Marianna Hargrave

In The Madness of Crowds Douglas Murray investigates the dangers of ‘woke’ culture and the rise of identity politics. In lively, razor-sharp prose he examines the most controversial issues of our moment: sexuality, gender, technology and race, with interludes on the Marxist foundations of ‘wokeness’, the impact of tech and how, in an increasingly online culture, we must relearn the ability to forgive.

What is it like to never forget - to be able to retrieve not only every positive moment of every day of your life, but also every painful episode as if it were happening again? Imagine a permanent record of every event of your life constantly running through your brain, making you both master of your past and the prisoner of your relentless memory. Jill Price's memory is so powerful and so detailed that she can remember what she had for breakfast on any given day, going back into the 1970s.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.