Contemporary Britain

The buildings designed in our lifetimes encapsulate the dreams and aspirations of our culture, while also revealing the sobering realities. Whether modest or monumental, they offer a living history of Britain, symbols of the forces that have shaped our modern landscape and icons in their own right. Iconicon is an enthralling journey around the Britain we have created since 1980: the horrors and delights, the triumphs and failures.

In 1951, the Festival of Britain commissioned a series of short guides they dubbed ‘handbooks for the explorer’. Their aim was to encourage readers to venture out beyond the capital and on to ‘the roads and the by-roads’ to see Britain as a ‘living country’. Yet these 13 guides did more than celebrate the rural splendour of this ‘island nation’: they also made much of Britain’s industrial power and mid-century ambition. Armed with these About Britain guides, historian Tim Cole takes to the roads to find out what has changed and what has remained the same.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and...

Brought to you by Penguin. Across the globe, over 122 million people have been displaced. In a world increasingly divided by borders and nationality, the charity Choose Love was founded to support and provide humanitarian aid to those in need. In this powerful collection, ten acclaimed writers...

"In his remarkable performance of Edward St. Aubyn's newest novel, stage and screen actor Benedict Cumberbatch proves yet again that he is a master of pacing and characterization...When not delivering a silky, warm, and beautifully enunciated narration, Cumberbatch subsumes himself into a...

In #1 New York Times bestselling author Rosamunde Pilcher’s The End of Summer, a woman revisits her home and her heartbreak when she is reunited with the one she loved and lost—and could love again. After years in the United States, Jane returns to the tranquil Scottish estate, Elvie, where...

The New York Times bestselling author Jude Deveraux brings a “wonderful addition” (Booklist) to her Montgomery/Taggert Family series with this supernatural romance in which, with the help of a feisty ghost, a man uncovers the secrets that led to the tragic death of his fiancée. After three...