A biography of Hitler that traces the story of how a bitter, failed art student from an obscure corner of Austria rose to unparalleled power, destroying the lives of millions and unleashing Armageddon.

THE BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER When he receives an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, international lawyer Philippe Sands begins a journey on the trail of his family's secret history. In doing so, he uncovers an astonishing series of coincidences that lead him halfway across the world, to the origins of international law at the Nuremberg trial. Interweaving the stories of the two Nuremberg prosecutors (Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin) who invented the crimes or genocide and crimes against humanity, the Nazi governor responsible for the murder of thousands in and around Lviv (Hans Frank), and incredible acts of wartime bravery, EAST WEST STREET is an unforgettable blend of memoir and historical detective story, and a powerful meditation on the way memory, crime and guilt leave scars across generations. * * * * * 'A monumental achievement: profoundly personal, told with love, anger and great precision' John le Carre 'One of the most gripping and powerful books imaginable' SUNDAY TIMES Winner: Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction JQ-Wingate Literary Prize Hay Festival Medal for Prose
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'A must read' - Margaret Atwood 'It would be hard to find a book that feels more important or original' - Viv Groskop, Observer Extraordinary stories from Soviet women who fought in the Second World War - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature "Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to write the history of that war. A women's history." In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich set out to write her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War , when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from official narratives. Travelling thousands of miles, she spent years interviewing hundreds of Soviet women - captains, tank drivers, snipers, pilots, nurses and doctors - who had experienced the war on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories. As it brings to light their most harrowing memories, this symphony of voices reveals a different side of war, a new range of feelings, smells and colours. After completing the manuscript in 1983, Alexievich was not allowed to publish it because it went against the state-sanctioned history of the war. With the dawn of Perestroika, a heavily censored edition came out in 1985 and it became a huge bestseller in the Soviet Union - the first in five books that have established her as the conscience of the twentieth century.
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I have to assume that there is a very real chance that Putin or members of his regime will have me killed some day. If I'm killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know.

Reads like a classic thriller, with an everyman hero alone and in danger in a hostile foreign city ... but it's all true, and it's a story that needs to be told.
LEE CHILD An unburdening, a witness statement and a thriller all at the same time ... electrifying.
THE TIMES A shocking true-life thriller.
TOM STOPPARD --- In November 2009, the young lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight police officers in a freezing cell in a Moscow prison. His crime? Testifying against Russian officials who were involved in a conspiracy to steal $230 million of taxes.

Red Notice is a searing expose of the whitewash of this imprisonment and murder. The killing hasn't been investigated. It hasn't been punished. Bill Browder is still campaigning for justice for his late lawyer and friend. This is his explosive journey from the heady world of finance in New York and London in the 1990s, through battles with ruthless oligarchs in turbulent post-Soviet Union Moscow, to the shadowy heart of the Kremlin.

With fraud, bribery, corruption and torture exposed at every turn, Red Notice is a shocking political roller-coaster.
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Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University and the award-winning author of The Politics of Borders. He lives in The Netherlands.>

An epic history of the 'other' Europe, a place of conflict and coexistence, of faith and folklore.

'Do not rush to bid farewell to eastern Europe until reading this book. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this very personal story of the place that one can't find on the map pays tribute to the origins of the experiences, cultures and ideas that continue to shape political and ideological battles of the modern world.' Serhii Plokhy

Eastern Europe is more than the sum total of its annexations, invasions and independence declarations. From the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev, the area exuded a tragicomic character like no other.

This is a paean for a disappearing world of movable borders, sacred groves and syncretism. And an invitation to not forget.

***

A SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

'An insightful chronicle... distilling more than a decade of research, [Mikanowski] carefully argues that if something marks out Europe's eastern half, it is not homogeneity but wild, glorious diversity.' -Economist

'A lively and sweeping history.' -Washington Post

'Goodbye Eastern Europe is a thematic history of a divided half-continent, a goulash of imperial histories, shifting frontiers and heartbreaking family stories, spiced with myth and poet-martyrs, and deeply satisfying on the palate... vital and informed.' -TLS Lire la suite Fermer

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literaturebr>br>''Absolutely essential and heartbreaking reading. There''s a reason Ms. Alexievich won a Nobel Prize'' - Craig Mazin, creator of the HBO / Sky TV series Chernobylbr>br>br>- A new translation of Voices from Chernobyl based on the revised text -br>br>In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. br>br>A chronicle of the past and a warning for our nuclear future, Chernobyl Prayer shows what it is like to bear witness, and remember in a world that wants you to forget.br>br>''Beautifully written. . . heart-breaking'' - Arundhati Roy, Elle br>br>''One of the most humane and terrifying books I''ve ever read'' - Helen Simpson, Observer> Lire la suite Fermer

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, and received her doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1933, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, after which she fled Germany for Paris, where she worked on behalf of Jewish refugee children. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship, and in 1941 she left France for the United States. Her many books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she coined the famous phrase ''the banality of evil''. She died in 1975.>

Ian Kershaw is the author of Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, which received the Wolfson Literary Award for History and the Bruno Kreisky Prize in Austria for the Political Book of the Year, and w

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian, journalist and the author of the widely acclaimed Blood and Iron. A visiting Research Fellow at King's College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she is a columnist

The Europeans is a richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline's husband Louis. Their passionate, ambitious lives were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous and genuinely pan-European culture that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change. This culture - through trains, telegraphs and printing - allowed artists of all kinds to exchange ideas and make a living, shuttling back and forth across the whole continent from the British Isles to Imperial Russia, as they exploited a new cosmopolitan age. The Europeans is Orlando Figes' masterpiece. Surprising, beautifully written, it describes huge changes through intimate details, little-known stories and through the lens of Turgenev and the Viardots' touching, strange love triangle. Events which we now see as central to European high culture are made completely fresh, allowing the reader to revel in the sheer precariousness with which the great salons, premieres and bestsellers came into existence.
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Haunting stories from the Soviet-Afghan War from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature br>br>- A new translation of Zinky Boys based on the revised text - br>br>From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. While the Soviet Union talked about a ''peace-keeping'' mission, the dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins. Boys in Zinc presents the honest testimonies of soldiers, doctors and nurses, mothers, wives and siblings who describe the lasting effects of war. br>br>Weaving together their stories, Svetlana Alexievich shows us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan conflict: the killing and the beauty of small everyday moments, the shame of returned veterans, the worries of all those left behind. When it was first published in the USSR in 1991, Boys in Zinc sparked huge controversy for its unflinching, harrowing insight into the realities of war.> Lire la suite Fermer

A 2022 BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR: Sunday Times * Irish Times * Spectator * Financial Times * Telegraph ''The history book you need if you want to understand modern Russia'' ANNE APPLEBAUM ''A magnificent, magisterial thousand year history of Russia . . . by one of the masters of Russian scholarship'' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE ''A great historian at the peak of his powers'' WILLIAM DALRYMPLE ''[An] excellent short study'' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES ''If you really want to understand Putin''s Russia today, anchored in its past of myths, then you simply have to read Figes''s superb account'' ANTONY BEEVOR ''A lucid chronological journey that ably illustrates how narratives from the nation''s past have been used to shape its autocratic present'' OBSERVER ''A valuable, instructive overview'' INDEPENDENT ------------------------- From the great storyteller of Russia, a spellbinding account of the stories that have shaped the country''s past - and how they can inform its present.

No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. None has changed its story so often. How the Russians came to tell their story, and to reinvent it as they went along, is a vital aspect of their history, their culture and beliefs. To understand what Russia''s future holds - to grasp what Putin''s regime means for Russia and the world - we need to unravel the ideas and meanings of that history.

In The Story of Russia, Orlando Figes brings into sharp relief the vibrant characters that comprise Russia''s rich history, and whose stories remain so important in making sense of the world''s largest nation today - from the crowning of sixteen-year-old Ivan the Terrible in a candlelit cathedral, to Catherine the Great, riding out in a green uniform to arrest her husband at his palace, to the bitter last days of the Romanovs.

Beautifully written and based on a lifetime of scholarship, The Story of Russia is a major and definitive work from the great storyteller of Russian history: sweeping, suspenseful, masterful.

------------------------- PRAISE FOR ORLANDO FIGES ''An outstanding historian and writer, he brings distant history so close that you could feel its heartbeat'' KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD ''Figes knows more about Russia than any other historian'' MAX HASTINGS, SUNDAY TIMES Lire la suite Fermer

From the bustling bazaars of Tabriz, to the mysterious island of Caldihe, where sheep were said to grow on trees, Anthony Bale brings history alive in A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, inviting the reader to travel across a medieval world punctuated with miraculous wonders and long-lost landmarks. Journeying alongside scholars, spies and saints, from western Europe to the Far East, the Antipodes, and the ends of the world, this is no ordinary travel guide, containing everything from profane pilgrim badges, Venetian laxatives and flying coffins to encounters with bandits and trysts with princesses.

Using previously untranslated contemporary accounts from as far and wide as Turkey, Iceland, Armenia, north Africa, and Russia, A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages is a living atlas that blurs the distinction between real and imagined places. It offers the reader a vivid and unforgettable insight into how medieval people understood their world - a world of stories, desire and fantasies, of cherished pasts and longed-for futures. Lire la suite Fermer

An astonishing amount of research and expertise has gone into the making of this book . . . a compelling historical and human drama>

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER AWARD A magisterial and acclaimed history of post-war Europe, from Germany to Poland, from Western Europe to Eastern Europe, selected as one of New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year Europe in 1945 was drained. Much of the continent was devastated by war, mass slaughter, bombing and chaos. Large areas of Eastern Europe were falling under Soviet control, exchanging one despotism for another. Today, the Soviet Union is no more and the democracies of the European Union reach as far as the borders of Russia itself. Postwar tells the rich and complex story of how we got from there to here, demystifying Europe's recent history and identity, of what the continent is and has been.

