It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship-far subtler than twentieth-century strains-that is rapidly rising to challenge the West.When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system.Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.

    Peary in 1909. Previously a National Geographic cover story and TV film. Two 8-page photo inserts.

    Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building. When the police were finally called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the 'penny dreadful' novels that Robert loved to read. In The Wicked Boy, Kate Summerscale has uncovered a fascinating true story of murder and morality - it is not just a meticulous examination of a shocking Victorian case, but also a compelling account of its aftermath, and of man's capacity to overcome the past.

    Churchill, 1948: World War II was the defining event of our age—the climactic clash between liberty and tyranny. It led to revolutions, the demise of empires, a protracted Cold War, and religious strife still not ended. Yet Churchill maintained that it was all avoidable. Here is a transformative view of Churchill’s theories, prescriptions, actions, and the degree to which he pursued them in the decade before the war. It shows that he was both right and wrong: right that Hitler could have been stopped; wrong that he did all he could to stop him. It is based on what really happened—evidence that has been “hiding in public” for many years, thoroughly referenced in Churchill’s words and those of his contemporaries. Richard M. Langworth began his Churchill work in 1968 when he organized the Churchill Study Unit, which later became the Churchill Centre. He served as its president and board chairman and was editor of its journal Finest Hour from 1982 to 2014. In November 2014, he was appointed senior fellow for Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project. Mr. Langworth published the first American edition of Churchill’s India, is the author of A Connoisseur’s Guide to the Books of Sir Winston Churchill, and is the editor of Churchill by Himself, The Definitive Wit of Winston Churchill, The Patriot’s Churchill, All Will Be Well: Good Advice from Winston Churchill, and Churchill in His Own Words. His next book is Winston Churchill, Urban Myths and Reality. In 1998, Richard Langworth was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by HM The Queen “for services to Anglo-American understanding and the memory of Sir Winston Churchill.”

    Christopher Hibbert is a master storyteller. With vivid character sketches, telling details and well-chosen anecdotes he brings people and places to life, while the outline of great events remains clear. His remarkable narrative gift keeps the reader enthralled, from the first encounter with England's Neolithic inhabitants, through the entire course of the country's political, economic and cultural history, to an expression of faith in the qualities of the English today. The text is illuminated throughout by many colour illustrations, and the need for quick reference is met by maps, genealogies, fold-out chronological charts and a comprehensive index. Concise yet richly informative, this book presents a new style of history that will delight and educate all who read it.

    But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realise. Whether it was the scandalous Lord Byron, whose poetry sent female fans into an erotic frenzy; or the cheetah-owning, coffin-sleeping, one-legged French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who launched a violent feud with her former best friend; or Edmund Kean, the dazzling Shakespearean actor whose monstrous ego and terrible alcoholism saw him nearly murdered by his own audience - the list of stars whose careers burned bright before the Age of Television is extensive and thrillingly varied.Celebrities could be heroes or villains; warriors or murderers; brilliant talents, or fraudsters with a flair for fibbing; trendsetters, wilful provocateurs, or tragic victims marketed as freaks of nature. Some craved fame while others had it forced upon them. A few found fame as small children, some had to wait decades to get their break. But uniting them all is the shared origin point: since the early 1700s, celebrity has been one of the most emphatic driving forces in popular culture; it is a lurid cousin to Ancient Greek ideas of glorious and notorious reputation, and its emergence helped to shape public attitudes to ethics, national identity, religious faith, wealth, sexuality, and gender roles.In this ambitious history, that spans the Bronze Age to the coming of Hollywood's Golden Age, Greg Jenner assembles a vibrant cast of over 125 actors, singers, dancers, sportspeople, freaks, demigods, ruffians, and more, in search of celebrity's historical roots. He reveals why celebrity burst into life in the early eighteenth century, how it differs to ancient ideas of fame, the techniques through which it was acquired, how it was maintained, the effect it had on public tastes, and the psychological burden stardom could place on those in the glaring limelight. DEAD FAMOUS is a surprising, funny, and fascinating exploration of both a bygone age and how we came to inhabit our modern, fame obsessed society.

    The Regency (1811–1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales—the future king George IV—replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain’s ruler.Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer.Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.

