New Releases

In this comprehensive guide to the most widespread conflict in contemporary history, Vladislav Zubok traces the origins of the Cold War in post-war Europe, through the tumultuous decades of confrontation, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. Drawing on years of research and informed by Zubok’s three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, The Cold War paints a striking portrait of a world on the brink.

The period between 2005 and 2025 has been a rapid transformation, marked by significant social, political, technological, and economic shifts. The rise of social media revolutionized communication, shaping global politics, activism, and personal interactions. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube enabled the spread of information and misinformation, influencing elections, protests, and cultural movements.

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men, women and children, it was the beginning of a terrifying new episode in human history. Written only a year after the disaster, John Hersey brought the event vividly alive with this heart-rending account of six men and women who survived despite all the odds. He added a further chapter when, forty years later, he returned to Hiroshima to discover how the same six people had struggled to cope with catastrophe and with often crippling disease.

The Shortest History of Music takes us on a lively tour through several thousands of years of music history, tracing our relationship with this essential art and allowing us to freshly appreciate and understand music today.

The Shortest History of Music takes us on a lively tour through several thousands of years of music history, tracing our relationship with this essential art and allowing us to freshly appreciate and understand music today.

The history of humanity is one of devastating, once-in-a-thousand-year events: rising seas that make land uninhabitable, decades-long droughts, civilisational collapse, epidemics like the Black Death and the Spanish Flu that reduce a city’s population by fifty percent. And yet, despite enormous destruction and very real tragedy, these catastrophes all share one common denominator: we survived. In APOCALYPSE, Lizzie Wade reframes the story of human history to show how we can learn from these apocalyptic moments, seeing them not just as violent, world-ending events but as moments of progress.