Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal:
"The authoritarian right is taking control. From Viktor Orban in Hungary, to Brexit in Britain, to Donald Trump in America, nationalists are launching an all-out assault on liberal values. In this groundbreaking new book, political journalist Ian Dunt tells the story of liberalism, from its birth in the fight against absolute monarchy to the modern-day resistance against the new populism. In a soaring narrative that stretches from the battlefields of the English Civil War to the 2008 financial crash and beyond, this vivid, page-turning book explains the political ideas which underpin the modern world. But it is also something much more than that – it is a rallying cry for those who still believe in freedom and reason."
Ian Dunt - How Westminster Works... and Why it Doesn't:
"Why do some prime ministers manage to get things done, while others miserably fail? What is a 'special adviser' and how did they take over British political life? And why is the House of Lords more functional than most people think?
Most of us have a sense that our political system doesn't seem to work, but struggle to articulate exactly why. And for good reason: our political and financial institutions are cloaked in secrecy, archaic terminology, ancient custom and impenetrable jargon. Now, expert political journalist Ian Dunt is lifting the lid on British politics to expose every aspect of the setup in a way that can be understood and challenged. From Downing Street to Whitehall, the Commons to the Lords, this book is an indispensable guide to our political system - and how we might begin to fix it."
Dorian Lynskey - Everything Must Go:
"We have always told ourselves stories about the end of the world. Long before we watched superintelligent AI wage war on humanity in The Terminator, or read about a catastrophic deluge in J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, art, literature and politics were all haunted by recurring visions of apocalypse.
In Everything Must Go – a colourful, witty and stirring cultural history of the modern world that weaves in politics, history and science – Dorian Lynskey explores the endings that we have read, listened to, or watched with morbid fascination, from the sci-fi terrors of H. G. Wells and John Wyndham to the apocalyptic ballads of Bob Dylan and planet-shattering movie blockbusters.
Whether we’re fantasizing about nuclear holocaust or a collision with an asteroid, a devastating pandemic or a robot revolution, why do we like to scare ourselves, and why do we keep coming back for more? And how do fictional premonitions of the end play into real-life responses to existential threats?
Deeply illuminating about our past and our present, and surprisingly hopeful about our future, Everything Must Gowill grip you from beginning to, well, end."
John Sweeney - Killer in the Kremlin
John Sweeney - The Church of Fear: Inside the Weird World of Scientology
Eliot Higgins - We are Bellingcat:
"How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time?
Bellingcat, the home-grown investigative unit, is redefining the way we think about news, politics and the digital future. Here, their founder - a high-school dropout on a kitchen laptop - tells the story of how they created a whole new category of information-gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation, using just their computers.
From the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over the Ukraine to the sourcing of weapons in the Syrian Civil War and the identification of the Salisbury poisoners, We Are Bellingcat digs deep into some of Bellingcat's most successful investigations. It explores the most cutting-edge tools for analysing data, from virtual-reality software that can build photorealistic 3D models of a crime scene, to apps that can identify exactly what time of day a photograph was taken.
In our age of uncertain truths, Bellingcat is what the world needs right now - an intelligence agency by the people, for the people."
Bill Browder - Red Notice:
"This is a story about an accidental activist. Bill Browder started out his adult life as the Wall Street maverick whose instincts led him to Russia just after the breakup of the Soviet Union, where he made his fortune.
Along the way he exposed corruption, and when he did, he barely escaped with his life. His Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky wasn’t so lucky: he ended up in jail, where he was tortured to death. That changed Browder forever. He saw the murderous heart of the Putin regime and has spent the last half decade on a campaign to expose it. Because of that, he became Putin’s number one enemy, especially after Browder succeeded in having a law passed in the United States—The Magnitsky Act—that punishes a list of Russians implicated in the lawyer’s murder. Putin famously retaliated with a law that bans Americans from adopting Russian orphans.
A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world, and also the story of how, without intending to, he found meaning in his life."