No American or foreign leader has met with as many sitting presidents as Queen Elizabeth II. Her Royal Majesty’s seventy-year reign witnessed the highs and lows of the close and crucial alliance between the U.S. and the U.K., from the Suez crisis to Brexit.

Following the advice of her mentor, Winston Churchill, to “stay close to the Americans,” Queen Elizabeth played an unexpected role behind the scenes that has never been thoroughly explored. In The Queen and Her Presidents, veteran political reporter Susan Page goes beyond the image of a staid monarch in colorful hats to reveal a skilled strategist, who, like many powerful women, was routinely underestimated and discounted.

Page also shows the impact American presidents had on the monarch as she developed from a shy, anxious princess to a powerful and persuasive global leader, and analyzes both the reach and the limits of the “soft power” she wielded. These accounts of the Queen’s deft diplomacy provide candid and telling assessments of her partners in the Oval Office as well.

Page shares fascinating true stories and details, including:

• Going beyond rumors and speculation, the reality of the relationship between Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth – and Trump’s own surprising comments about the monarch whose approval he coveted.
• The unexpected and genuine connection between the Queen and Barack Obama, and her surprising admission to him, and how each ranked the other as among the most impressive leaders of their lifetimes.
• Her influential friendship with Ronald Reagan during the Cold War, a bond built on their shared love of horses-and their conflict with Britain’s then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
• How Richard Nixon sought the Queen’s help during Watergate-and even wanted to make her a relative.
• Elizabeth’s hand-in-glove cooperation with John F. Kennedy and the distance from his successor, Lyndon Johnson, the only president who declined to meet with her in office.
• The almost paternal role played by Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, offering support and advice as the young monarch assumed the crown in the wake of her beloved father’s death.

Eye-opening and compelling, featuring an 8-page color photo insert, The Queen and Her Presidents is a remarkable chronicle of a legendary contemporary monarch and the American presidents who helped shape who helped shape her-and were shaped by her.

Frankenstein has terrified and delighted readers since its initial publication in 1818. Victor Frankenstein’s Creature-stitched together from the limbs of the dead, taken from “the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse”-is a grotesque being who, rejected by his maker and starved of human companionship, embarks on a journey of revenge. In the most famous gothic horror story ever told, Mary Shelley confronts the limitations of science, the nature of human cruelty, hubris, and ambition, and the pathway to forgiveness.

Shelley’s revered novel comes to life as never before in this inventive edition showcasing the magical artistry of MinaLima. Brimming with original illustrations and seven extraordinary interactive features, delve into MinaLima’s captivating interpretation which includes:

• A reveal of the Creature’s face,
• A foldout excerpt from Victor’s diary,
• An expanding map, and more!

Filled with marvels, this beautiful edition will enchant readers of every age and is sure to become a treasured keepsake.

?In The Origin Of Politics, Nicholas Wade explains how our political systems compete with a more ancient set of rules for organizing society-those developed by evolution. Modern ideologies are in constant tension with structures inherent in human social behavior, such as the family, the tribe, and male-dominated institutions.

This tension plays out in various ways. Sometimes nature prevails over politics, as in the proposal by Marx and Engels to eliminate the family, the basic unit of society. The founders of the kibbutz movement put this radical idea into practice, only to find that the conflict with human nature was unsustainable. In other cases, culture has successfully modified evolutionary behaviors, replacing polygamy with monogamy and dissolving the bonds of tribalism to make way for modern states.

But the evolutionary framework of human societies is not infinitely flexible. The nation-state, especially in the case of the United States, is prone to disintegration if disruptive ideologies are allowed to undermine the cohesive affinities that hold its disparate cultures together.

The worldwide decline in fertility in most countries except those in Africa signals a severe derangement in the behaviors evolution has devised for ensuring that a population will maintain itself. If the causes of this disruption cannot be understood and reversed, human societies will embark on an unsought path to extinction.

Other fraught issues in which human biology and politics conflict include the innate specializations of the sexes, the stratification of society by ability, and the mismatch between the inequalities of wealth-creating societies and the egalitarian ethic inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

We live in an iridescent bubble, the intoxicating richness of modern culture. Shielded from the natural world, we have lost our awareness of the evolutionary forces that still guide our motivations and shape the foundations of our societies. The Origin of Politics explores the risks of underestimating evolution’s fundamental role in human affairs.

In Prey, the best-selling author of Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, presents startling statistics, criminal cases and personal testimony. Among these facts: In 2014, sexual violence in Western Europe surged following a period of stability. In 2018 Germany, “offences against sexual self-determination” rose 36 percent from their 2014 rate; nearly two-fifths of the suspects were non-German. In Austria in 2017, asylum-seekers were suspects in 11 percent of all reported rapes and sexual harassment cases, despite making up less than 1 percent of the total population.

This violence isn’t a figment of alt-right propaganda, Hirsi Ali insists, even if neo-Nazis exaggerate it. It’s a real problem that Europe-and the world-cannot continue to ignore. She explains why so many young Muslim men who arrive in Europe engage in sexual harassment and violence, tracing the roots of sexual violence in the Muslim world from institutionalized polygamy to the lack of legal and religious protections for women.

A refugee herself, Hirsi Ali is not against immigration. As a child in Somalia, she suffered female genital mutilation; as a young girl in Saudi Arabia, she was made to feel acutely aware of her own vulnerability. Immigration, she argues, requires integration and assimilation. She wants Europeans to reform their broken system-and for Americans to learn from European mistakes. If this doesn’t happen, the calls to exclude new Muslim migrants from Western countries will only grow louder.

Deeply researched and featuring fresh and often shocking revelations, Prey uncovers a sexual assault and harassment crisis in Europe that is turning the clock on women’s rights much further back than the #MeToo movement is advancing it.

A few years ago, Ben and his wife, Katherine, sold their small flat in Primrose Hill and moved to France to pursue their dream of restoring an old barn near Nimes.

That dream then became much, much bigger for, last October, they moved with their two young children, Ben’s 76 year-old mother and his brother, into a run-down zoo on the edge of Dartmoor which they had bought, and found themselves responsible for 200 animals including four huge tigers, lions, pumas, three massive bears, a tapir and a wolf pack.

Ben’s new extended family now included: Solomon, an African lion and scourge of the local golf course; Zak, the rickety Alpha wolf, a broadly benevolent dictator clinging to power; Ronnie, a Brazilian tapir, easily capable of killing a man, but hopelessly soppy; and Sovereign, a jaguar who is also a would-be ninja, and has devised a long term escape plan and implemented it.

But tragedy was to strike for, in the midst of dealing with escaping wolves and jaguars, and troublesome adolescent vervet monkeys, Katherine, who had developed, and had removed, a brain tumour while in France, began to experience symptoms again. The prognosis was poor, and so Ben found himself juggling the complexities of managing the zoo and getting it ready for re-opening, and at the same time having to care for his rapidly deteriorating wife, their two young children, and their ever growing menagerie of animals.

Ben’s story will both move and entertain – charting, simultaneously, the family’s attempts to improve the animals’ lives, the build-up to the Zoo’s official reopening, as well as Katherine’s decline, her final days, and how the family went on.