Peter Apps0.0 On the 14th June, 2017, a 24-storey block of flats went up in flames.
The fire climbed up cladding as flammable as solid petrol. Fire doors failed to self-close. No alarm rang out to warn sleeping residents. As smoke seeped into their homes, all were told to ‘stay put’. Many did—and they died.
It was a disaster decades in the making.
Peter Apps exposes how a steady stream of deregulation, corporate greed and institutional indifference caused this tragedy. It is the story of a grieving community forsaken by our government, a community still waiting for change.
Салли Хейден0.0 The Western world has turned its back on migrants, leaving them to cope with one of the most devastating humanitarian crises in history.
In 2018, Sally Hayden received a message on Facebook: “Hi sister Sally, we need your help.” It was from an Eritrean refugee who had been held in a Libyan detention center for months, locked in one big hall with scant meals. Now, Tripoli was crumbling in a scrimmage between warring factions, and the refugees remained stuck, defenseless, with only one hope: contacting her.
With that begins Hayden’s staggering account of the migrant crisis across North Africa: from brutal, vindictive Libyan guards to unexpected acts of kindness; the frustration of visiting aid workers; fake marriages between detainees; the strain on real marriages; and the phenomenon of some refugees becoming oppressors after entering into Faustian bargains with their captors. With unprecedented contact with dozens of people currently inside Libyan detention centers, My Fourth Time, We Drowned will, for the first time, detail these stories.
In the future, people will regard this pivotal period with fascination and horror. The failure of NGOs and corruption within the United Nations represents a collective abdication of international standards that will echo throughout history. But most importantly, this book will highlight the resilience of humans: how refugees and migrants locked up for years fall in love, support each other through the hardest times and carry out small acts of resistance in order to survive in a system that wants them to be silent and disappear.
Джошуа Яффа0.0 From a leading journalist in Moscow and correspondent for The New Yorker, a groundbreaking portrait of modern Russia and the inner struggles of the people who sustain Vladimir Putin's rule
"Unforgettable . . . This is a book about Putin's Russia that is unlike any other."--Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing
In this rich and novelistic tour of contemporary Russia, Joshua Yaffa introduces readers to some of the country's most remarkable figures--from politicians and entrepreneurs to artists and historians--who have built their careers and constructed their identities in the shadow of the Putin system. Torn between their own ambitions and the omnipresent demands of the state, each walks an individual path of compromise. Some muster cunning and cynicism to extract all manner of benefits and privileges from those in power. Others, finding themselves to be less adept, are left broken and demoralized. What binds them together is the tangled web of dilemmas and contradictions they face.
Between Two Fires chronicles the lives of a number of strivers who understand that their dreams are best--or only--realized through varying degrees of cooperation with the Russian government. With sensitivity and depth, Yaffa profiles the director of the country's main television channel, an Orthodox priest at war with the church hierarchy, a Chechen humanitarian who turns a blind eye to persecutions, and many others. The result is an intimate and probing portrait of a nation that is much discussed yet little understood. By showing how citizens shape their lives around the demands of a capricious and frequently repressive state--as often by choice as under threat of force--Yaffa offers urgent lessons about the true nature of modern authoritarianism.
Кейт Клэнчи0.0 Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career.
Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school ‘Inclusion Unit’, trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance.
While Clanchy doesn’t deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced. Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me will show you why it shouldn’t be.
Patrick Radden Keefe4.4 From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution; to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark; to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army; to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past, Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.
Даррен МакГарви0.0 Darren grew up living in poverty. He suffered domestic abuse, his mother died young, leaving her school-age children behind her, and Darren fell into a trap of drug and alcohol addiction.
But he managed to pull himself out of this. Now, Darren is a successful columnist and advocate for change, representing many NGOs and organisations in the Third Sector.
The irony lies in that, in order to gain success and break away from his 'deprived' community, he has had to exploit his own difficult experiences. 'I find it difficult pitching articles that don't contain at least some personal blood and guts, ' he says. His social mobility relies on the very re-telling of the story of bis impoverished upbringing.
