Showing titles in 21st Century

From trouncing Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral race in 2008 to becoming Prime Minister, he takes listeners through all the big decisions during his time in power and the reasons he took them. The challenges and crises, how they were resolved – or not – and how he nearly died from Covid. Riots, knife crime, bikes, buses, the London Olympics and so much more. He writes about his role in Brexit and the constitutional sea-change that took place in British politics in 2019 – with his landslide election victory and the massive expansion in the groups that think of themselves as Conservative.

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, has been covering the region since 1989 and is uniquely placed to explain its complex past and its troubled present. In this new book, in part based on his acclaimed podcast, Bowen takes us on a journey across the Middle East and through its history. He meets ordinary men and women on the front line, their leaders, whether brutal or benign, and he explores the power games that have so often wreaked devastation on civilian populations as those leaders, whatever their motives, jostle for political, religious and economic control.

In this gripping account of Britain’s brutal entanglement with Brexit, Tim Shipman follows the key players as they navigate negotiations and the unfolding democratic drama that ensues. With unique access to politicians on both sides of the Brexit divide, Shipman unravels an extraordinary period of British political history. Multiple Brexit secretaries and repeated coups, the ambition, gossip and heated exchanges between Brussels and the British Brexit team are all revealed in Shipman’s unflinching and unfiltered account.

Keir Starmer: The Biography is an authoritative study of a man who now stands on the brink of becoming Britain's next Prime Minister. If he succeeds, Starmer will be the first Labour leader in a generation to win power, even though most voters still say they don’t know much about him. It not only tells Starmer’s story but also examines the paradox of a politician often uncomfortable with politics, someone who is both remarkably ordinary and capable of defying all efforts to define him.

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, envisions a not-too-distant world in which we face a new set of challenges. Now, in Homo Deus, he examines our future with his trademark blend of science, history, philosophy and every discipline in between. Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century - from overcoming death to creating artificial life.

Sapiens showed us where we came from. Homo Deus looked to the future. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century explores the present. How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children? Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues.

All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like, with a bad man at the top. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another.

Hence this is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up the Nobel Prize, the Beatles become, if anything, bigger than the Beatles and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks to the march of technology, be playing Las Vegas forever.

Europe is an astonishingly successful place. In this dazzling new history, best-selling author Simon Jenkins grippingly tells the story of its evolution from warring peoples to peace, wealth and freedom - a story that twists and turns from Greece and Rome, through the Dark Ages, the Reformation and the French Revolution, to the Second World War and up to the present day. Jenkins takes in leaders from Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc to Wellington and Angela Merkel as well as cultural figures from Aristotle to Shakespeare and Picasso.

When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly coming to light: that untested automations would undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation.

In 2020, the world faced its biggest crisis in a generation: a global pandemic. In the UK, it exposed deep divisions within society and laid bare a toxic culture war that had been raging beneath the surface. From the outset, Piers Morgan urged the nation to come to its senses, once and for all, and held the government to often ferocious account over its handling of the crisis. COVID-19 shed shocking light on the problems that plague our country. Stockpilers and lockdown-cheats revealed our grotesque levels of self-interest.

From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. The Pentagon has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyles kills (the previous American record was 109), but it has declined to verify the astonishing total number for this book. Iraqi insurgents feared Kyle so much they named him al-Shaitan (“the devil”) and placed a bounty on his head. Kyle earned legendary status among his fellow SEALs, Marines, and U.S. Army soldiers, whom he protected with deadly accuracy from rooftops and stealth positions.

A riveting political thriller from the journalist who covered the controversy for more than two years, Burned is the inside story of the shocking scandal that brought down a government. One of the most shocking scandals in Northern Irish political history: originally a green-energy initiative, the Renewal Heat Incentive (RHI) or 'cash-for-ash' scheme saw Northern Ireland's government pay £1.60 for every £1 of fuel the public burned in their wood-pellet boilers, leading to widespread abuse and ultimately the collapse of the power-sharing administration at Stormont.

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from 20 countries, ranging as far back as the 18th century, to uncover key economic and social patterns.

During the peak of the Somali piracy crisis, three ships - from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan - were hijacked and then abandoned to their fate by their employers, who lacked the money to pay ransoms. All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attaché, who launched his own private mission to free them. Author Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes listeners on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man’s heroic rescue mission.

In the past five years, Israel has mounted three major assaults on the 1.8 million Palestinians trapped behind its blockade of the Gaza Strip. Taken together, Operation Cast Lead (2008-9), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), and Operation Protective Edge (2014) have resulted in the deaths of some 3,700 Palestinians. Meanwhile a total of 90 Israelis were killed in the invasions. On the face of it, this succession of vastly disproportionate attacks has often seemed frenzied and pathological.

Sir Trevor McDonald is an extraordinary man - and he has led an improbable life. Now in his 80th year, he is known and loved by people the world over for his humility, charm and natural ease. As a natural storyteller and communicator, he has few equals. In An Improbable Life, Sir Trevor recounts his personal experience of world events and interviews with globally famous - or notorious - figures. He has witnessed war and death and risked his own life to meet and talk with despots and liberators.

Five years in the making, Cameron at 10 is the gripping inside story of the Cameron premiership, based on over 300 in-depth interviews with senior figures in 10 Downing Street, including the Prime Minister himself. As dusk descended on 11 May 2010, David Cameron entered 10 Downing Street as the youngest prime minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. He stood at the head of the first Coalition government in 65 years, with the country in dire economic straits following a deep financial crisis.

1978 - a chance meeting on a remote military airbase between two Green Berets involved in the same operation leads to a partnership that will last over 40 years. Four years after that meeting, Nick Brokhausen and Jeff Miller leave the service within a few weeks of each other and begin an odyssey that takes them to dozens of countries on five continents.

You might have forgotten (or wanted to forget) the storming of the Capitol, the Meghan and Harry interview with Oprah, Dominic Cummings turning on his former master and that bum squeeze by Matt Hancock - but James Felton is here to remind listeners of all of that and more using his usual razor-sharp wit and gleeful disdain.