British Politics

As police racism unsettles Britain’s tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Elliott-Cooper analyzes racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal–arguing that Black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation, and violence.

Gabby Lane is a Senior Field Agent in British Intelligence. When she is sent on an undercover operation to kill Europe's largest arms dealer and find a British spy who has disappeared, she discovers that the two men are connected and are part of the criminal gang who are stealing western weapons.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Mary Berry's autobiography, Recipe for Life, read by the actress Patricia Hodge. From Queen of Tarts to the nation's heart, Mary Berry shares her Recipe for Life. "In the words of my father, my birth caused no end of trouble..." From the moment she came into the world - two weeks early, throwing her parents' lives into disarray - Mary has gracefully but firmly done things her own way.

During a holiday with his wife in Crete, the celebrated diarist and playwright Simon Gray recalls the scans and consultations that have dominated the previous months in this frank, moving, and often painfully funny account of what Gray refers to as "the beginning of my dying". Wonderfully comic depictions of the medical team are interrupted by unforgettable portraits of fellow tourists, digressions on everything from crimes of passion to a brief history of his athletic career, and a masterfully tense distraction, composed while waiting for his final prognosis - and smoking one last cigarette.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music hall diva renowned for her singing and exotic dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the most highly paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all 'negroes and Jews'. Yet, instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight she went from performer to Resistance spy. In The Flame of Resistance, best-selling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little known history of the famous singer's life.

The reign of Queen Elizabeth II has seen huge changes in the lifestyle and expectations of peoples and nations. She has proved to be the constitutional monarch par excellence—while primarily a figurehead, she has guided the concept of monarchy through difficult times, both national and personal. And even when her family has been rocked by scandals, she has maintained a quiet dignity. In this informative yet entertaining audio-biography, Pearson Phillips reflects on her life and times.

Forget Westminster bust-ups and PMQs, some of the key events that have shaped modern British politics happened not in the cloisters of parliament or Downing Street’s many corridors of power, but in car parks, village halls and seaside resorts where the mundane have played host to the mighty. Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors is an entertaining and original romp through the highs and lows of British political history and the unlikely locations that have decided our national fate.

When an MI6 operation in Belarus goes wrong and a key asset is killed, Agent Blackhawk has to go under cover to break a crime and espionage ring in Eastern Europe. Then an expert in biological warfare disappears from a British safe house in Denmark and needs to be found before a Russian assassination team finds him. The attacks are coming from all sides—but will she and her team all survive?

Arthur Finch-Hatten is six-feet-four-inches of hot, ripped, loaded English billionaire nobleman who is wasting his life and his earldom so audaciously that his younger brother is suing him for control. Arthur stands to lose everything, including his cover as an MI-6 spy. Genevieve is a lawyer, not a babysitter, and certainly not a dog trainer. She is just about to become a full barrister when her mentor dies unexpectedly. She is shuffled off to another barrister, one who’s nothing at all like her kind, decent former mentor, and then she is assigned the office’s worst case: Arthur.

Towards the end of 1906, a meeting took place between two emerging giants of the age, Mohandas K. Gandhi and General Jan Christian Smuts. United under the same empire, but separated by distance and culture, Smuts was born in the Cape Colony, and Gandhi in Porbandar, a duchy of the Indian province of Gujarat. Both, however, went on to study law in Britain, and while developing a great admiration for the institutions of empire, each man also suffered his own particular crisis of faith.

Over the course of its history, England has engaged in an uncountable number of battles, but none of her military heroes has had a greater military legacy than Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté. Whether traveling to Trafalgar Square or one of the hundreds of pubs named after him, seemingly it becomes easy to believe that no Briton has cast as long a shadow.

Mary Wollstonecraft is an undisputed icon for women’s rights, and this is not a status she earned lightly. Daring to demand equality at a time when it was incredibly risky to do so, Wollstonecraft developed a long resume of standing up to those that wished to subvert her rights and the rights of those she loved. She stood up to her own father as a teenager when he abused her mother, and she didn’t hesitate to help her sister escape from a similarly tyrannical husband.

The mixed population is the fastest-growing group in the UK today, but the mainstream conversation around mixedness is stilted, repetitive and often problematic. At a time when ethnically ambiguous models fill our Instagram feeds and our high street shop windows, and when children of interracial relationships are lauded as heralding in the dawn of a post-racial utopia, journalist Natalie Morris takes a deep dive into what it really means to be mixed in Britain today.

Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian refugee and language teacher living in France, is enjoying his first break for years in a small hotel on the Riviera. But when he takes his holiday photographs to be developed at a local chemists, he suddenly finds himself mistaken for a Gestapo agent, and a charge of espionage is levelled at him. To prove himself innocent to the French police, he must discover which one of his fellow guests at his pension is the real spy. As he desperately tries to uncover the true culprit's identity, Vadassy must risk his job, his safety and everything he holds dear.

Helena Kennedy forensically examines the pressing new evidence that women are being discriminated against when it comes to the law. From the shocking lack of female judges to the scandal of female prisons and the double discrimination experienced by BAME women, Kennedy shows with force and fury that change for women must start at the heart of what makes society just.

Featuring: Oh, Jeremy Corbyn; Danny Dyer turning out to be good; Fortnite; hipster pies; The Independent Group; reviews for items on supermarket delivery sites; even Mark Zuckerburg saying the internet needs regulating; new football stadiums; old football stadiums; feeling a bit sorry for Theresa May; Elon Musk; Christopher Nolan films that aren't Memento; TED Talks; Irish passports - this year's must-have accessory!; Airbnb obsessives; woke one-upmanship; Vladimir Putin; how many f*cking platforms am I supposed to have to pay for just to watch the f--king telly?

There are fewer than 5000 people who can genuinely claim to be members of the British aristocracy, and yet they loom large in the popular consciousness. We're fascinated by their houses and estates, their lives and loves, their foibles and eccentricities. And we entertain the strong suspicion that, while they may be fellow citizens, they are very far from being People Like Us. In Heirs and Graces Eleanor Doughty draws on her unparalleled access to a bewildering range of dukes, duchesses, earls and others to create a vivid picture of who they are and how they tick.

Drawing from careful examinations of their personal narratives, Jamie L. Bronstein investigates the ways in which working people thought about the good life as seen through their experiences with family and friends, rewarding work, interaction with the natural world, science and creativity, political causes and religious commitments, and physical and economic struggles. Informed by the history of emotions and the philosophical and social-scientific literature on happiness, this book reflects broadly on the industrial-era working-class experience in an era of immense social and economic change.

A way of life that once encompassed most of humanity is vanishing in one of the greatest transformations of our time: the eclipse of the rural world by the urban. In this new history of peasantry, Patrick Joyce tells the story of this lost world and its people. In contrast to the usual insulting stereotypes, we discover a rich and complex culture: traditions, songs, celebrations, and revolts, across Europe from the plains of Poland to the farmsteads and villages of Italy and Ireland, through the 19th century to the present day.

The Napoleonic Wars radically altered the old, established European power dynamics, and in 1795, the British, now emerging as the globe’s naval superpower, assumed control of the Cape as part of the spoils of war. In doing so, they recognized the enormous strategic value of the Cape as global shipping routes were developing and expanding. Possession passed back and forth once or twice, but more or less from that point onward, the British established their presence at the Cape, which they held until the unification of South Africa in 1910.