In this sharp and thought-provoking book, Darren explains how the organisations that seek to empower him often feel him leaving helpless and frustrated. It is a thorough and witty exploration of the class system and all of the mechanisms that work to support the dichotomy between rich and poor in today's Great Britain.
Джон Бью0.0 Clement Attlee was a slightly-built, bald, pipe-smoking and unassuming man who presided over the radical administration of 1945-51 and is sometimes referred to as Britain's greatest peace-time Prime Minster.
His cocooned suburban childhood and standing at university as 'the man who couldn't quite' were unlikely preparations for such a figure. Yet Attlee was often underestimated: he won over those who compared him unfavourably to his rival, Churchill, and undercut their doubt with dry wit and proof of his steady and ethical leadership.
His political awakening volunteering in the East End of London was instrumental in redrawing his map of Britain's class and economic system. Growing up in the comfortable coda of the Victorian era, he foresaw an epoch of change - one that he was pivotal to bring about in the post-war years. After serving at Gallipoli during the First Word War he rose through the ranks of the Labour Party and during the Second World War became Britain's first Deputy Prime Minister. In 1945, in the glow of Churchill's great war victory, Attlee won the election by a landslide. Alongside Bevin, Nye and Truman, his governance saw the end of the Empire in India, the foundation of the NHS and Britain's places in NATO and the nuclear arms race.
John Bew's brilliant biography will pierce the reticence of Attlee and explore the intellectual foundations and core beliefs of one of the most important, and least understood, figures in the history of the United Kingdom. It will reveal a public servant and patriotic socialist, who never lost sight of the national interest and whose view of humanity and belief in solidarity was grafted onto the Union Jack.
Председатель жюри премии лорд Уильям Уолдегрейв отметил, что книга написана «абсолютно в духе произведений Оруэлла», так как современная Россия оперирует теми же методами информационной манипуляции, которые были описаны им в романах «1984» и «Скотный двор». «Книга соответствует строгим критериям политической журналистики как искусства», — заявил Уолдегрейв.
Ostrovsky has spent 15 years reporting from Moscow as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times and The Economist. The Invention of Russia is his account of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation from 1985 to the present day, exposing along the way the central role played by the media, especially television, in creating Russia’s national narrative.
James Meek0.0 In a little over a generation the bones and sinews of the British economy - rail, energy, water, postal services, municipal housing - have been sold to remote, unaccountable private owners. In a series of brilliant portraits James Meek shows how Britain's common wealth became private, and the impact it has had on us all. In a series of panoramic accounts, Meek explores the human stories behind the incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. As our national assets are being sold, the new buyers reap the rewards, and the ordinary consumer is left to pay the ever rising bill. Urgent, powerfully written and deeply moving, 'Private Island is a passionate anatomy of the state of the nation for readers of Chavs and Whoops!.
Алан Джонсон0.0
Alan Johnson's childhood was not so much difficult as unusual, particularly for a man who was destined to become Home Secretary. Not in respect of the poverty, which was shared with many of those living in the slums of post-war Britain, but in its transition from two-parent family to single mother and then to no parents at all...
This is essentially the story of two incredible women: Alan's mother, Lily, who battled against poor health, poverty, domestic violence and loneliness to try to ensure a better life for her children; and his sister, Linda, who had to assume an enormous amount of responsibility at a very young age and who fought to keep the family together and out of care when she herself was still only a child.
Played out against the background of a vanishing community living in condemned housing, the story moves from post-war austerity in pre-gentrified Notting Hill, through the race riots, school on the Kings Road, Chelsea in the Swinging 60s, to the rock-and-roll years, making a record in Denmark Street and becoming a husband and father whilst still in his teens.
This Boy is one man's story, but it is also a story of England and the West London slums which are so hard to imagine in the capital today. No matter how harsh the details, Alan Johnson writes with a spirit of generous acceptance, of humour and openness which makes his book anything but a grim catalogue of miseries.
