Disasters are inherently hard to predict. But when catastrophe strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet the responses of many developed countries to a new pathogen from China were badly bungled. Why?

While populist rulers certainly performed poorly in the face of the pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work – pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters.

Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics and network science, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe offers not just a history but a general theory of disaster. As Ferguson shows, governments must learn to become less bureaucratic if we are to avoid the impending doom of irreversible decline.

‘Stimulating, thought-provoking … Readers will find much to relish’ Martin Bentham, Evening Standard

‘The most brilliant British historian of his generation … Ferguson examines the roles of “pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts” in the creation of history’s largest empire … he writes with splendid panache … and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit’ Andrew Roberts

‘Dazzling … wonderfully readable’ New York Review of Books

‘A remarkably readable précis of the whole British imperial story – triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all’ Jan Morris

‘Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence’ Sunday Times

‘For big, bold and compelling, it is impossible to ignore Kissinger‘ – John Bew, New Statesman, Books of the Year

‘This is a superb history of the modern world as well as a biography of Kissinger … a tour de force’ William Shawcross, The Times

No American statesman has been as revered and as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Hailed by some as the “indispensable man”, whose advice has been sought by every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, Kissinger has also attracted immense hostility from critics who have cast him as an amoral Machiavellian – the ultimate cold-blooded “realist”.

In this remarkable new book, the first of two volumes, Niall Ferguson has created an extraordinary panorama of Kissinger’s world, and a paradigm-shifting reappraisal of the man. Only through knowledge of Kissinger’s early life (as a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, a poor immigrant in New York, a GI at the Battle of the Bulge, an interrogator of Nazis, and a student of history at Harvard) can we understand his debt to the philosophy of idealism.

And only by tracing his rise, fall and revival as an adviser to Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and, finally, Richard Nixon can we appreciate the magnitude of his contribution to the theory of diplomacy, grand strategy and nuclear deterrence.

Drawing not only on Kissinger’s hitherto closed private papers but also on documents from more than a hundred archives around the world, this biography is Niall Ferguson’s masterpiece. Like his classic two-volume history of the House of Rothschild, Kissinger sheds dazzling new light on an entire era.