A detailed, surprising and moving account of the long history of Africans in Europe. Olivette Otele carefully charts the multiple interlinkages between two worlds often seen as separate, and in the process casts a light on contemporary debates about race and identity.”
A remarkable, deeply personal story of friendships gone sour in the shadow of changing politics. Applebaum brilliantly captures the pain and confusion of seeing those close to us turn towards ugly forms of nationalism, and of having to confront the uncomfortable possibility that allies are now enemies.”
Cumbrian shepherd James Rebanks’s memoir recalls his family’s farming days, from his grandfather and father, to his own young children, who are already learning his trade. Vividly and movingly written, with sometimes painful honesty, this is part tribute to his forebears and a declaration of love for the English countryside. Equally, it is an impassioned plea for a return to more sustainable and environmentally friendly ways of farming, that allow livestock, the land and all its wildlife to thrive even as they support us.”
The Interest is exactly the kind of history book Britain needs now, putting into sober context the back-slapping idea Britain did everything it could to wipe out slavery in the nineteenth century. Exhaustive and unflinching, Taylor’s book shows that, in reality, many British institutions and individuals desperately tried to keep it alive, motivated by greed.”
“A magnificent and moving account of everyday life in Putin’s Russia, this book explores the moral psychology of compromise and the difficulties of pursuing one’s ambitions, while living with integrity, or not, in the face of demands from an overmighty state. Beautiful and haunting, the book illuminates the challenges of moral life and the ways in which authoritarian rule is maintained.”
Tim Bouverie read history at Christ Church, Oxford. From 2013-2017 he was a political journalist at Channel 4 News, where he worked alongside Michael Crick, as his producer, and covered all major political events, including both the 2015 and 2017 General Elections and the EU Referendum. He regularly reviews history and politics books, and has written for the Spectator, Observer and Daily Telegraph. He has also for the last five years worked at the Chalke Valley History Festival as an interviewer.
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Hussein Kesvani is a journalist, editor and producer based in London. He is the Europe editor of MEL Magazine, and has written for BuzzFeed, Vice, The Guardian, the New Statesman and The Spectator, among others
Azadeh Moaveni is a journalist, writer and academic, who has been covering the the Middle East for nearly two decades. She started reporting in Cairo in 1999 while on a Fulbright fellowship, and worked across the region for the next several years, covering Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq. A Pulitzer finalist, she is the author of Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and co-author, with Iranian Nobel Peace Laurate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening, which has been translated into over forty languages.. She is Director of the Project for Gender and Conflict at the International Crisis Group and Lecturer in Journalism at New York University, London.
Julia Lovell is Professor of Modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her two most recent books are The Great Wall and The Opium War (which won the 2012 Jan Michalski Prize). Her many translations of modern Chinese fiction into English include Lu Xun’s The Real Story of Ah Q, and other Tales of China (2009). She is currently completing a new translation of Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’en. She writes about China for several newspapers, including the Guardian, Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
Robert Service is a Fellow of the British Academy and of St Antony’s College, Oxford. He has written several books, including the highly acclaimed Lenin: A Biography, Russia: Experiment with a People , Stalin: A Biography and Comrades: A History of World Communism, as well as many other books on Russia’s past and present. Trotsky: A Biography was awarded the 2009 Duff Cooper Prize. Married with four children, he lives in London.
Robert Macfarlane is the author of Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways, Landmarks, and The Lost Words, co-created with Jackie Morris. Mountains of the Mind won the Guardian First Book Award and the Somerset Maugham Award and The Wild Places won the Boardman-Tasker Award. Both books have been adapted for television by the BBC. The Lost Words won the Books Are My Bag Beautiful Book Award and the Hay Festival Book of the Year. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and writes on environmentalism, literature and travel for publications including the Guardian, the Sunday Times and The New York Times.
Amelia Gentleman is a reporter and author of The Windrush Betrayal, Exposing the Hostile Environment. She won the Paul Foot award, Cudlipp award, an Amnesty award, journalist of the year British journalism awards and London press club print journalist of the year for Windrush investigations. She has also won the Orwell prize, feature and specialist writer of the year.
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Dorian Lynskey writes about music, film, books and politics for publications including the Guardian, the Observer, the New Statesman, GQ, Billboard, Empire, and Mojo. His first book, 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, was published in 2011. A study of 33 pivotal songs with a political message, it was NME’s Book of the Year and a ‘Music Book of the Year’ in the Daily Telegraph. He hosts the Remainiacs podcast.
Shoshana Zuboff has been called ‘the true prophet of the information age’ by the Financial Times for her ground-breaking book, In the Age of the Smart Machine. She is now the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School as well as Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. In 2006, strategy+business magazine named her one of the eleven most original business thinkers in the world.
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Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her BBC 3 radio programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was awarded an MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019 she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experience of teaching in state schools for several decades.
The judges said:
In this book, a brilliantly honest writer tackles a subject that ties so many people up in knots – education and how it is inexorably dominated by class. Yet this is the very opposite of a worthy lecture: Clanchy’s reflections on teaching and the stories of her students are moving, funny, full of love and offer sparkling insights into modern British society.”
Charles Moore joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph in 1979, and as a political columnist in the 1980s covered several years of Mrs Thatcher’s first and second governments. He was Editor of the Spectator 1984-1990; Editor of the Sunday Telegraph 1992-1995; and Editor of the Daily Telegraph 1995-2003, for which he is still a regular columnist. The first volume of his biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in 2013, won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, the H.W. Fisher Best First Biography Prize and Political Book of the Year at the Paddy Power Political Book Awards.
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Caroline Criado Perez is a writer, broadcaster and award-winning feminist campaigner. Her most notable campaigns have included co-founding The Women’s Room, getting a woman on Bank of England banknotes, forcing Twitter to revise its procedures for dealing with abuse and successfully campaigning for a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett to be erected in Parliament Square. She was the 2013 recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year Award, and was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2015. Her first book, Do it Like a Woman, was published in 2015. She lives in London.
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‘In Nightmarch Alpa Shah explains the logic behind the Naxalite movement in India through her own encounters with them. She does so beautifully and thoughtfully, in sympathy yet critically, academically yet in the most simple and absorbing of ways’ – Helen Pankhurst