The epic successor to Tim Weiner’s National Book Award-winning classic, Legacy of Ashes: a gripping and revelatory history of the CIA in the 21st century, reaching from 9/11 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to today’s battles with Russia and China – and with the President of the United States.

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn’t being collected. At the dawn of the information age, the CIA’s officers and analysts worked with outmoded technology, struggling to distinguish the clear signals of significant facts from the cacophony of background noise.

Then came September 11th, 2001. After the attacks, the CIA transformed itself into a lethal paramilitary force, running secret prisons and brutal interrogations, mounting deadly drone attacks, and all but abandoning its core missions of espionage and counterespionage. The consequences were grave: the deaths of scores of its recruited foreign agents, the theft of its personnel files by Chinese spies, the penetration of its computer networks by Russian intelligence and American hackers, and the tragedies of Afghanistan and Iraq. A new generation of spies now must fight the hardest targets – Moscow, Beijing, Tehran – while confronting a president who has attacked the CIA as a subversive force.

From Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, The Mission tells the gripping, high-stakes story of the CIA through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, revealing how the agency fought to rebuild the espionage powers it lost during the war on terror – and finally succeeded in penetrating the Kremlin. The struggle has life-and-death consequences for America and its allies. The CIA must reclaim its original mission: know thy enemies. The fate of the free world hangs in the balance.

A masterpiece of reporting, The Mission includes exclusive on-the-record interviews with six former CIA directors, thirteen station chiefs, and scores of top spies who served undercover for decades and have never spoken to a journalist before.

In Plunder, Max Hastings presents a cast of fascinating people British, American and German, in a series of great events in which some distinguished themselves through wonderful deeds, others through the basest crimes.

The book takes its title from Montgomery’s ‘Operation Plunder’, the 23 March 1945 crossing of the Rhine, witnessed by Winston Churchill and embracing huge amphibious and airborne landings. The author describes the American coup in capturing Remagen bridge and the ‘battles of the breakout’ which followed. Thereafter he recounts stories of Nazi Werewolves; of US General George Patton’s reckless and doomed dispatch of an armoured column fifty miles behind German lines to liberate his son-in-law from a prison camp; the heartbreaking liberation of Belsen concentration camp; the wonderful achievement of Ian Liddell of the Coldstream Guards, among the last VC winners of the war and surely one of the most deserving; the last big SAS operation of the war. Finally come accounts of the tortuous succession of German surrenders, and the weeks of Admiral Karl Donitz’s posturing as the Third Reich’s last Fuhrer.

Plunder is the latest history from Max Hastings, and offers his signature narrative of conflict, blending personal experiences into the ‘big picture’, highlighting deeds and personalities that will be unfamiliar to many readers. He mingles accounts of the battles with stories of people – warlords, soldiers, slave labourers, prisoners, fugitives, victims – who played many and various roles in the last European act of history’s most terrible war.

So was the instinct to battle back.

Over more than fifty years as an elected representative – councillor, council leader, MP and minister – she fought on every front. Against the old guard of the Labour right and the bullying hard left. Against Margaret Thatcher's assault on local government. Against the BNP, when Nick Griffin came to Barking to take her seat. Against Jeremy Corbyn and the antisemitism that infected her beloved party. And against the oligarchs, tax avoiders, money launderers and kleptocrats who have used Britain as their playground.

As chair of the Public Accounts Committee, she transformed a dry accounting exercise into one of the most feared scrutiny bodies in British public life. When a senior Google executive sat before her committee, she invoked the company's famous motto saying: 'You say you “do no evil” – but I think you do do evil, in that you use smoke and mirrors to avoid paying tax.' It was that kind of directness – applied equally to Amazon, Starbucks, Goldman Sachs and HSBC – that made tax avoidance a matter of public outrage rather than private cleverness. As Britain's first Children's Minister, she championed and expanded Sure Start, the network of children's centres that transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of families – and whose destruction by subsequent governments remains one of her deepest regrets.

