The book combines scholarship and observations to illuminate the life and career of one of Britain's most controversial post-war statesmen. Wilson is one of the most enigmatic personalities of recent British history. He held office as Prime Minister for longer than any other Labour leader, and longer than any other premier in peacetime apart from Mrs Thatcher. His success at winning General Elections - four in all - has so far not been matched. His grasp of economic policy was better than that of any other Prime Minister, and he enjoyed a high reputation among foreign leaders. Yet, in retrospect, he seems a master tactician rather than a strategiest - and he is regarded today with more curiosity than respect, when he is not treated with contempt.

    Includes a number of stories taken from Very Good, Jeeves

    In six years in office he has committed forces to action in Kosovo, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. This work shows how Blair's government has sought to be at the forefront of a new and turbulent world order.

    Graced with one of the most acute gifts for political prescience since Orwell, Conquest assigns responsibility for our century’s cataclysms not to impersonal economic or social forces but to the distorted ideologies of revolutionary Marxism and National Socialism. The final, sobering chapters of Reflections on a Ravaged Century concern themselves with some coming storms, notably that of the European Union, which Conquest believes is an economic, cultural, and geographical misconception divisive of the West and doomed to failure. Winner of the Ingersoll Prize; winner of the Richard M. Weaver Prize; a New York Times Notable Book. "Provides many glowing embers of reasoned and wise argument."—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times  "A book that ought to be required reading for everyone about to enter college, and by every member of Congress."—Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

    Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie.He sets up camp in a tent city built in downtown Beirut by anti-Syrian dissidents, is bullied and menaced by Hezbollah's supposedly friendly "media relations" department, crouches under fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border during the six-week war in 2006, witnesses an Israeli ground invasion from behind a line of Merkava tanks, sneaks into Hezbollah's post-war rubblescape without authorization, and is attacked in Beirut by militiamen who enforce obedience to the "resistance" at the point of a gun.From the "Cedar Revolution" that ousted the occupying Syrian military regime in 2005, to the devastating war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006, and to Hezbollah's slow-motion but violent assault on Lebanon's elected government and capital, Totten's account is both personal and comprehensive. He simplifies the bewildering complexity of the Middle East, has access to major regional players as well as to the man on the street, and personally witnesses most of the events he describes. The Road to Fatima Gate should be indispensable reading for anyone interested in the Middle East, Iran's expansionist foreign policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, asymmetric warfare, and terrorism in the aftermath of September 11.

    It feeds a whole industry of commentators, pundits and politicians who take great delight in whipping us all into a frenzy, speaking for the ‘ordinary people’. But, when ugly prejudices are being fed by professionals grown fat on the fear and fury of their consumers, it is time to stop and ask whether the faceless group of immigrants really exists – or whether it just appeals to our basest fears.In this lively polemic, James O’Brien brings some common sense back into the discussion. Some people want to be frightened. They thrive on anger and division and upset. But many people don’t, and it is they who are most let down – most insulted – by the immigration debate. We don’t need to buy into this myth. There is no such thing as ‘immigrants’. There is no ‘they’. There is only ‘we’.

    Haldeman died, he left behind a chronicle of the four years he was Chief of Staff for President Nixon. His diaries offer a fascinating portrait of the major events of this era, including the Cambodia bombings, the Kent State killings, the fall of Spiro Agnew, the Watergate scandal and new insights on Richard Nixon. 8-page photo insert.

    And while the election of Jeremy Corbyn may have thrown a harsher spotlight on the crisis, it is by no means a recent phenomenon.The widening gulf between British Jews and the anti-Israel left - born out of antiapartheid campaigns and now allying itself with Islamist extremists who demand Israel’s destruction - did not happen overnight or by chance: political activists made it happen. This book reveals who they were, why they chose Palestine and how they sold their cause to the left.Based on new academic research into the origins of this phenomenon, combined with the author's daily work observing political extremism, contemporary hostility to Israel, and anti-Semitism, this book brings new insight to the left's increasingly controversial 'Jewish problem'.

