Georgina Sturge, House of Commons Library statistician and author of the critically acclaimed Bad Data, explores the rich history of the times the UK has counted itself – from the revolutionary first census of 1801 to modern worries over technological surveillance.

Condensing a whole society into numbers brought hidden problems to light: mapping cholera deaths in Soho led researchers to a single deadly water pump; Florence Nightingale stunned the Victorian establishment with her diagrams showing disease was the soldier's hidden enemy; and the discovery that industries like firework-making were almost entirely staffed by women helped improve workers' rights.

Full of fascinating social detail, Sum of Us draws out the human stories captured in the vast tangle of data the UK has collected over two centuries. It provides a vital snapshot not of who we imagine ourselves to be – but who we really are.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 MOORE PRIZE IN HUMAN RIGHTS WRITING

‘Prosecuting The Powerful isn’t just compelling and very moving, it has all the force of a well-crafted thriller. I literally couldn’t stop reading it,’ John Simpson, BBC World Affairs Editor

‘A compelling account of a revolutionary moment in history,’ Philippe Sands, The Spectator

‘Powerful, timely and moving,’ Baroness Helena Kennedy KC

‘A tour de force,’ Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor, Channel 4 News

‘Absolutely brilliant,’ Nick Cohen

Could we ever see Vladimir Putin in the dock for his crimes? What about a Western ally like Benjamin Netanyahu? Putting a country’s leader on trial once seemed unimaginable. But as Steve Crawshaw describes in Prosecuting the Powerful – a blend of powerful eyewitness reporting and gripping history – the possibilities of justice have been transformed.

Crawshaw includes recent stories from the front lines of justice in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and at The Hague, as well as his earlier encounters with war criminals like Slobodan Milo?evic. He tells the stories of those who have demanded protection for civilians and accountability for war criminals – from the Geneva Conventions to the Syrian police photographer who helped put one of Bashar al-Assad’s torturers behind bars. He also follows the extraordinary unfolding story of two of the world’s most powerful and well-connected leaders currently under indictment at the International Criminal Court in The Hague: Putin and Netanyahu.

For all the current darkness, this is a historic opportunity. The scales of justice can and must be balanced. Now is the moment.

“Michael Wolff… the shrewdest and most colourful chronicler of the Trump years,” Sunday Times

All or Nothing is the final chapter in Wolff’s Fire and Fury series. With extraordinary behind-the-scenes access, it follows every turn of Donald Trump’s third presidential campaign.

In disgrace after the January 6 attack on the Capitol and sent into exile, Trump immediately sputters back to life. To the shock of the Republican Party leadership, the Trump base has not abandoned him. Hardly a year on, he is as strong as any challenger has ever been. The American establishment is stunned by his comeback and determined to stop it and hold him accountable for his abuses of law and power. Equally, he has vowed retribution on anyone who tries to stand in his way. The 2024 presidential race is elemental: the system breaks Donald Trump or Donald Trump breaks the system.

Michael Wolff tells this story from inside the Trump campaign. Through the sources he has cultivated over his ten years of writing about Donald Trump, including people who are with Trump on a daily basis, as well as his own first-hand reporting, we get a nearly moment-by-moment picture of the pendulum mood swings, the casual cruelties, the demands for obeisance, the preternatural resolve or otherworldly levels of denial, and the certain flashes of showman genius of the new president.

Praise for Fire and Fury, Siege and Landslide

“A book to shake America to its foundations” TheGuardian
“Cruel, unforgiving, muckracking, scandalous. I couldn’t stop reading it.” The Telegraph

“Hilarious and frightening, and often reads like a Hollywood gossip column” Financial Times

“Smart, vivid and intrepid,” The New York Times

“A fine and brave book.” Luke Harding, author of Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the writer Jana Bakunina, who has lived in the UK for 20 years, felt furious, ashamed, but most of all helpless. A year later she travelled to her home city of Yekaterinburg to see how ordinary Russians viewed the conflict – and whether the soul of her nation had truly been crushed.

Jana finds a booming city seemingly untouched by war. Reconnecting with old friends, she discovers people either happy to go along with a regime that has brought them stability, or else staying out of politics. Most painful of all, her once liberal father has channelled his personal disappointments into becoming a firm fan of Putin.

