanised planet natural forces - be they floods storms droughts or pandemics - look set to determine the future of our cities. In a time of climate crisis cities that once built walls and towers to defend against attack; now they have to become greener to protect themselves from external threats. Our future - and that of the planet - will be made in the city. Only by looking deep in to the past examining the present and casting an eye to the future can we really begin to understand the bountiful potential and wonder of our extraordinary urban ecosystems.

A practical, accessible guide to understanding the diet myth and the secret to lasting weight loss. For over two decades, weight loss surgeon Dr Andrew Jenkinson has treated thousands of people who have become trapped in the endless cycle of dieting. Why We Eat (Too Much), combines case studies from his practice and the new science of metabolism to illuminate how our appetite really works. Debunking the great myths of the body, and systematically explaining why dieting is counter-productive, this unflinching book investigates every aspect of nutrition.

50,000 years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements - in radiocarbon dating and ancient DNA, for example - that allowed each of these discoveries to be made, enabling us to be more accurate in our predictions about not just how long ago these other humans lived, but how they lived, interacted and live on in our genes today. This is the story of us, told for the first time with its full cast of characters.

The modern world is built on commodities - from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they come from. But we should. In The World for Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinised corners of the economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the earth's resources. It is the story of how a handful of swashbuckling businessmen became indispensable cogs in global markets: enabling an enormous expansion in international trade, and connecting resource-rich countries - no matter how corrupt or war-torn - with the world's financial centres.

And it is the story of how some traders acquired untold political power, right under the noses of Western regulators and politicians - helping Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, fuelling the Libyan rebel army during the Arab Spring, and funnelling cash to Vladimir Putin's Kremlin in spite of strict sanctions. The result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

In this masterful work, one of the most revered spiritual leaders in the world today shares his wisdom on how to be the change we want to see in the world.

In these troubling times we all yearn for a better world. But many of us feel powerless and uncertain what we can do. Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) is blazingly clear: there's one thing that we have the power to change-and which can make all the difference: our mind. How we see and think about things determines all the choices we make, the everyday actions we take (or avoid), how we relate to those we love (or oppose), and how we react in a crisis or when things don't go our way.

Filled with powerful examples of engaged action he himself has undertaken, inspiring Buddhist parables, and accessible daily meditations, this powerful spiritual guide offers us a path forward, opening us to the possibilities of change and how we can contribute to the collective awakening and environmental revolution our fractured world so desperately needs.