In 2011, a 43-foot-high tsunami crashed into a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. In the following days, explosions would rip buildings apart, three reactors would go into nuclear meltdown, a...
'A memoir and a master class in musing on modern design . . . It's a collection of thoughtful, absorbing essays about many aspects of modern design, a subject nobody writes better about than Sudjic...
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United StatesIn a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most ...
Ludwig van Beethoven: to some, simply the greatest ever composer of Western classical music. Yet his life remains shrouded in myths, and the image persists of him as an eccentric genius shaking his...
Behind the Throne is a history of family life.The families concerned were royal families. But they still had to get up in the morning. They ate and entertained their friends and worried...
Despite years of stagnation, Japan remains one of the world's largest economies and a country which exerts a remarkable cultural fascination. David Pilling's new book is an entertaining, deeply kno...
Internationally renowned writer Javier Marias is a tireless examiner of the world around us, an enthusiastic debunker of pretensions of every kind, a polymath and a rogue. This selection of his ini...
Many of us think we know his story well. His ruthless ambition was evident from his insistence, as a three-year-old, that he would one day be 'world king'. Eton and Oxford prepared him well for a f...
The way we work is broken. It takes forever to get anything done. Meetings and emails are incessant. Bureaucracy stifles talent and creativity. After decades of management theory and multiple waves...
Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes prophesied that by the century's end, technology would see us all working fifteen-hour weeks. But instead, something curious happened. Today, average...
"Inazo Nitobe's book, the most influential ever written on Bushido, or the samurai Way of the Warrior, argues that the philosophy of Bushido is the true key to understanding 'the soul of Japan...
The biography of the brutal, crazed and incestuous Roman Emperor Caligula, who tried to appoint his own horse consul.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birth...
Sam Selvon is now widely considered to be one of the greatest chroniclers of the West Indian emigrant experience. His evocation of voice, of place, of longing, defined for many the experience of a ...
Why are all my clothes made in Asia?How do I get a pay-rise?And what even is money?Join Britain's most venerable financial institution for a rip-roaring crash-course on econ...
On 26 April 1986 at 1.23am a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. While the authorities scrambled to understand what was occurring, workers, engineers, firefight...
In November 1838 Frédéric Chopin, George Sand and her two children sailed to Majorca to escape the Parisian winter. They settled in an abandoned monastery at Valldemossa in the mounta...
A magnificently fresh and unexpected biography of Churchill, by one of Britain's most acclaimed historiansWinston Churchill towers over every other figure in twentieth-century British h...
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened...
Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened...
How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted ...