Showing titles in Politics & Government

Spring 1958: a mysterious individual believed to be high up in the Polish secret service began passing Soviet secrets to the West. His name was Michal Goleniewski, and he remains one of the most important yet least known and most misunderstood spies of the Cold War. Even his death is shrouded in mystery and he has been written out of the history of Cold War espionage - until now.

In the early 2010s, reports began to emerge of deaths linked to a government department. Suicide notes, coroners' reports, and research by disabled activists pointed to failings within the Department for Work and Pensions – the DWP – the government body responsible for the disability benefits system. For the last decade, disabled journalist John Pring has meticulously pieced together how the DWP ignored pleas to correct fatal flaws in the social security system and covered up its role in the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of disabled people.

Geoff Shepard had a ringside seat to the unfolding Watergate debacle. As the youngest lawyer on Richard Nixon’s staff, he personally transcribed the Oval Office tape in which Nixon appeared to authorize getting the CIA to interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation, and even coined the phrase “the smoking gun.” Like many others, the idealistic Shepard was deeply disappointed in the president. But as time went on, the meticulous lawyer was nagged by the persistent sense that something wasn’t right with the case against Nixon.

The Future of War - which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't) - is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.

“A Muslim & A Jew Go There” is a brand new podcast produced by Instinct Productions, hosted by comedian David Baddiel (author of “Jews Don’t Count”) and politician Sayeeda Warsi (“Muslims Don’t Matter”) who will take on whatever controversy hits the headlines each week, providing context and discussion around current political and cultural events involving and affecting British Muslims and Jews. Covering topics from antisemitism in the Labour party and Islamophobia in the Conservative Party to debating concepts like “racism hierarchies”, “non-visible minorities” and ...

From the time of his childhood in rural Kansas, Dwight D. Eisenhower's vision of himself and his country was one of confidence and hope. His hard-working parents taught him self-reliance and nothing that happened in his long career ever eroded this trait. During nearly half a century of service to his country and the world, Eisenhower displayed a deep understanding of the nation's problems, aspirations, and fears that prevailed during both war and peace.

In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature - places we escape to and can’t escape from - have influenced us throughout history and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating.

A major figure behind his nephew Philip's marriage to Queen Elizabeth II and instrumental in the royal family taking the Mountbatten name, Dickie Mountbatten's career included being Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia during World War Two and the last Viceroy of India. Once the richest woman in Britain and a playgirl who enjoyed numerous affairs, Edwina Mountbatten emerged from World War Two as a magnetic and talented charity worker loved around the world.

Barton Gellman’s informant called himself ‘Verax’ - the truth-teller. It was only later that Verax unmasked himself as Edward Snowden. But Gellman’s primary role in bringing Snowden’s revelations to light, for which he shared the Pulitzer prize, is only the beginning of this gripping real-life spy story. Snowden unlocked the door: here Gellman describes what he found on the other side over the course of a years-long journey of investigation.

The Plantagenet queens of England played a role in some of the most dramatic events in our history. Crusading queens, queens in rebellion against their king, queen seductresses, learned queens, queens in battle, queens who enlivened England with the romantic culture of southern Europe - these determined women often broke through medieval constraints to exercise power and influence, for good and sometimes for ill.

In the early hours of June 17, 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills enters six words into the log book of the Watergate office complex that will change the course of history: 1:47 AM Found tape on doors; call police. The subsequent arrests of five men seeking to bug and burgle the Democratic National Committee offices—three of them Cuban exiles, two of them former intelligence operatives—quickly unravels a web of scandal that ultimately ends a presidency and forever alters views of moral authority and leadership.

Wes Streeting might have ended up in prison rather than in parliament. His maternal grandfather Bill, an unsuccessful armed robber, spent time behind bars, as did his grandmother, who was also a political campaigner. Brought up on a Stepney council estate, the young Streeting saw his teenage parents struggle to provide for him. In One Boy, Two Bills & A Fry Up he brings to life the poverty, humiliation and incredible struggle for them choosing whether to feed the meter and heat the flat, put carpet on the floor, or food on the table.

Since the early 20th century, Traditionalism has defined itself against modernity and Enlightenment values. Traditionalist thinkers such as René Guénon and Julius Evola celebrated hierarchy, denounced the idea of progress and regarded liberal secularism, capitalism and communism as aligned forces working to replace social, cultural and political norms. Through exclusive interviews and deep historical context, Teitelbaum reveals the radical worldview infusing the thinking of powerful actors and inspiring a renegade reinterpretation of humanity, geopolitics and history.

Often compared to Catherine the Great or Elizabeth I, Caroline of Ansbach is the great queen Britain forgot it had - a thinker, politician, schemer, patroness and matriarch. This book offers a remarkable portrait of a woman of great political astuteness and ambition, a radical icon of female power. The intellectual superior of her husband, George II, Caroline is credited with bringing the Enlightenment to Britain through her sponsorship of red-hot debates about science, religion, philosophy and the nature of the universe.

In A Convenient Death, investigative reporters Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper search for the truth of what really happened to Jeffrey Epstein. With access to Epstein's victims and lawyers, to doctors, Wall Street insiders, and law enforcement officers, they reveal the dirty secrets and sinister ties that may have driven someone in Epstein’s circle to take matters into their own hands.

In his 1988 CBC Massey Lecture, Noam Chomsky inquires into the nature of the media in a political system where the population cannot be disciplined by force and thus must be subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control. Specific cases are illustrated in detail, using the U.S. media primarily but also media in other societies.

The Spycatcher affair remains one of the most intriguing moments in the history of British intelligence and a pivotal point in the public's relationship with the murky world of espionage and security. It lifted the lid on alleged Soviet infiltration of British services and revealed a culture of law-breaking, bugging and burgling. But how much do we know about the story behind the scandal?

For the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. This is her most personal memoir yet.

Returning Marx to the Victorian confines of the 19th century, Jonathan Sperber, one of the United States' leading European historians, challenges many of our misconceptions of this political firebrand turned London journalist. In this deeply humanizing portrait, Marx no longer is the Olympian soothsayer, divining the dialectical imperatives of human history, but a scholar-activist whose revolutionary Weltanschauung was closer to Robespierre's than to those of 20th-century Marxists.

From leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., to lesser-known figures such as Barbara Rose Johns and Jim Zwerg, each man and woman made the decision that something had to be done to stop discrimination. These moving accounts of the first decade of the civil rights movement are a tribute to the people, black and white, who took part in the fight for justice and the struggle they endured.