Labour Wars

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR FOR 2024 LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION, AND THE FT BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD The trillion-dollar battle for the resources to power our future. Oil and gas defined the twentieth century. Now...

The French painter Jean Hélion’s unique and deeply moving account of his experiences in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps prefigures the even darker stories that would emerge from the concentration camps. This serious adventure tale begins with Hélion’s infantry platoon fleeing from the German army and warplanes as they advanced through France in the early days of the war. The soldiers chant as they march and run, “They shall not have me!” but are quickly captured and sent to hard labor.

Bloomsbury presents The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment's Surrender to Drugs, written and read by Peter Hitchens Again and again British politicians, commentators and celebrities intone that 'The War on Drugs has failed'. They then say that this is an argument for abandoning all...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2017 #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER ‘The best political book of the year’ Andrew Marr ‘A superb work of storytelling and reporting. Sets new benchmark for the writing of contemporary political history’ Guardian The only book to tell the full story of how and...

On a spring morning in 1914, members of the United Mine Workers of America clashed with guards employed by the Rockefeller family, and a state militia beholden to Colorado's industrial barons. When the dust settled, nineteen men, women, and children among the miners' families lay dead. The strikers had killed at least thirty men, destroyed six mines, and laid waste to two company towns. Killing for Coal offers a bold and original perspective on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre and the "Great Coalfield War."

From London’s inimitable mayor, Boris Johnson, the story of how Churchill’s eccentric genius shaped not only his world but our own. On the fiftieth anniversary of Churchill’s death, Boris Johnson celebrates the singular brilliance of one of the most important leaders of the twentieth...

Bloomsbury presents Margaret Bondfield by Nan Sloane, read by Harriet Dunlop A groundbreaking biography of Margaret Bondfield, the remarkable political pioneer and working-class woman who rose to become the first female Cabinet Minister in the 1929 Labour government. Rising from modest...

A collection of Tony Benn’s private audio diaries, documentaries and archive interviews Tony Benn was the patriarch of the Labour left, a radical statesman, orator and anti-war campaigner who spent over 50 years as an MP, serving in the Cabinet under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. A...

“Ford’s overlap of past and present, narrative and commentary is masterful, and makes this volume all the more valuable to those readers wise enough to allow the past to inform the future. Of Blood and Sweat is a myth-busting work of genius that will stand as the last word on this vital...

Bloomsbury presents Your Presence Is Mandatory by Sasha Vasilyuk, read by Sam Rushton. Winner of the 2025 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature | Gold Medal Winner for the 94th Annual California Book Awards | Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A riveting debut novel, based...

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

Margaret Thatcher is one of the most iconic politicians of the twentieth century. With the possible exception of Winston Churchill, no other Prime Minister has had such an impact on modern British history. Like it or not, her radical social and economic policies have made Britain the country it...

During World War II, Michigan became a temporary home to six thousand German and Italian POWs. At a time of homefront labor shortages, they picked fruit in Berrien County, harvested sugar beets in the Thumb, cut pulpwood in the Upper Peninsula, and maintained parks and other public spaces in...

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Bank that Lived a Little by Phillip Augar, read by Jonathan Keeble. Based on unparalleled access to those involved, and told with compelling pace and drama, The Bank that Lived a Little is the story of one of the most familiar names on the British...

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s. 

They were the unsung heroines of World War II; the wives and mothers and teenage girls who clocked in daily to work in vast munitions factories, helping to make explosives, bullets, shells, bombs and war machines that would ensure victory. It was dangerous, dirty and exhausting work. They worked...