Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing" in All Categories

In Vulture Capitalism, acclaimed journalist Grace Blakeley takes on the world’s most powerful corporations by showing how the causes of our modern crisis are the intended result of our capitalist system. It’s not broken, it’s working exactly as planned. From JPMorgan to Boeing, Henry Ford to Richard Nixon, Blakeley shows us exactly where late-stage capitalism has gone wrong. Searing, explosive and timely, Vulture Capitalism is the book you need to understand what is happening in the world around you – and what you can do to change it.

From the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History, a whistle-stop tour through the past – from Alexander the Great to Agatha Christie, the Wars of the Roses to Watergate. The nation’s favourite historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook take on the most curious moments in history, answering the questions we didn’t even think to ask. Whether it is sending historical figures to Casa Amor in a series of Love Island, ranking history’s most famous eunuchs and pigeons, or debating the meaning of greatness, there is nothing too big or too small for Tom and Dominic to unpick.

In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Everybody leaves a trace. The ghosts of Button House may have been dead a long time - some of them a very long time - but they have all left their mark on the world (even if, in Robin’s case, that mark is just a handprint on the wall of a cave). Gathered together in this volume is a treasure trove of unearthed cuttings, original records and rare artefacts that explore the unseen lives of those who died at Button House: from Thomas's love letters to Pat's ‘Summer Camp Rap’, and from Julian's campaign promises to Lady Button's Rules of Etiquette.

In a bold and magisterial work of immense scope, Josephine Quinn argues that the real story of the West is much bigger than this established paradigm leads us to believe. So much of our shared history has been lost, drowned out by the concept – developed in the Victorian era – of separate ‘civilisations’. Moving from the Bronze Age to the Age of Exploration, How the World Made the West reveals a new narrative: one that traces the millennia of global encounters and exchange that built what is now called the West, as societies met, tangled and sometimes grew apart.

In this fascinating exploration of the surprising power of questioning, innovation expert Warren Berger reveals that powerhouse businesses like Google, Nike, and Netflix, as well as hot Silicon Valley startups like Pandora and Airbnb, are fueled by the ability to ask fundamental, game-changing questions. But Berger also shares human stories of people using questioning to solve everyday problems—from “How can I adapt my career in a time of constant change?” to “How can I step back from the daily rush and figure out what really makes me happy?”

Teddy Angstrom is no stranger to morbid public interest in her family’s tragedies. And when her father dies suddenly, ten years to the day after her sister Angie’s disappearance, she intends to maintain as much privacy as she always has. Clearing out her father’s office, however, Teddy discovers her father’s double life: a decade-long investigation into wild conspiracies from a Reddit community of true crime fans fixated on Angie. Repelled and compelled in equal measure by this new online dimension, Teddy finds herself falling down that same rabbit hole.

It’s been two decades since Irakli fled his war-torn homeland with two young sons, now grown men. Two decades since he saw their mother, who stayed so they could escape. At long last, Tbilisi has lured him home. But when Irakli’s phone calls stop, a mystery begins... Arriving in the city as escaped zoo animals prowl the streets, Saba picks up the trail of clues: strange graffiti, bewildering messages transmitted through the radio, pages from his father’s unpublished manuscript scattered like breadcrumbs.

1985. Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn’t. By 1998 Anita’s name has been all but forgotten – certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.

Millie wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. She’s slowly saving up from her job on campus, but when a visiting professor offers her an unusual opportunity to make some extra money, she jumps at the chance. Agatha is a writer, recovering from a break-up while researching attitudes towards weddings and money for her new book. She strikes gold when interviewing the girls in Millie’s dorm, but her plans take a turn when she realises that the best material is unfolding behind closed doors.

When we meet Carrie Sun, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.

As the sports reporter for BBC Radio 1 for the best part of a decade, Simon Mundie was pitch-side at many of the most high-profile sporting events in history. It was often thrilling, but when he took to the airwaves to report on what he had seen, it increasingly felt like something was missing. The emphasis always seemed to be on results, tactics and the score. But as the saying goes, sport is a metaphor for life – so Simon set out to explore that.

They had nothing to expect from the mercy of the crown; their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world. When Charles Dickens wrote these tragic lines he was penning fact, not fiction. He had visited the condemned cells at the infamous prison at Newgate, where seventeen men who had been sentenced to death were awaiting news of their pleas for mercy. Two men were particularly striking: James Pratt and John Smith, who had been convicted of homosexuality.

When Thomas Roe arrived in India in 1616 as James I’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire, the English barely had a toehold in the subcontinent. Their understanding of South Asian trade and India was sketchy at best, and, to the Mughals, they were minor players on a very large stage. Roe was representing a kingdom that was beset by financial woes and deeply conflicted about its identity as a unified ‘Great Britain’ under the Stuart monarchy. 

New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother's sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol.

In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with 'big government' and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor.

Ada’s answer to most questions is: yes. Every night is an opportunity to be thrilled and every morning a chance to recount it to her friends, so when she falls for Sadie and Stuart at the same time, she sees no reason not to pursue them both. But as the realities of modern life begin to catch up with her, and everyone wants Ada to define herself in relation to them, she feels the weight of the questions: which version of yourself is most true? And do other people enhance your best self, or distort it?

From its debut in 1962, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a wild success and a cultural lightning rod. The play transpires over one long, boozy night, laying bare the lies, compromises, and scalding love that have sustained a middle-aged couple through decades of marriage. It scandalized critics but magnetized audiences. Across 644 sold-out Broadway performances, the drama demolished the wall between what could and couldn’t be said on the American stage and marked a definitive end to the I Love Lucy 1950s.

Maria and Josef live with their children in a valley in westernmost Austria. When the First World War breaks out and Josef is drafted into the army, Maria is left to provide for her family alone. Every day is a struggle against starvation, the harsh alpine climate and the hostile nearby villagers who see Maria as little more than a beautiful temptress out for the men left behind. But when a red-haired stranger arrives in the village, Maria feels happiness seep back into her life and she faces a choice whose consequences will affect the lives of her family for generations to come.

Josef was an illegitimate child, a charity case from Salzburg, schooled by a benefactor. He was drafted to fight in the Second World War while still at school and sent to Russia, returning with only one leg. He married his nurse, and brought his family to the high, idyllic slopes of the Austrian Alps, where he took a position as manager of a home for injured soldiers, a strangely suspended, deeply isolated place with a remarkable library. He was a man of many mysteries. To his daughter, Monika, none was greater than his obsession with these cloistered, crumbling books.