А. Т. Уилльямс0.0 On 15 September 2003 Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist, was killed by British Army troops in Iraq. He had been arrested the previous day in Basra and was taken to a military base for questioning. For forty-eight hours he and nine other innocent civilians had their heads encased in sandbags and their wrists bound by plastic handcuffs and had been kicked and punched with sustained cruelty.
A succession of guards and casual army visitors took pleasure in beating the Iraqis, humiliating them, forcing them into stress positions in temperatures up to 50 degrees Centigrade, and watching them suffer in the dirty concrete building where they were held. Other soldiers, officers, medics, the padre, did not take part in the violence but they saw what was happening and did nothing to stop it. Some knew it was wrong. Some weren't sure. Some were too scared to intervene. But none said anything or enough until it was far too late and Baha Mousa had been beaten to death.
This book tells the inside story of these crimes and their aftermath. It examines the institutional brutality, the bureaucratic apathy, the flawed military police inquiry and the farcical court martial that attempted to hold people criminally responsible. Even though a full public inquiry reported its findings into the crimes in September 2011, its mandate restricted what it could say. The full story, told with the power of a true-crime expose or court-room drama, shows how this was not simply about a few bad men or 'rotten apples'. It shines a light on all those involved in the crime and its investigation, from the lowest squaddie to the elite of the army and politicians in Cabinet. What it reveals is devastating.
Тоби Харнден0.0 This is the story of the men of the Welsh Guards and their bloody battle for survival in Afghanistan in 2009. The book draws on interviews, military documents and other sources which raise questions from beyond the grave that will unnerve politicians and generals alike.
Журналистке вручили премию за серию статей, в которой, по выражению жюри, она осветила самые сложные проблемы британского общества. В своих статьях Джентльмен писала о людях, обманом получающих государственные льготы или живущих только за счет льгот и пособий, исправительных учреждениях для малолетних и социальных работниках, заботящихся о пожилых. Амелию Джентльмен выдвинули на премию Оруэлла уже третий год подряд.
Tom Bingham0.0 ?The Rule of Law? is a phrase much used but little examined. The idea of the rule of law as the foundation of modern states and civilisations has recently become even more talismanic than that of democracy, but what does it actually consist of? In this brilliant short book, Britain?s former senior law lord, and one of the world?s most acute legal minds, examines what the idea actually means. He makes clear that the rule of law is not an arid legal doctrine but is the foundation of a fair and just society, is a guarantee of responsible government, is an important contribution to economic growth and offers the best means yet devised for securing peace and co-operation. He briefly examines the historical origins of the rule, and then advances eight conditions which capture its essence as understood in western democracies today. He also discusses the strains imposed on the rule of law by the threat and experience of international terrorism. The book will be influential in many different fields and should become a key text for anyone interested in politics, society and the state of our world.
Андреа Гиллис0.0 Keeper is a fiercely honest "glimpse into the dementia abyss" - an endlessly engrossing meditation on memory and the mind, on family, and on a society that is largely indifferent to the far-reaching ravages of this baffling disease.
Five years ago, Andrea Gillies - writer, wife, and mother of three - seeing that her husband's parents were struggling to cope, invited them to move in. She and her newly extended family relocated to a big Victorian house on a remote, windswept peninsula in the far north of Scotland, leaving behind their friends and all that was familiar; hoping to find a new life, and new inspiration for work.
Her mother-in-law Nancy was in the middle stages of Alzheimer's Disease, and Keeper charts her journey into dementia, its impact on her personality and her family, and the author's researches into what dementia is. As the grip of her disease tightens, Nancy's grasp on everything we think of as ordinary unravels before our eyes. Diary entries and accounts of conversations with Nancy track the slow unravelling. The journey is marked by frustration, isolation, exhaustion, and unexpected black comedy. For the author, who knew little about dementia at the outset, the learning curve was steeper than she could have imagined. The most pernicious quality of Alzheimer's, Gillies suggests, is that the loss of memory is, in effect, the loss of one's self, and Alzheimer's, because it robs us of our intrinsic self-knowledge, our ability to connect with others, and our capacity for self-expression, is perhaps the most terrible and most dehumanizing illness. Moreover, as Gillies reminds us, the effects of Alzheimer's are far-reaching, impacting the lives of caregivers and their loved ones in every way imaginable.
