Showing results by publisher "Canongate Books" in History

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe.

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions - our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems - through the intertwined lives, loves and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright.

Why Women Grow is a much-needed exploration of why women turn to the earth, as gardeners, growers and custodians. This book emerged from a deeply rooted desire to share the stories of women who are silenced and overlooked. In doing so, Alice fosters connections with gardeners that unfurl into a tender exploration of women's lives, their gardens and what the ground has offered them, with conversations spanning creation and loss, celebration and grief, power, protest, identity and renaissance.

In Letters of Note: Dogs, Shaun Usher brings together a delightful collection of correspondence about our canine friends, featuring affectionate accounts of pups’ playful misdemeanours, heartfelt tributes to loyal fidos and shared tales of remarkable hounds. 

At a time when political, environmental and social gloom can seem overpowering, this remarkable book offers a lucid, affirmative and well-argued case for hope. This exquisite work traces a history of activism and social change over the past five decades - from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the worldwide marches against the war in Iraq. Hope in the Dark is a paean to optimism in the uncertainty of the 21st century.

Throughout history we have told ourselves stories to try and make sense of what it all means: our place in a small corner of one of billions of galaxies, at the end of billions of years of existence. In this new book Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are.

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.

Shaun Usher brings together fascinating correspondence about the universe beyond our planet, containing hopeful thoughts about the future of space travel, awestruck messages penned about the worlds beyond our own and celebrations of the human ingenuity that has facilitated our understanding of the cosmos. 

This is a neglected history. No attempt at a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular, told by Annabelle Hirsch through her selection of 101 objects, and now brought thrillingly alive for you by a chorus of 101 remarkable women in this ground-breaking audio release.

A brand-new collection from the internationally best-selling author of Letters of Note.

In Letters of Note: Sex, Shaun Usher collects together some of the most noteworthy missives ever written on the subject, from euphemism-laden, flirtatious exchanges and desire-driven expressions of passion to sincere and thoughtful meditations on the meaning of sex. Includes letters by John Cheever, Sigmund Freud, Dorothy Day, James Joyce, Margaret Mead, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Mae West and many others. 

A brand-new collection from the internationally best-selling author of Letters of Note.

Robert Elms has seen London change beyond all imagining: the house he grew up in is now the behemoth that is the Westway flyover, and areas once deemed murder miles have morphed into the stuff of estate agents' dreams, seemingly in a matter of months. Elms takes us back through time and place to myriad Londons. He is our guide through a place that has seen scientific experiments conducted in subterranean lairs, a small community declare itself an independent nation and animals of varying exoticism roam free through its streets.... 

Jackie Kohnstamm's mother rarely talked about what had happened during the war and had kept little evidence of her early life. It was only after her uncle and aunt had died that Jackie inherited an archive of material relating to the family back in Germany. Jackie's mother had managed to get out of Berlin in 1936, following her brother and sister who had already escaped. But Jackie's grandparents had remained.

Today, there are more borders in the world than ever before in human history. In this audiobook, James Crawford argues that our enduring obsession with borders has brought us to a crisis point: that we are entering the endgame of a process that began thousands of years ago, when we first started dividing up the earth. Beginning with the earliest known marker which denoted the end of one land and the beginning of the next, James follows the story of borders into our fragile and uncertain future.

This book is about two unlikely friends. One brown, one white; one female, one male; one born in 1970s Britain to Indian immigrant parents, the other arrived from Nazi Germany in 1939, fleeing persecution. This book is about common ground. It is a story of migration, anti-Semitism, racism, family, belonging, grief and resilience. This book is about the past and the present. It is about the mistakes of the 20th century and the uncertain hope of our present moment.

The dinner table, among friends, is where the best conversations take place - talk about the world, religion, politics, culture, love and cooking. In the same way, Be My Guest is a conversation about all these things, mediated through the sharing of food. We live in a world where some have too much and others not enough, where migrants and refugees are both welcomed and vilified, and where most of us spend less and less time cooking and eating together.

A century on from the first votes for women in the UK, award-winning author Jeanette Winterson asks what we still stand to learn from the Suffragettes. Examining recent women's rights movements, the worlds of politics and technology, social media and changes in the law, Winterson celebrates how far we have come but demands that we do more. There is still so far to go, so much courage we still need to find. Witty and wise, incisive and inspiring, Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere is a powerful reminder of the need for true equality and an urgent call to arms.

The Missing of the Somme has become a classic meditation upon war and remembrance. It weaves a network of myth and memory, photos and films, poetry and sculptures, graveyards and ceremonies that illuminate our understanding of, and relationship to, the Great War. 

Through the story of his own family's history as slave and plantation owners, Alex Renton looks at how we owe it to the present to understand the legacy of the past. When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in 1833, it was not the newly liberated who received compensation, but the tens of thousands of enslavers who were paid millions of pounds in government money. The ancestors of some of those slave owners are among the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain today.