Haus Publishing – The Bell Bookshop

Making the weather

Emma — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Making the Weather is the story of six post-war politicians, all of whom exerted an outsized influence on the political life of the UK: an influence greater than that of most prime ministers. Vernon Bogdanor’s cast includes three from the political Left – Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, Roy Jenkins, and Tony Benn – and three from the Right – Enoch Powell, Keith Joseph, and Nigel Farage. Each study is a fascinating analysis that examines how these men achieved such prominence and influence and how, though very different figures in many ways, they came to dominate the political landscape, often for a period of years. Each of the six made fundamental contributions to the debate about Britain’s future and to the vibrancy of our democracy. From immigration to Europe, from the NHS to devolution, the issues and causes that brought these men to prominence are still of considerable contemporary relevance.

Leonard Cohen

Emma — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So begins the story of an everyman Leonard Cohen, a would-be artist, a would-be lover, a would-be tragic figure. Or perhaps the ‘would-be’ doesn’t really apply, perhaps he is all of these things. Yet he is a man haunted by the greatness of his namesake. He struggles to compete. He struggles not to be defeated. He struggles to accept his fate, to be more than a punchline in his own mind. He struggles, in partiuclar, to write one song that would be as great as the least of the great Leonard Cohen’s songs.At the centre of Leonard’s life is Daphne. In their meeting, a contemporary fable of Daphne and Apollo plays out, the birth of love out of lust. But even with Daphne, Leonard is shadowed by the ‘other’ Leonard Cohen. The ancient myths haunts the fated lovers, and the ‘nobody’ Leonard Cohen’s life becomes at once a mystery, a miracle, and a myth on its own terms.Once upon a time, Apollo fell hard for Daphnem who turned herself into a laurel tree. No less a fate awaits the protagonists of this slender yet universal novel, where art, love, and fame all fatefully intertwine.

Land of shame and glory

Emma — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Hennessy brings his deep political and historical understandign to this study of two of the most turbulent and disruptive years experienced by Britain in peacetime. As the protracted withdrawal from the EU and the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic dragged on, a series of unprecedented challenges - some global, some domestic – laid bare the fragility of Britain the Union. Beginning with the chaotic Fall of Kabul, which exposed Britain’s military dependence on the United States, through the protracted, unedifying removal of a prime minister – and the economically catastrophic, short-lived tenure of his successor – that further exposed the vulnerabilities of an unwritten constitutionl to the country sweltering in record breaking temperatures amid dire warnings of climate catastrophe; and finally to the death of a much-loved monarch, a point of constancy during decades of tremendous social and technological change. In his final chapter, Hennessy considers the continuities and upheavals of the last seventy years, asking whether there can be said to have been a second ‘Elizabethan Age’, and lamenting that the post-war period came close to its close amid such upheavel and loss.

In the Long Run We’re All Dead

Emma — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

No one grows up dreaming of becoming an economist. Until the late nineteenth century, economics couldn’t even be studied at university and was the preserve of polymathic figures whose radical curiosity drew them to an evolving discipline that was little understood and often derided. Each of the thirteen chapters of this book tells the story of just such a figure. Each of their extraordinary lives is worthy of fiction, and the manner of their deaths, oddly, often illuminate their work.In the Long Run We’re All Dead shows us how these great economists developed their theories for which they became famous, even if, tragically, much too late for them to enjoy their fame. And these often-complex ideas – of Utilitarianism, of Social Costs, of the Endowment Effect, to name just a few – are explained here with reference to the lives of their creators in a style that is engaging, irreverent, and comic. Though what Frank tells us about these lives is true, this is also a book of imaginative speculation that considers how economists’ principles might be applied to problems of today and of the future.’In the long run’, said John Maynard Keynes, we are all dead’. A blandly straightforward statement but one, when uttered by perhaps the greatest economist of the twentieth century, intriguingly gnomic too. Keynes is but one of the eccentrics, radical, unconventional, and often revolutionary thinkers whose lives Björn Frank entertainingly recounts.