Keeper is a fiercely honest "glimpse into the dementia abyss" - an endlessly engrossing meditation on memory and the mind, on family, and on a society that is largely indifferent to the far-reaching ravages of this baffling disease.
Keeper won the U.K.'s Orwell Prize for political writing and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for medical writing.
Эндрю Браун0.0 Andrew Brown lived in Sweden as a child in the 1960s. Ten years later, he returned: he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill, raising his small son, first of all in a housing estate on the edge of Gothenberg, and then in a makeshift chalet in the forest. This book tells his story and woven into it is the landscape of Sweden.
Раджа Шехаде0.0 Raja Shehadeh is a passionate hill walker. He enjoys nothing more than heading out into the countryside that surrounds his home. But in recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel.
In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire.
Amid the many and varied tragedies of the Middle East, the loss of a simple pleasure such as the ability to roam the countryside at will may seem a minor matter. But in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh's elegy for his lost footpaths becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for the deprivations of an entire people estranged from their land.
Питер Хеннесси0.0 Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, Peter Hennessy's Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties captures Britain in an extraordinary decade, emerging from the shadow of war into growing affluence.
The 1950s was the decade in which Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile, Bill Haley released 'Rock Around the Clock', rationing ended and Britain embarked on the traumatic, disastrous Suez War.
In this highly enjoyable, original book, Peter Hennessy takes his readers into front rooms, classrooms, cabinet rooms and the new high-street coffee bars of Britain to recapture, as no previous history has, the feel, the flavour and the politics of this extraordinary time of change.
'Utterly engaging ... a treat. It breathes exhilaration'
Libby Purves, The Times
'If the Gods gossip, this is how it would sound'
Philip Ziegler, Spectator Books of the Year
'A particular treat ... fine, wise and meticulously researched'
Andrew Marr
'Stands clear of the field as our best narrative history of this decisive decade'
Peter Clarke, Sunday Times
'A compelling narrative ... Hennessy's love of the flesh and blood of politics breathes on every page'
Tim Gardam, Observer
'The late Ben Pimlott once described Hennessy as "something of a national institution". You can forget the first two of those five words'
Guardian
Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of History at Queen Mary College, London, and the Director of the Mile End Institute of Contemporary British Government, Intelligence and Society. He is the author of Never Again: Britain 1945-51 (winner of the NCR and Duff Cooper Prizes), Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties (winner of the Orwell Prize); the bestselling The Prime Minister and The Secret State.
Делия Джарретт-Маколи0.0 When Julia flies in to war-scarred Sierra Leone from London, she is apprehensive about seeing her uncle Moses for the first time in 20 years. But nothing could have prepared her for her encounter with her eight-year-old cousin, Citizen, a former child soldier, and for the shocking truth of what he has done. Driven by a desire to understand Citizen, Julia takes the disturbed child into the bush. There they meet other child soldiers, and a storyteller, Bemba G., who provides a safe haven for them all and strives to return them to childhood through play, love, story-telling, and performance. As Julia gradually rediscovers Africa, the different generations of her family rediscover their bonds. And then Bemba G. directs the child soldiers in a version of Julius Caesar, with powerful effect.
Майкл Коллинз0.0 Once they were portrayed as the salt of the earth. Nowadays, they expose their lives in TV documentaries, they love Gucci and hate the Euro—the broadsheets cast them as xenophobes and exhibitionists and mock their tastes and attitudes. Who are the white working class and what have they done to deserve this portrayal? In this controversial book, South East-London born Michael Collins defends the white working class against such slurs and caricatures. He argues that their culture is intimately linked to a landscape and a concept of home—in his case, Southwark, where his family lived for generations. As Collins delves into his family’s history, he discovers that missionaries from other classes have always descended to study, influence, patronise and politicise them, long before the contemporary intelligentsia began to demonize them. The Likes of Us is a fascinating and wholly original examination of London's white working class.
