Showing results for "What the" in Modern

“A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished...

The crisis in Europe is not over, it's getting worse. In this dramatic narrative of Europe’s economic rise and spectacular fall, Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, ‘the emerging rock star of Europe’s anti-austerity uprising’ (Telegraph), shows that the origins of the...

Scott McClellan belonged to President Bush's select inner circle of trusted advisers during one of the most challenging, contentious periods of recent history. Over a period of more than seven years, he witnessed, day-to-day, exactly how the presidency veered off course, not only by its decision to topple Saddam Hussein, but by an embrace of confrontational politics in the face of an increasingly partisan Washington and a hostile media.

Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like "pandemic," a Freudian state of mind like the "Oedipus complex," or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks' spell. But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us?

With the urgency and passion of Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), the seductive storytelling of JD Vance (Hillbilly Elegy) and the historical rigor of Carol Anderson (White Rage), Kamal Al-Solaylee explores the in-between space that brown people occupy in today's world: on the cusp of whiteness and the edge of blackness.

At some point in the 1980s we gave up on the future. Before then, we imagined wonderful days to come, free from disease, work and want, in television series like Star Trek or events such as the 1939 Futurama World Fair. When we look ahead now, we tell dystopian stories of environmental collapse, zombie plagues and the end of civilisation. If it is true that we have to imagine the future before we build it, then this is deeply worrying. 

A hundred years after World War I, new accounts of the drama help listeners navigate the intricacies of European politics and the political and diplomatic maneuverings that kicked off the war. Yet there is still no consensus on its origins or lessons.