'It is hard to imagine how a better - and more readable - history of the emergence of today's Europe from the ashes of 1945 could ever be written...All in all, a real masterpiece' Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler
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''Tremendously enjoyable ... thoughtful, honest, open, self-deprecating'' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times ''Readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide ... panoramic ... defiantly hopeful'' Financial Times Drawing from the people who lived it, Homelands explores how Europe slowly recovered and rebuilt from World War Two. And then faltered.

Timothy Garton Ash, our greatest writer about Europe, has spent a lifetime studying Europe and this deeply felt book is full of vivid experiences: from his father''s memories of D-Day and his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi to interviewing Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents.

Homelands is at once a living, breathing history of a period of unprecedented progress, a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong and an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

''The right book for Europe, at the right time'' Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny ''A moving love letter to Europe'' Lea Ypi, author of Free Lire la suite Fermer

BY THE AUTHOR OF NOTHING IS TRUE AND EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE

''Both history and a rallying cry . . . an illuminating guide to the nature and possibilities of propaganda.'' TLS

From one of our leading experts on disinformation, the incredible true story of the complex and largely forgotten WWII propagandist Sefton Delmer - and what we can learn from him today.

In the summer of 1941, Hitler and his allies ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat the powerful Nazi propaganda machine, which crowed victory and smeared its enemies.

However, inside Germany, there was one notable voice of dissent from the very heart of the military machine - Der Chef, a German whose radio broadcasts skilfully questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens. But what these audiences didn''t know was that Der Chef was a fiction, a character created by the British propagandist Sefton Delmer, just one player in his vast counter-propaganda cabaret, a unique weapon in the war.

As author Peter Pomerantsev uncovers Delmer''s story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the global response to Putin''s invasion of Ukraine. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern-day investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to seduce and inspire the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of information wars. Lire la suite Fermer

Chernobyl Roulette is a fast-paced, illuminating narrative of the incredible heroism and courage shown by the personnel of Ukrainian nuclear facilities that were attacked by Russian forces, and of the stupefying recklessness with which the Russian military pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear disaster. A must-read>

'An indispensable guide to the tragic history of a great European nation' (David Blair Sunday Telegraph ) Located at the western edge of the Eurasian steppe, Ukraine has long been the meeting place of empires - Roman to Ottoman, Habsburg to Russian - and they all left their imprint on the landscape, the language and the people living within these shifting borders. In this authoritative book, Harvard Professor Serhii Plokhy traces the history of Ukraine from the arrival of the Vikings in the tenth century to the current Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea. Fascinating and multilayered, The Gates of Europe is the essential guide to understanding not just Ukraine's past but also its future.
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''A witty, gossipy, sparkling history, full of bright jewels of anecdote... Magnificent Rebels is a triumph'' THE TIMES, Book of the Week ''Extraordinary... A thrilling intellectual history that reads like a racy, intelligent novel, with a cast of unforgettable characters'' SUNDAY TIMES ''Magnificent Rebels is a magnificent book: a revelation which could easily become an obsession'' SPECTATOR ''A thrilling page-turner, by turns comical & tragic... My book of the year so far'' TOM HOLLAND ''Elegantly written, deeply researched and totally gripping'' SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends changed the world. Disappointed by the French Revolution''s rapid collapse into tyranny, what they wanted was nothing less than a revolution of the mind. The rulers of Europe had ordered their peoples how to think and act for too long. Based in the small German town of Jena, through poetry, drama, philosophy and science, they transformed the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. They were the first Romantics.

Their way of understanding the world still frames our lives and being.We''re still empowered by their daring leap into the self. We still think with their minds, see with their imagination and feel with their emotions. We also still walk the same tightrope between meaningful self-fulfilment and destructive narcissism, between the rights of the individual and our role as a member of our community and our responsibilities towards future generations who will inhabit this planet. This extraordinary group of friends changed our world. It is impossible to imagine our lives, thoughts and understanding without the foundation of their ground-breaking ideas. Lire la suite Fermer

Just after the iron curtain fell on Eastern Europe John Steinbeck and acclaimed war photographer, Robert Capa ventured into the Soviet Union to report for the New York Herald Tribune. This rare opportunity took the famous travellers not only to Moscow and Stalingrad - now Volgograd - but through the countryside of the Ukraine and the Caucasus. A RUSSIAN JOURNAL is the distillation of their journey and remains a remarkable memoir and unique historical document. Steinbeck and Capa recorded the grim realities of factory workers, government clerks, and peasants, as they emerged from the rubble of World War II. This is an intimate glimpse of two artists at the height of their powers, answering their need to document human struggle
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A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ONDAATJE PRIZE



'A masterful portrait of one of the world's greatest cities... A must-read' PETER FRANKOPAN



'Such a delightful read' KATJA HOYER, The Times



'Berlin may well be Europe's most enigmatic city and John Kampfner is the ideal guide.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist



'Gripping' Financial Times



No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin.



Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered.



Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city.



Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. But it is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating.



In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention. Lire la suite Fermer