Роберт Купер0.0 Based on an essay that has been hailed as one of the most influential policy pieces published in the last decade, Robert Cooper sets out a radical new interpretation of the shape of the world in this path-breaking book The Breaking of Nations.
Cooper argues that there are three types of states in the world that deal with each other in different ways: 'pre-modern' parts of the world, without fully functioning states, 'modern' nation states, concerned with territorial sovereignty and national interests, and 'post-modern' states in which foreign and domestic policy are inextricably intertwined, tools of governance are shared and security is no longer based on control over territory or the balance of power. Among first world nations, societies may operate on the basis of laws, openness and cooperative security. But when dealing with a hostile outside enemy, civilized countries need to revert to tougher methods from an earlier era – force, pre-emptive attack, deception – if we are to safeguard peaceful co-existence throughout the civilized world
Like Robert Kagan’s best-selling Of Paradise and Power, The Breaking of Nations is essential reading for a dangerous age, a cautionary tale for superpowers, and a prescient examination of international relations in the twenty-first century.
Фрэнсис Уин0.0 Topics covered in this collection of Francis Wheen's articles include the follies of think-tanks, the future of swearing, the hypocrisy of New Labour and the madness of retired prime ministers, as well as shady business deals and scabrous gossip.
Миранда Картер4.0 Anthony Blunt, aesthete, communist, homosexual, MI5 agent and Soviet mole, was Surveyor of the King's Pictures and Director of the Courtauld Institute. Betrayed in 1963, he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Late that year, she was to expose his treachery and strip him of his knighthood. While the other Cambridge spies (Philby, Burgess and Maclean) subordinated their lives and careers to espionage, Blunt had a separate passionate existence. His reputation as an art historian was second to none: he made an enormous contribution to the establishment of art history as an academic discipline; his volumes on Poussin, French and Italian art and old master drawings are still in print and some are still set texts. At the Courtauld he trained a whole generation of world-class academics and curators.
Майкл Игнатьев0.0 For a decade, Michael Ignatieff has provided eyewitness accounts and penetrating analyses from the world's battle zones. In Virtual War, he offers an analysis of the conflict in Kosovo and what it means for the future of warfare. He describes the latest phase in modern combat: war fought by remote control. In "real" war, nations are mobilized, soldiers fight and die, victories are won. In virtual war, however, there is often no formal declaration of hostilities, the combatants are strike pilots and computer programmers, the nation enlists as a TV audience, and instead of defeat and victory there is only an uncertain endgame.
Kosovo was such a virtual war, a war in which U.S. and NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying. Ignatieff examines the conflict through the eyes of key players--politicians, diplomats, and generals--and through the experience of the victims, the refugees and civilians who suffered. As unrest continues in the Balkans, East Timor, and other places around the world, Ignatieff raises the troubling possibility that virtual wars, so much easier to fight, could become the way superpowers impose their will in the century ahead.
Брайан Кэткарт0.0 Eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was murdered on the night of 22 April 1993 whilst standing at a bus-stop, by a gang of white youths. Cathcart wrote a long piece about the murder and all its ramifications for Granta magazine (59), and this is the basis for his book: an account of the crime, the investigation and the criminal culture of South-East London that gave rise to the murderers.
Дональд Майкл Томас0.0 One of the most important literary biographies of recent times, this is not only the story of one of this century's greatest writers, but the history of Russia itself. Already featured in a controversial New York Times article, this magisterial biography will attract attention throughout the literary world. 16-page photo insert.
Председатель жюри премии лорд Уильям Уолдегрейв отметил, что книга написана «абсолютно в духе произведений Оруэлла», так как современная Россия оперирует теми же методами информационной манипуляции, которые были описаны им в романах «1984» и «Скотный двор». «Книга соответствует строгим критериям политической журналистики как искусства», — заявил Уолдегрейв.