Current Affairs

This book's title, No Straight Road Takes You There, is an evocation and a declaration. Highways tend to be built across the easy routes and flat places, or the landscape is cleared away - logged, graded, levelled, tunnelled throu…

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the ver…

An entertaining account of the philosophy and technology of hacking-and why we all need to understand it.It's a signal paradox of our times that we live in an information society but do not know how it works. And without understan…

Featuring an introduction by Rachel Maddow, Pegasus: How a Spy in Our Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy is the behind-the-scenes story of one of the most sophisticated and invasive surveillance weapons ev…

The celebrated historian and journalist uncovers the networks trying to destroy the democratic worldAll of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like, with a bad man at the top. But in the 21st cen…

AI is here, bringing a seismic shift in the way our society operates. Might this mean a future reimagined on equitable terms for women and marginalised groups everywhere?Not unless we fight for it.At present, power remains largely…

Is this how democracy dies? Based on his smash hit podcast, The Coming Storm is Gabriel Gatehouse's brilliant exploration of the roots of Q Anon and the rise of the extreme right in the US. It's a story that reaches back decades, …

The tools and understanding you need to protect yourself, and your family.Smartphone Nation will transform the way you - and your children - understand your devices and how they affect you. In this practical, agenda-setting book, …

Undeterred by eight years of timid US sanctions, Vladimir Putin ordered his full-scale assault on Ukraine on 24 February 2022. In the hours that followed, Western leaders weaponized economic tools in a world-changing financial exp…

The rise, fall, and revival of the Caesar of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk famously leads his companies from a bully pulpit, cutting through red tape whenever possible with little regard for the fallout. Musk's approach to business an…

What can the fall of Rome teach us about the decline of the West today? A historian and a political economist, both experts in their field, investigate. Over the last three centuries, the West rose to dominate the planet. Then, su…

Forgotten is a search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine - now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories - and what they might tell us about the land and the people who live on our small slip …

A powerful and urgent explanation and vindication of our human rights and freedomsOur human rights are endangered. After the devastation of World War Two the international community united to enshrine fundamental rights to refuge,…

A Palestinian prisoner’s memoir of thirty years’ captivity, and a love letter to the wall that encircles and comforts him This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and didNasser Abu Srour gre…

Sarah Wynn-Williams, a young diplomat from New Zealand, pitched for her dream job. She saw Facebook's potential and knew it could change the world for the better. But, when she got there and rose to its top ranks, things turned ou…

In early October 2023, Palestinian Plestia Alaqad was a recent graduate with dreams of becoming a successful journalist. By the end of November, she would be internationally known as the 'Eyes of Gaza'. Millions of people would be…

Prisoners of Geography is the book people need to understand what’s happening in the news today, from China’s ambitions to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.   Bestselling author and geopolitics expert Tim Marshall looks at the pa…

In October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining 'a peer-to-peer electronic cash system' called Bitcoin to an arcane Listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as peo…

In November 2023, the Dublin riots shocked Ireland and the wider world. They were sparked by a knife attack by an immigrant on three children. Inflammatory online rumours spread in minutes.Part of the north inner city were wrecked…

How can you fight something if you don’t know it exists? We live under an ideology that preys on every aspect of our lives: our education and our jobs; our healthcare and our leisure; our relationships and our mental wellbeing; th…

We have most of the technology we need to combat the climate crisis - and most people want to see more action. But after three decades of climate COPs, we are accelerating into a polycrisis of climate, food security, biodiversity,…

'A landmark contribution to humanity's understanding of itself' The New York TimesWhy can it sometimes feel as though half the population is living in a different moral universe? Why do ideas such as 'fairness' and 'freedom' mean …

The Baltic will decide the course of the West in the coming years. These nine borderlands are not only the historical battleground of Russian aggression; they are also a factory of ideas for how to revive Europe. Shaped by the pas…

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction 2024AI is changing what it means to be human. This is the unrivalled investigation into the impact of AI on how we live now. 'The intimate investigation of AI that we’ve been waiti…

For three years, Tom Burgis followed a lead that took him deeper and deeper into Cuckooland – the place where the rich own the truth. The trail snaked from the Kremlin to Kathmandu, Stockholm to the Steppe, from a blood-soaked tow…

Could we ever see Vladimir Putin in the dock for his crimes? What about a Western ally like Benjamin Netanyahu? Putting a country's leader on trial once seemed unimaginable. But as Steve Crawshaw describes in Prosecuting the Power…

This is an urgent and necessary reckoning about what it means to live in the West today. As an immigrant, Omar El Akkad believed the West offered freedom and justice for all. Over the past twenty years he reported on the various W…

The renowned author returns with a timely book about his journeys to three sites of conflict - Dakar, South Carolina, and Palestine - exploring how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities. Ta-Nehisi Coates …

The World After Gaza takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it within as well as outside the West, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: t…

The 1,000-square-mile Chornobyl Exclusion Zone is, for many, a symbol of total disaster: a reminder of shattered ideals and lost lives, now a toxic, dangerous no-man's-land. For Markiyan Kamysh, it became a site of pilgrimage. He …