Battleaxe is her memoir of a life spent in the thick of it. It is candid about mistakes made and lessons learned. It is honest about the grief of losing her husband Henry, the love of her life, and about the loneliness and unexpected freedoms of life without him. It captures the joy of the battles won – crushing Nick Griffin in Barking, forcing transparency on tax havens, calling Corbyn an antisemitic racist to his face and refusing to apologise – and the frustration of watching hard-won gains undone by those who came after.

She has been called a champagne socialist, a national treasure, a loony leftie, a radical reformer, a traitor, and yes – a battleaxe. She has never much minded. What has always mattered is the fight itself, and the conviction that politics, done properly, can make the world a better place. Margaret Hodge, at eighty-one, is still fighting. In this forthright book, she does not spare herself. She reflects on lessons learned from things she got wrong. But above all, she writes with the passionate conviction of someone who has always believed that politics can make the world a better place – and who has spent a lifetime trying to prove it.

Sanctuary is an ancient right- a haven, a place of refuge and freedom from harm. In the classical world, it offered immunity to fugitives from justice; in medieval Europe it extended a reprieve to all who sought sanctuary in a church or holy site. It was a sacrilege to lay hands on a sanctuary-seeker: sanctuary was sacred.

But what are the principles that govern this ancient tradition? Could a revived practice of sanctuary today offer security, a home for those who seek it? What could ‘sanctuary’ offer to those who have been displaced? Or does the idea support excluding those of a certain race or creed?

Increasingly, in keeping with the general growth of nationalism and individualism, the arc of the concept has been bending away from a place of openness and welcome towards a private safe place, a redoubt: home and homeland as sanctuaries to be defended against strangers, migrants, incomers.

In this groundbreaking book, the distinguished cultural historian Marina Warner explores the principles that underpin the tradition of ‘sanctuary’. She ranges broadly across myth and history and explores the concept of hospitality, the cult of relics, shrines and festivals, the imagination of place, and travelling tales. She asks profound questions about political ideas of a right to safety, home, freedom of movement, and peace.

Sanctuary was written alongside work with the project “Stories in Transit” which brings young refugees together with artists, writers and musicians in the UK and in Sicily to invent or reimagine stories and perform them. Marina Warner reflects on the ways stories address the worst experiences of humanity and argues that the act of storytelling offers a salve, a route to a site of mutual interaction and understanding, a new place of belonging and conviviality. The book draws on a lifetime of engagement with literature, myth, history and tradition from different cultures. It is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the sharpest questions that we are facing in a world of global turmoil. Warner’s inquiry could not be more relevant.

Paul Preston, the preeminent historian of modern Spain, here lays bare the complex web of financial and sexual excess that led to the hero’s vertiginous downfall. For decades, King Carlos was immensely popular in Spain and much beloved – in part because of his courageous defence of Spanish democracy after Franco’s death. However, his secrets’ gradual exposure e was detonated in April 2012 by his appearance on television cameras as he left a Madrid hospital. An astonished nation heard him make a declaration unprecedented from the lips of any Spanish Head of State, royal or republican: ‘I am very sorry. I have made a mistake and it will not happen again’.

Revelations that he had been badly injured while elephant hunting in Botswana accompanied by a woman who was not his wife opened the floodgates to prurient research into his marital infidelities. From there, it was a short step to journalistic, followed by judicial, investigation into his financial misdemeanours. The consequent accumulation of hostile coverage culminated in his abdication on 2 June 2014 and, from August 2020, a gilded exile in Abu Dhabi.

Paul Preston’s spectacular biography tells the story of the King’s very public implosion and identifies the seeds of self-destruction in Juan Carlos’s unhappy childhood and upbringing. In so doing, Preston also throws a penetrating light on the massive scale of corruption within the Spanish establishment and sets the King’s downfall against Spain’s own identity crisis as it continues to grapple with its fascist past.

The Building of England puts into context the significance of a country’s architectural history and unearths how it is inextricably linked to the cultural past – and present.

From humble Saxon huts, to soaring gothic cathedrals, through feats of Victorian engineering to the homes we live in today, Simon Thurley tells the story of England through the places and people that built it.

