What makes a great leader? In a fresh take on the interplay of power, character and success, world-renowned historian and bestselling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond argues that they're so much more than heroic exceptions or product of circumstance.

Drawing on examples on iconic leaders, and looking at natural experiments in four different spheres - history, business, sport and religion - Diamond presents how effectiveness is determined by a myriad of interrelated factors, from resources to geography, culture to technology.  

Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings is a thought-provoking assessment of when leaders can bring about effective change, when they don't, and perhaps whether we need them at all.

Standing among the mourners gathered to honour Hélène Carrère d'Encausse - renowned historian of Russia - her son, Emmanuel Carrère, wonders who this formidable woman was: to the country, to history and to himself.

Carrère - author of The Adversary - turns his unflinching gaze on his own lineage, crafting his most ambitious book yet. Spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, he traces the destinies of a family scattered by revolution, ideology and pride - at its centre, a mother whose brilliance shaped both French intellectual life and her son's inner world.

Sifting through letters, archives and memories, he confronts the stories families tell to survive and the lies they tell to protect one another, and asks: can a son write about his mother honestly without betraying her?

The story of the novel in Britain begins in the eighteenth century, when people began to read in ever greater numbers, seeking words that helped explain their hopes and desires. A new kind of literature was needed for this growing market: something novel.

In this illuminating new history of both an art and an industry, Philip Hensher describes how the evolutionary scramble by writers and publishers to get attention drove constant innovation and produced new ways of printing, distributing, and selling books, and how this has shaped the form of the novels we read today.  

Reading widely, from the famous to the forgotten, this is a work that argues to widen the canon of literature, and also delivers a treasure of lost gems waiting to be discovered, wondered at and delighted in.

When King William I sent his agents to survey every shire in England, he asked them to list his holdings and calculate what was owed to him. The manuscript record of the 'Great Survey' remains a window onto the structure of English administration and economy before the Norman Conquest.  

In this book, Max Adams travels the agents' path taken in 1085, taking us on foot through the sites covered in one of the most iconic documents in English history, bringing forth a unique portrait of a land and its people.

Bringing together archaeology, contemporary chronicles and historical geography, Adams brings us face to face with this legacy, fleshing out the landscapes of a thousand years ago, and casting a reflective light on Englishness and the English landscape of today; our ongoing relations with tax, law and authority, and with the past.

The story of trade is the story of humanity. From the copper in Mesopotamian ploughs to the silicon atoms in smartphone chips, intricate global trading networks have evolved over millennia to fulfil the distinctly human desire to buy and sell.

Today, the volume of trade bestriding the planet is unprecedented. Yet, as fractures in the global order emerge, understanding this fundamental shift to the dominant economic consensus is more important than ever.

From the author of Material World, Ed Conway tells the story of trade through three commonplace products - bread, cloth and cars. Blending economic history and first-hand access to key figures and institutions, he shows us the people who make, ship and sometimes smuggle the products we buy on a daily basis.

As Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, Lucy Worsley has worked in some of Britain's most famous royal sites, and even lived in one of them herself. Now she takes us behind closed doors to reveal some of the monarchy's best-kept secrets.

Bringing to life the rules who shaped Britain over the last thousand years, Worsley reveals a royal world far stranger, funnier and more surprising than we might think - of intimate love letters, phantom pregnancies and fatal betrayals - finding the details that make history feel gloriously human.  

With her trademark warmth and incisive scholarship, this book explores the full splendour, scandal and sorrow of royal life. The result is a wildly engaging history of the monarchy from one of our most beloved historians.

Six hundred years after the invention of the printed book, it has never been more threatened or more irreplaceable.

Reading built the modern world, helped to create democracy, science and reason. Now, people everywhere are losing the ability to read deeply or think rationally, and the golden chain of knowledge linking reader to reader through history is breaking.

In The New Dark Ages, James Marriot warns of the decline of reading and the dire consequences for a post-literary world. As screens replace the page, free time is colonised by addictive, infantilising 'slop, and Marriot examines how the culture of distraction is replacing a culture of reasoned debate. 

Freddie Mercury was one of the greatest showmen of the twentieth century, with an unparalleled voice and searing on-stage energy. But behind the glamour lived a musician and lyricist talented beyond measure.  

When Freddie passed away, he left to his former fiancée and dearest friend Mary Austin a creative archive spanning almost two decades - notebooks containing previously unpublished material, including alternative lyrics, abandoned verses and entire, never-recorded songs.  

Accompanied by memories and anecdotes from his lifelong companion, this is the definitive creative record of one of the most celebrated songwriters of all time.

"Enshittification" is Doctorow's word to describe the decay of online platforms and captures the feeling of a world that is ever worsening.

Not a technical glitch, it is a technique that every platform has adopted, luring in users to their platforms before attracting businesses who might profit from this newly formed public, squeezing both for their own profit. Services for users degrade over time, and in the meantime, our public spaces have become unfit to deal with the problems of our times.  

But what is to be done? This highly awarded work from the author behind The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI sets out the symptoms, diagnosis and the cure to these metastasising platforms, and how might start to treat them.

Welcome to Margaret Atwood's world: books, feminism, school bullies, Hollywood stars, bears, vengeance, love, creativity, and death.

With her trademark wit, infamous wisdom and frankly astonishing recall, the creative icon takes us on a tour of her life so far.   

From her unfettered childhood in the wild forests of northern Quebec, to 1980s Berlin where the seeds of The Handmaid's Tale were sown and on to her life today on the global cultural stage, settle into your ringside seat and witness the remarkable life of one of our greatest living writers.

The most influential inventor of the modern world, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a different kind of visionary. Sharing his invention, the World Wide Web, for no commercial reward, its widespread adoption changed everything, transforming humanity into the first digital species.  

In this intimate memoir, Berners-Lee tells the story of his iconic invention, exploring how it launches a new era of creativity and collaboration while unleashing a race that today imperils democracies. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, he provides the perfect guide to crucial decisions ahead.  

Ultimately, this is a book about the power of technology, both to fuel our worst instincts and to profoundly shape out lives for the better.

When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told her grandmother's youth was destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But here she was, glamorous and newlywed while WWII raged.

What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, as we're transported to the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Albania, and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. Investigating her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? And why is she smiling in the winter of 1941?

By turns epic and intimate, Indignity examines what it means to survive in an age of extremes, revealing the cost of decisions made against the tide of history, and explores what moral authority we have to judge the acts of previous generations.

In this deeply researches book, two leading experts provide the definitive guide to British folklore, exploring its remarkable variations, from village rituals and fairy tales to UFO legends and internet fanfiction.  

Travelling through a landscape of witches, wizards and wicker men, they reveal how folklore has been researched and written about in the past and show how it continues to be lived in the present, and show how to interpret the diverse examples given.  

Davies and Houlbrook present folklore as much more than the fossilised remains of a distant, rural past - it's something that is and has always been ubiquitous, dynamic and political, a living tradition that is forever being renewed and updated. 

This beautiful classic hardback edition marks the fortieth anniversary of the ultimate horror classic, with a new introduction by the Duffer Brothers.

Derry, Maine is just an ordinary town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part, a good place to live.

It's a group of children who know what makes Derry so horribly different. In the sewers, IT lurks, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one's deepest dread.  
Time passes and the children grow up, move away and forget. Until they are called back,  as IT stirs and coils in the sullen depths of their memories, emerging again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.