    As acknowledged, he's drawn heavily on the historian J.C. Beaglehole's definitive volumes, as well as from other weighty sources. But this should not dismay the layman. He has the novelist's eye, not only in his firm but sensuous descriptions, but also in his stunning ability to evoke character, interweave various tales, & see a Jumble of facts & conjectures as a means of releasing whatever dramatic moments are around. The confrontation between aggressive Europeans & innocent primitive tribes affords ample opportunity. The book is a requiem for an idyllic past, moving in its picture of a wild civilization slowly eroding under the impact of commercial progress or geographical expansion, exciting in its interplay of differing psychological attitudes or customs, & developed with many crisscrossing references: Bougainville & Banks, Melville & Gauguin, the Bounty mutiny & the little known efforts of the Englishwoman Daisy Bates to save the Aborigines. A lovely, sophisticated work.--Kirkus (edited)

    Only five survived.Journalist Andy Hall, son of the park superintendent at the time, investigates the tragedy. He spent years tracking down survivors, lost documents, and recordings of radio communications. In Denali’s Howl, Hall reveals the full story of an expedition facing conditions conclusively established here for the first time: At an elevation of nearly 20,000 feet, these young men endured an “arctic super blizzard,” with howling winds of up to 300 miles an hour and wind chill that freezes flesh solid in minutes. All this without the high-tech gear and equipment climbers use today.As well as the story of the men caught inside the storm, Denali’s Howl is the story of those caught outside it trying to save them—Hall’s father among them. The book gives readers a detailed look at the culture of climbing then and now and raises uncomfortable questions about each player in this tragedy. Was enough done to rescue the climbers, or were their fates sealed when they ascended into the path of this unprecedented storm?

    Joined by his best friend, Dillon Wallace, and a Scots-Cree guide, George Elson, Hubbard hoped to make a name for himself as an adventurer. But plagued by poor judgment and bad luck, his party turned back and Hubbard died of starvation just thirty miles from camp. Two years later, Hubbard's widow, Mina, and Wallace returned to Labrador, leading rival expeditions to complete the original trek and fix blame for the earlier failure. Their race made headlines from New York to Nova Scotia-and it makes fascinating reading today in this widely acclaimed reconstruction of the epic saga. The authors draw on contemporary accounts and their own journeys in Labrador to evoke the intense drama to men and women pushed beyond the limits of endurance in one of the great true adventures of our century.

    The coup against the Queen results in the brutal executions of six innocent people - Anne Boleyn herself, her brother, and four courtiers - and the rise of a new Queen. Drawing on sixteenth century letters, eye witness accounts and chronicles, Claire Ridgway leads the reader through the sequence of chilling events one day at a time, telling the true story of Anne Boleyn's fall. The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown is presented in a diary format, allowing readers to dip in, look up a particular date, or read from start to finish. Special features include mini biographies of those involved, a timeline of events and full referencing. Claire Ridgway, creator of The Anne Boleyn Files website and author of The Anne Boleyn Collection, continues her mission to share the real truth about Anne Boleyn.

    Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West’s understanding of human history.In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome—and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published” and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West’s assumptions about the development of civilization.By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya’s heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the “New World,” the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years.Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen’s rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves.

    Illustrations.

    "I am a woman. I am a fisherman. . . I am not a fisherwoman, fisherlady, or fishergirl. If anything else, I am a thirty-seven-year-old tomboy. It's a word I have never outgrown." Greenlaw also happens to be one of the most successful fishermen in the Grand Banks commercial fleet, though until the publication of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, "nobody cared." Greenlaw's boat, the Hannah Boden, was the sister ship to the doomed Andrea Gail, which disappeared in the mother of all storms in 1991 and became the focus of Junger's book.The Hungry Ocean, Greenlaw's account of a monthlong swordfishing trip over 1,000 nautical miles out to sea, tells the story of what happens when things go right -- proving, in the process, that every successful voyage is a study in narrowly averted disaster. There is the weather, the constant danger of mechanical failure, the perils of controlling five sleep-, women-, and booze-deprived young fishermen in close quarters, not to mention the threat of a bad fishing run: "If we don't catch fish, we don't get paid, period. In short, there is no labor union." Greenlaw's straightforward, uncluttered prose underscores the qualities that make her a good captain, regardless of gender: fairness, physical and mental endurance, obsessive attention to detail. But, ultimately, Greenlaw proves that the love of fishing -- in all of its grueling, isolating, suspenseful glory -- is a matter of the heart and blood, not the mind. "I knew that the ocean had stories to tell me, all I needed to do was listen." -- Svenja Soldovieri

    Sometimes it's murder, sometimes it's by accident, and sometimes it's because they were so ludicrous they didnt deserve to exist in the first place. Occasionally they explode violently. A few slip away almost unnoticed. Often the cause of death is either 'got too greedy' or 'Napoleon turned up'. Now and then they just hold a referendum and vote themselves out of existence.This is an atlas of 48 nations that fell off the map. The polite way of writing an obituary is: dwell on the good bits, gloss over the embarrassing stuff. This book refuses to do so, because these dead nations are so full of schemers, racists, and con men that it's impossible to skip the embarrassing stuff.Because of this - and because treating nation-states with too much reverence is the entire problem with pretty much everything - these accounts are not concerned with adding to the earnest flag saluting in the world, however nice some of the flags might be.