Leadership

Emma — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When Abraham Lincoln said, ‘You can be anything you want to be,’ Americans, and eventually everybody everywhere, lifted their sights. Nowadays anybody can aspire to be a leader, and nearly everybody has to lead sometimes.In his first book, Simon McDonald assumes that thinking about leadership before you lead helps you lead better. No matter the circumstances in which we might be called to lead – be it at work, on the sports field, or in the community – the example of top leaders in politics and public service (both their successes and shortcomings) can help you figure out your own approach.Over four decades in HM Diplomatic Service, Simon worked for four permanent under-secretaries and a dozen senior ambassadors before becoming permanent under-secretary himself and leading the Service (which has over 14,000 staff in 270 countries worldwide) for five years. He also worked directly for six foreign secretaries and saw five ministers work at close quarters. Observing these people undertaking the most important and often the most difficult work in the country, Simon saw the behaviours that helped them achieve their objectives, and those that hindered them. He then had the chance to try to apply that learning.In a closing chapter that considers the future of leadership in the UK, Simon McDonald makes a compelling case for the reform of the monarchy, the cabinet, civil service, and, in particular, the House of Lords, of which he has been a member since 2021.Leadership of the United Kingdom is being debated as never before. This book is a clear-sighted and insightful contribution to that debate.

Riddle, Mystery, and Enigma

Emma — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Britain’s relationship with Russia is surprisingly under-explored. When the two formed a pragmatic alliance and fought together at Navarino in 1827, it was overwhelmingly the work of the British prime minister, George Canning. His death brought about a volte-face that would see the countries fighting on opposite sides in the Crimean War and jostling for power during the Great Game.It was not until the 1917 revolution that another statesman had a defining impact on relations between Britain and Russia. Winston Churchill opposed Bolshevism, yet he never stopped advocating diplomatic and military engagement with Russia. In the Second World War, he recognised earlier than most the necessity of allying with the Soviets against the menace of Nazi Germany – as well as the post-war threat to freedom posed by the Soviets themselves.Bringing us into the twenty-first century, Owen chronicles how both countries have responded to their geopolitical decline. Drawing on British imperial and Soviet history, he explains the unique nature of Putin’s autocracy and addresses Britain’s return to ‘blue water’ diplomacy.With Owen’s characteristic insight and expertise, Riddle, Mystery and Enigma depicts a relationship governed by principle as often as by suspicion, expediency, and outright necessity.

Labour’s Civil Wars

Emma — Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The biblical adage that ‘if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand’ remains sound theological advice. It also essential counsel for any political party that aspires to win elections. When a party is riven with division people do not know what it stands for. Though both major parties have been subject to internal conflict over the years, it is the Labour Party which has been more given to damaging splits. The divide exposed by the Corbyn insurgency is only the most recent example in a century of destructive infighting. Indeed, it has often seemed as though Labour has been more adept at fighting itself than in defeating the Tory party. This book examines the history of Labour’s civil wars and the underlying causes of the party’s schisms, from the first split of 1931, engineered by Ramsay MacDonald, to the ongoing battle for the future between the incumbent, Keir Starmer, and those who fundamentally altered the party’s course under his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

Regicide

Emma — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Henry Marten – soldier, member of parliament, organiser of the trial of Charles I and signatory of the King’s death warrant – is today a neglected figure of the seventeenth-century. Yet at the fulcrum of English history during the turbulent years of the civil war, the protectorate and the restoration, his life is both extraordinary and emblematic. Imprisoned in the Tower of London and tried at the Old Bailey, Marten is found guilty of High Treason only to be held captive for years on the equivalent of death row. It was only many years later that his letters to his mistress Mary Ward were stolen and published in an attempt to destroy his reputation. Witty, clever, loving, sardonic and never despairing, the letters offer a rare and extraordinary insight into the everyday life of a man in the Tower of London awaiting a sentence of death. The attempt to expose him as immoral instead revealed a tender and brave man. In John Worthen’s revelatory biography, Marten emerges from the shadows as a brilliantly clever, lively-minded man, free of fundamentalist zeal so common in many of his republican contemporaries. Marten never abandoned his beliefs in equality, in a representative parliament under a constitution (which he had helped to write) without a monarch or a House of Lords and in that way be seen as a very modern man.

Bismarck

Emma — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A leading historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history Volker Ullrich has written a very accessible biography of Otto von Bismarck.