The Building of England challenges us to think differently about English history. Through the lens of architecture Thurley shows how a thousand years of economic, social and cultural change made England the place it is today. People built for defence, power, profit, farming, manufacture, travel, religion and entertainment. The story of England is embedded in all our buildings. This book brings the buildings, their designers, builders, owners and users vividly to life to show that they are a profound reflection of our history.

In this fully updated and expanded edtion of his 2013 classic, The Building of England brings the story completely up to date: now ending in 2020. It places English architecture full square in its historical context.

These remarkable creatures are both among and apart from us: sharing the same environments but carrying a sense of mystique as they beat their wings low over the fields where they hunt, or swoop up and around to their nest, high in a tree or haystack. There is something ethereal, awe- and fear-inspiring about the appearance and movement of these birds: graceful, distinctive, almost otherworldly. It is not hard to see why observers long ago watched the owl and deemed it a visitor from another place, with either a great or terrible message to impart. Every encounter with an owl is special, somehow new, and stands alone even as it helps you to understand patterns and connections.

The silent approach of a white Barn Owl angel over a paddock is one of the most alluring images in the British countryside. The t’wit and the answering t’wo of the Tawny owl is a classic of the night. Both are tiny insights into the amazing lives of the owls that are found around us. Ghosts of the Night is a wonderful insight into every element of our British Owls – Barn and Tawny and their even more enigmatic cousins the Short-eared, Long-eared and Little. How well do they hear, how silently do they fly and how do they live in the ever changing countryside.

Chris Sperring is the acknowleged expert and he explains everything you have ever wanted to know about these amazing creatures.

'Written with all the pace and energy of a John Grisham novel … An incredible true story and a great read!' BILL BROWDER

'If you want to know how Putin ruined Russia and to understand why it matters, you should read Rule of Lies' OLIVER BULLOUGH

'Jamison Firestone is a legend … his books is a remarkable firsthand account' FIONA HILL

An American lawyer’s brilliant, propulsive story of witnessing and playing a part in the transformation of Russia under Yeltsin and Putin. A true tale of fascinating personalities, criminal intrigue, harrowing situations, audacious actions and international politics that combines Bill Browder’s Red Notice with Michael Lewis’s Liar's Poker.

Raised by his father, a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who owned Manhattan’s most expensive brothel, twenty-four-year-old Jamison R. Firestone decided to change the channel. He graduated from law school in 1991 and sought his fortune in Gorbachev’s USSR, establishing Russia’s first independent foreign law firm.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Jamison lived in the maelstrom that was Russia, defending himself and his clients from mafia attacks, dealing with corrupt police officers, having his law office raided by armed commandos, and once having to bug the offices of the Russian police.

Jamison was at the centre of some of Russia’s most important events. He employed Sergei Magnitsky who was murdered for uncovering the largest tax theft in Russian history and teamed up with Bill Browder and Alexei Navalny to expose his killers. Along the way he inadvertently taught Navalny to make videos exposing corruption and started a war with the Russian government over passage of the Magnitsky Acts which threatened to sanction Russia’s most powerful people.

A real-life story that reads like a spy novel, Rule of Lies goes deep inside contemporary Russia and events that have reshaped the globe. Darkly comic, sometimes horrifying and deeply moving, it is a chilling warning of what can happen when a nascent democracy succumbs to one man’s corrupt iron rule, becoming not only an authoritarian nation but a profoundly criminal one-a true mafia state.

Jonathan Swift settled into his great friend Alexander Pope’s new house on the river at Twickenham (or Twitnam as they liked to call it), and joined by John Gay, the trio of Scriblerius Club writers spent a delightful and creative summer, pushing each other to new satirical heights (The Dunciad and The Beggar’s Opera also ensued), exploring the gardens and houses of their aristocratic friends and thinking up ways to torment Robert Walpole’s corrupt Whig administration without going to jail.

An unlikely threesome in many ways – Swift was 20 years older, and Gay was as large and indolent as Pope was tiny and restless – “the three Yahoos of Twittenham” were unmarried and took great emotional and intellectual succour from their friendship.

The three of them added up to more than the sum of their considerable parts and, as well as being a brilliant evocation of the radical rage, the joy and stench of early eighteenth century life, The Twitnam Summer is also a very moving portrait of male friendship.