'Crucial reading on why our global order has come apart at the seams' – WILLIAM HAGUE

'Thoughtful, thought-provoking and clear-eyed' – PETER FRANKOPAN

'An expert voice for troubled times' – JOHN KERRY

Every day, a new headline. War in the Middle East between Trump's America and Iran. Israel and Palestine in a never-ending conflict. Putin's Russia and Ukraine in a battle that threatens the autonomy of Europe. China on a mission to extend its global reach. The world is closer than it ever has been to midnight on the Doomsday Clock.

Tobias Ellwood is an expert in geopolitics and military strategy. As former Foreign Minister, Defence Minister, Chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee and an officer in the British Army's Royal Green Jackets, he is uniquely placed to offer solutions to the crises affecting our global order. In ten steps, he shows us exactly what is at stake, how we got here, and how we can build an exit plan to prevent regional conflict escalating into global war.

'Engaging and insightful, this book … offers practical steps that world leaders and everyday citizens alike can take to navigate them with purpose' – GENERAL JIM MATTIS, USMC RTD

From Joan of Arc to Lady Godiva, Isabella of Castile to Catherine of Siena, famous medieval women have become national icons, their legends burnished and celebrated. But over the centuries their lives have been exploited, their stories twisted and weaponised. Searching for the real women behind the legends, bestselling historian Janina Ramirez reveals how history is often hijacked to serve the ideological and political agendas of the present.

Praise for LEGENDA:
'Fearless, stunning and shockingly relevant' Alice Roberts, author of Domination

'A brilliant concept, conveyed with that dynamo mix: academic authority and storytelling pizzazz!' Alice Loxton, author of Eighteen

'Deeply researched, smart, poignant, and witty.' – Karen Bloom Gevirtz, author of The Apothecary's Wife

Women have been fighting for control over their bodies for thousands of years. From Neolithic hunter-gatherers to the reversal of Roe v. Wade, this is their story.

Acclaimed cultural historian Lucy Inglis takes the reader on an epic journey through the stories of women over hundreds of thousands of years. From ancient Mesopotamian birthing practices to the lost contraceptives of Ancient Rome and the strange story of the feminists who fought for the right to forget childbirth, this is a truly sweeping history that explores the competing ideologies and lived realities that have shaped so many lives.

Lucy Inglis charts the battle for control throughout history over reproduction, birth and women’s bodies – a fight still raging in many places across the world. With birth rates falling and infant mortality in many societies on the rise once more, this bold and timely book raises vital questions about how we think about motherhood and pregnancy today. Lucy Inglis has spent over a decade researching the history of childbirth, drawing on new and unseen sources from a wide-ranging array of disciplines.

Charting the powerful interests and dedicated scientists that have shaped women’s maternal experiences, this is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand how we all came to be here.

‘Thought-provoking’ – The Sunday Times
'Mesmerising' – LRB
'A great big entertaining sweep of a book' – The Guardian
'Excellent' – The Telegraph
'Rich and incisive' – The Economist
‘Powerful, precise, morally engaged’ – Rory Stewart
‘The authoritative political history’ – David Kynaston
'Sweeping and ambitious' – Helen Lewis

In this lively history, acclaimed writer Tom McTague chronicles the battle of ideas, events and personalities that first took the country into the Common Market in 1973, only to take it out of the European Union in an explosive referendum a little over forty years later.

A riveting story of the clashing ideals that have pulled at Britain’s public imagination for more than seven decades, Between the Waves illuminates the conflicts between leading twentieth century politicians and the lesser-known actors in this great post-war drama: the Eurosceptic student radicals, Cold Warriors, eccentric billionaires and political strategists who turned the tide of history.

Ultimately, this book raises that most elemental of questions: who are we?

'Shines powerful light on the state of contemporary geopolitics . . . Profound'
ANDREW ROBERTS

'Wide-ranging and provocative'
FIONA HILL

'Simms is one of the most knowledgeable and formidable analysts of how the Great Powers will shape the new order'
RANA MITTER

From an acclaimed historian, a sweeping study of the past, present, and future of the Great Powers, revealing the new rules of global leadership.

From the dawn of the modern era to the end of the Cold War, global history was defined by rivalries between great powers. In the West, this meant the struggle for supremacy in Europe and the Americas, while in the East, it encompassed those vying for control over the successor states to Genghis Khan's empire. Between 1989 and the year 2000, great power rivalry temporarily gave way to globalization, with liberal democracy on the march and national chauvinism seemingly in retreat. But events of the past decade have made one thing abundantly clear: the great powers are back.

In The Return of the Great Powers, renowned historian Brendan Simms offers a new history of the rise, fall, and return of the Great Powers in our time. He shows that over the past ten years or so, the major global actors have already resumed making decisions based on geopolitical rather than global economic considerations. Delivering a clear-eyed reckoning with today's most pressing geopolitical issues, from the Ukraine war to the future of American dominance, The Return of the Great Powers insists that we can only understand the future of the great powers by looking to the history that forged them.