    With poll leads of more than 20 points over Jeremy Corbyn’s divided Labour Party, the first Tory landslide since Margaret Thatcher’s day seemed certain.Seven weeks later, Tory dreams had turned to dust. Instead of the 100-seat victory she’d been hoping for, May had lost her majority, leaving Parliament hung and her premiership hanging by a thread. Labour MPs, meanwhile, could scarcely believe their luck. Far from delivering the wipe-out that most predicted, Corbyn’s popular, anti-austerity agenda won the party 30 seats, cementing his position as leader and denying May the right to govern alone.This timely and indispensable book gets to the bottom of why the Tories failed, and how Corbyn’s Labour overcame impossible odds to emerge closer to power than at any election since the era of Tony Blair. Who was to blame for the Tories’ mistakes? How could so many politicians and pollsters fail to see what was coming? And what was the secret of Corbyn’s apparently unstoppable rise?

    The prize-winning biographer of Edward Heath re-examines the mythology surrounding Margaret Thatcher and suggests a more complex reality behind the idealized portrait accepted by her earlier biographers.

    And the aftershocks are being felt far beyond the corridors of power in Whitehall... This book, written by the man who orchestrated that extraordinary rise, is not an autobiography, but rather the untold story of the journey UKIP has travelled under Farage's leadership, from the icy fringes of British politics all the way to Westminster, where it is poised to claim the popular vote. In it, he reveals for the first time exactly how, over the last few years, Farage and his supporters have ushered in a very English revolution: secretly courting MPs right under the nose of the political establishment, in the tearooms and wine bars of the House of Lords. With characteristic wit and candour, Farage takes us beyond the caricature of the beerdrinking, chain-smoking adventurer in Jermyn Street double-cuffs as he describes the values that underpin his own journey: from successful City trader to (very) outspoken critic of the European Union and champion of Britain's right to govern itself.

    Patenaude tells the dramatic story of Leon Trotsky's final years in exile in Mexico. Shedding new light on Trotsky’s tumultuous friendship with painter Diego Rivera, his affair with Rivera’s wife Frida Kahlo, and his torment as his family and comrades become victims of the Great Terror, Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary brilliantly illuminates the fateful and dramatic life of one of history’s most famous yet elusive figures.

    The attention attracted by the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto included laudatory references to Marx in venues as unexpected as The New York Times and The New Yorker. More predictably, the tributes in such publications focused on the strength of Marx as a critic of capital or a powerful wordsmith, rather than as an advocate of communism. But, if Marxism is to enjoy a rebirth in the coming century, appreciation needs to move beyond its value as a critical tool or a literary pleasure. The emancipatory potential of Marxism, its capacity to configure a world beyond the daily grind of selling one’s labor to stay alive, will have to be established anew. No one has made a better start to this task than the esteemed critic and writer Marshall Berman. Berman first read The Communist Manifesto in the same week as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman while at high school. A few years later, now a student at Columbia University, he was handing out copies of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, purchased for 50 cents each at the (Soviet) Four Continents Bookstore in New York, as holiday presents for friends and relatives. Here was the beginning of a lifelong engagement with Marxism that, as this volume demonstrates, has been both consistent and refreshing. In these pages are discussions of work on Marx and Marxism by Edmund Wilson, Jerrold Siegel, James Billington, Georg Lukcs, Irving Howe and Isaac Babel. They are brought together in a single embrace by Berman’s spirited appreciation of Marxism as expressive, playful, sometimes even a little vulgar, but always an adventure.

    While it is watched and admired around the world, it is often hated at home for bringing out the worst in our politicians. However, despite the best attempts of successive party leaders to try and move away from ‘Punch and Judy politics’, PMQs are here to stay. It sets the agenda, indicates who’s up and who's down and, most importantly, defines Prime Ministers and Leaders of the Opposition. Ayesha Hazarika and Tom Hamilton spent every Wednesday morning for five years preparing Ed Miliband for combat ahead of PMQs, with varying degrees of success. They know what it’s like to prepare a leader for the most stressful, unforgiving moment of the political week and they have lived through the drama, tension and black humour that goes with being in the room. They have seen the highs when a leader wins at the Dispatch Box as well as – perhaps more often – the lows when they take a beating. This book lifts the lid on PMQs, reveals the tricks of the trade from leading politicians and the people who prepared them, and takes you behind the scenes of some of the biggest PMQs moments. Part history, part inside account, this book is an entertaining and honest guide to one of the most loved, feared and loathed features of British politics by two people who know just how tough it can be.

    It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.Ali captures the mood and energy of those years as he tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement.This edition includes a new introduction, as well as the famous interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.