In the grand humane tradition of Russian dissident writers, Jana Bakunina grapples with a universal problem: what happens when a country you love becomes infected by nationalism? What hope is there when voices of conscience are silenced by dictatorship? And can Russians in exile still imagine a liberated future?

From the sacred stones of Stonehenge to the rose red city of Petra, from towering mountains to the smallest grains of sand, rocks have had a profound influence on human life.

Anjana Khatwa, an award-winning earth scientist and TV presenter, has dedicated much of her life to geology. Here she tells us in beautifully descriptive writing how rocks have been shaped over the eons-but also how they have shaped us.

Boldly alternating between modern science and ancient lore, Khatwa takes us on an exhilarating journey through deep time from bursting volcanoes in the Andes to the wonder of the Dorset coastline, while honouring the Indigenous stories that have brought the land alive over the millennia.

She also explores how connecting with the earth has guided her through the toughest times and offers the hope of reconnection with the earth and its stories-if only we open ourselves to hear the wisdom in its whispers.

Ponar, Lithuania. 1944. The Nazis have enslaved Jewish men to exhume and incinerate the bodies of more than 70,000 Jews previously shot to death in the forest. Trapped in almost unimaginable horror, a group develop an audacious escape plan. Despite being guarded day and night, they dig a tunnel with their bare hands. Twelve men escape – an act of great bravery and desperation as well as extraordinary imagination.

Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on every scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed or amplified since, No Road Leading Back resurrects the lives of the twelve and their acts of witness, as well as providing an urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told – and never accurately. Author Chris Heath explores the cultural use and misuse of Holocaust testimony and the need for us to face uncomfortable historical truths with honesty and accuracy.

This shattering and inspiring true story of prisoners who dug their way out of torture and imprisonment by the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in how we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.

‘There is no more powerful fighter for the cause that Muslims do, should and must matter than Sayeeda Warsi’
David Baddiel

‘A vitally important book from a vitally important voice’
David Olusoga

A DAILY TELEGRAPH MUST-READ FOR AUTUMN 2024

Three grandfathers killed on the streets of England in three separate incidents by three different men. Each targeted simply for being Muslim – each attack a consequence of the insidious rise in Islamophobia in Britain.

From the far-right violence that broke out in the summer of 2024 to the hatred directed at Muslims in public life during the Gaza conflict, anti-Muslim racism is dangerously out-of-control. Fed by a network of media outlets, think tanks, commentators, and even the entertainment industry, Islamophobia not only passes the dinner table test but is also Britain’s bigotry blind spot. For too many, Muslims Don’t Matter.

In this incisive polemic, Britain’s first Muslim Cabinet minister, Conservative peer, campaigner and podcaster Sayeeda Warsi uses her dual experience at the centre of British power and in the heart of our Muslim communities to unapologetically challenge the corrosive consensus. As Muslims terrified by the riots seriously consider whether Britain should still be their home, Warsi urges us to change course, to unite and dismantle this toxic bigotry.

Georgina Sturge, House of Commons Library statistician and author of the critically acclaimed Bad Data, explores the rich history of the times the UK has counted itself – from the revolutionary first census of 1801 to modern worries over technological surveillance.

Condensing a whole society into numbers brought hidden problems to light: mapping cholera deaths in Soho led researchers to a single deadly water pump; Florence Nightingale stunned the Victorian establishment with her diagrams showing disease was the soldier’s hidden enemy; and the discovery that industries like firework-making were almost entirely staffed by women helped improve workers’ rights.

The census also reveals the people left out of the nation’s story. Records reveal the remarkable presence of escaped American slaves living in nineteenth century Leeds, and that by 1901 there were 600 professional Italian cooks in the UK. More recent data has acknowledged religion, ethnicity, and LGBT identity for the first time. Sturge also tracks those who have resisted the state’s attempts at tabulation – people burning survey forms, stripping naked in protest and, in the case of 500 Suffragettes, avoiding the 1911 census by skating all night round Aldwych roller rink.

Full of fascinating social detail, Sum of Us draws out the human stories captured in the vast tangle of data the UK has collected over two centuries. It provides a vital snapshot not of who we imagine ourselves to be – but who we really are.