Stories about royal women form some of our most foundational myths about femininity, and yet their legacies have been almost entirely constructed by the words and images created by men.

In Regina, acclaimed historian Kate Williams leads us deep into a world of queens, empresses, princesses, mistresses and courtiers, uncovering how their ambitions were shaped, celebrated and often thwarted, exposing a tangled web of women and power that spans thousands of years.

Ranging from the ancient civilisations of Egypt and Mesopotamia to the opulent courts of the pre-modern world and the last days of colonialism, Williams delves into the lives of these remarkable women, revealing both their trials and triumphs as they navigate political intrigue, family rivalries and personal sacrifices.

From Hatshepsut and Boudica, through Tudor queens Catherine of Aragon and Lady Jane Grey, to Queen Victoria's contemporaries Yaa Asantewaa of Ghana and Queen Lili'uokalani of Hawaii, and right up to Princess Diana, this is a thrilling, globe-spanning story of queens and royal woman, of female power through the ages that unlocks how we understand women, politics and power today.

** FEATURED IN THE NEW BBC SERIES CIVILISATIONS: RISE AND FALL **
** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER **

‘A brilliant, utterly convincing account of the evolution of human society and why we are probably reaching humanity's end days’ HENRY MARSH

'Absolutely essential reading for understanding why past civilisations collapsed, and how to protect our own from the same fate' LEWIS DARTNELL

For the first 300,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change.

As we reluctantly congregated in the first farms and cities, people began to rely on novel lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. And when more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organization. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires – with vast bureaucracies and militaries – carved up and dominated the globe.

What brought them down? Whether in the early cities of Cahokia in North America or Tiwanaku in South America, or the sprawling empires of Egypt, Rome and China, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power that hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population.

Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.

'An excellent survey of human history through the collapses of Goliath-like kings, states and empires' OBSERVER

'A comprehensive overview of societal collapse, based on the analysis of dozens of cases spanning thousands of years from the Paleolithic to today. Highly recommended' PETER TURCHIN

'A deeply sobering and strangely inspiring history of how societies collapse – and how we can still save ours. Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins' JOHANN HARI

'Like reading Thomas Piketty filtered through Mad Max' NEW YORK TIMES

‘Weird and wonderful facts you didn’t know you needed. Full of quirky nuggets of information and trivia’ - Sun

‘Joyously bizarre facts in a new book from a QI brainbox’ - Daily Mail

Drawn from a former BBC QI Elf's lifetime’s search for the weird and the wonderful, The Most Interesting Book in The World is a miscellany of things too strange to be true, yet somehow are.
 
This remarkable treasury of tales and trivia will whisk you on a jaw-dropping journey through time and space, stopping off to marvel at only the obscure, the startling and the straight-up weird.
 
In it, Edward Brooke-Hitching considers questions such as:
 

• Why is a cat technically a liquid and a solid?
• How did nineteenth-century scientists attempt to signal aliens?
• Why did the Dutch once eat their prime minister?  

 
Nowhere else will you find woven together the stories of the religious leader who attempted to build a robot messiah from a dining table, the anti-gravity ‘air-walkers’ of Victorian London, and the pirates who rode sheep; or practical advice for correctly exorcising a house and casting ancient love spells, along with recent scientific discoveries like the mould that can navigate a maze and that humans can glow in the dark.
 
A unique hybrid of encyclopaedia, trivia and drunken-bar raconteur, all stitched together in one colossal Frankenstein volume packed full of images and photographs – this is the ultimate must-read for anyone looking to tickle the cortex of their curiosity. 

A Waterstones Best Nature & Travel Writing Book 2025

'Educational, smart and funny’ Richard Osman

‘This book is superb’ Charlie Brooker

‘Brilliant. Fascinating. Hilarious.’ Jonn Elledge, bestselling author of A History of the World in 47 Borders

The debut book from the YouTube sensation and all-round cartographical nerds, The Map Men!

Hello, we're the Map Men, and in the following pages we've selected what we believe to be some of the very best wrong maps. Some of them are decades old, some are centuries old and some are so recent they're being published today (or yesterday, if you’re reading this tomorrow).

They include world maps, colonial maps, corporate maps, Soviet maps, pioneer maps, news maps and maps whose intended use was hijacked for a French surrealist political movement in the 1950s. Whether you’re an avid map junkie or simply ‘map-curious’, you will uncover a unique tale of adventure, error and unexpected humour in each chapter, as we attempt to answer the question: ‘What on earth happened here?’

So, ditch the compass (or disable location services) and set out on a journey with us, the Map Men, into a world of cartographic chaos and mappy mishaps.

Because the worst maps are the best maps.