The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances.

The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author’s early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.

This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.

INCLUDES A NEW AFTERWORD FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI

What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens?

One of the world’s preeminent historians and thinkers, Yuval Noah Harari challenges everything we know about being human. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it: us.

In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we’re going.

PRAISE FOR SAPIENS:

‘Interesting and provocative… It gives you a sense of how briefly we’ve been on this Earth’ Barack Obama

‘Jaw-dropping from the first word to the last… It may be the best book I’ve ever read’ Chris Evans

‘Startling… It changes the way you look at the world’ Simon Mayo

‘I would recommend Sapiens to anyone who’s interested in the history and future of our species’ Bill Gates

‘Original and thrilling … achieving profound insights’ Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts

‘An incisive, deeply personal and beautifully written account of the power, the uses and the modern misuses of psychedelics. Highly recommended’ Anil Seth, author of Being You

Psychedelics have made a comeback but remain a mystery. They are now a ‘breakthrough therapy’ for mental illness but in truth we have only a vague idea how they work and there is a limit to what the science can reveal. To have any hope of understanding them, we must broaden our view – dramatically – of what they actually are.

In this daring, perception-shifting odyssey, clinical neuropsychologist Andy Mitchell takes ten different drugs in ten different settings, journeying from a London neuroimaging lab to the Colombian Amazon via Silicon Valley and his friend’s basement kitchen. His encounters with scientists and gangsters, venture capitalists and con men, psychonauts and shamans, as well as with the drugs themselves, reveal the reality of psychedelics in all their strangeness, hilarity, darkness and wonder.

‘A hair-raising hurtle of a ride’ Henry Shukman, author of One Blade of Grass

‘Utterly compelling … like having an out of body experience’ Mark Miodownik, author of Stuff Matters

‘The psychedelic world has been waiting for this book’ Professor Erika Dyck

Chinese was the earliest truly global cuisine. When the first Chinese labourers began to sojourn and settle abroad, restaurants appeared in their wake. Yet Chinese food has the curious distinction of being both one of the world’s best-loved culinary traditions and one of the least understood. For more than a century, the overwhelming dominance of a simplified form of Cantonese cooking ensured that few foreigners experienced anything of its richness and sophistication – but today that is beginning to change.

In this book, the James Beard Award-winning cook and writer Fuchsia Dunlop explores the history, philosophy and techniques of China’s rich and ancient culinary culture. Each chapter examines a classic dish, from mapo tofu to Dongpo pork, knife-scraped noodles to braised pomelo pith, to reveal a singular aspect of Chinese gastronomy, whether it’s the importance of the soybean, the lure of exotic ingredients or the history of Buddhist vegetarian cuisine. Meeting local food producers, chefs, gourmets and home cooks as she tastes her way across the country, Fuchsia invites readers to join her on an unforgettable journey into Chinese food as it is made, cooked, eaten and considered in its homeland.

Weaving together historical scholarship, mouth-watering descriptions of food and on-the-ground research conducted over the course of three decades, Invitation to a Banquet is a lively, landmark tribute to the pleasures and mysteries of Chinese cuisine.

Renowned anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody weaves a dazzling tapestry of personal memory and distant landscapes: childhood in England in the shadow of the Second World War, the Derbyshire hills, a kibbutz in Israel and the deep Canadian Arctic.

Growing up on the outskirts of Sheffield, Hugh Brody ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but was always given to understand that the real, the perfect food came from his mother’s home, Vienna. He attended Hebrew classes three times each week but was sent off to a Church of England boarding school. Conflicted and bewildered, he sought places to which he could escape – but everywhere he discovered deep and troubling silences.

He takes us on his first journeys to the Arctic, a world so far removed from anything he had known as to be a chance to learn, all over again, what it can mean to be alive. As he reveals, the realities of the far north were a joy, but even there he found abuses of the people and the land – and voices that were deeply silenced by the forces of colonialism.

In these landscapes, human well-being appears to be both possible and impossible. Yet in memory, in the land, in the defiance of silence, Hugh Brody sees a profound humanity – as well as hope.

An eye-opening book about how societies are designed to support those in power, at the expense of those without it.

COLONIAL POWER
In the 1950s, over 10,000 Kenyans were killed by the British during the Mau Mau uprising against a government determined to install a sympathetic post-independence regime and continue to exploit the resources of its former colonies.

PATRIARCHAL POWER
After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic systematically removed freedoms from women, relegating them to second-class citizens in the name of religious teachings.

EDUCATIONAL POWER
There have been fifty-seven prime ministers of the United Kingdom, of whom forty-three have been privately educated, creating a society built by and for the privileged.

These are just some of the stories through which Dr Jack Davy illustrates the key factors that allow societies to create and sustain oppressive systems. Some are historical. Others have played out right before our eyes over the last decade. All are rooted in the systems in which we all participate. Read this book, and take action.

‘Sharp and insightful. Jack Davy makes complex ideas accessible in this powerful book about the roots of inequality’ Caroline Dodds Pennock, author of On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe

‘A deeply humane book with true hope in its message’ Ray Mattinson, Blackwells