Sandi Toksvig - broadcaster, writer, actor, and seeker of all things whimsical, has turned her probing mind to many of the most intriguing questions of our times in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph for many years. Now, for the very first time, these musings have been collected in one hilarious collection. In The Chain of Curiosity, Sandi takes the reader on a side-splitting journey through life's peculiarities in a book packed with wit, wisdom and wonderment. From pondering the joys of World Pencil Day to examining the intricacies of applause etiquette, and from tip-toeing around the delicate art of school report vocabulary to researching the oddest way to meet a sticky end, the tickling tidbits and intriguing revelations contained within the book will delight Sandi's fans, both old and new.

Dark Shadows is a compelling portrait of Kazakhstan, a country that is little known in the West. Strategically located in the heart of Central Asia, sandwiched between Vladimir Putin's Russia, its former colonial ruler, and Xi Jinping's China, this vast oil-rich state is carving out its place in the world as it contends with its own complex past and present. Journalist Joanna Lillis paints a vibrant picture of this emerging nation through vivid reportage based on 13 years of on-the-ground coverage, and travels across the length and breadth of this enigmatic country that lies along the ancient Silk Road and at the geopolitical and cultural crossroads where East meets West. Featuring tales of murder and abduction, intrigue and betrayal, extortion and corruption, this book explores how a president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, transformed himself into a potentate and the economically-struggling state he inherited at the fall of the USSR into a swaggering 21st-century monocracy. A colourful cast of characters brings the politics to life: from strutting oligarch to sleeping villagers, from principled politicians to striking oilmen, from crusading journalists to courageous campaigners. Traversing dust-blown deserts and majestic mountains, taking in glitzy cities and dystopian landscapes, Dark Shadows conjures up Kazakhstan as a living, breathing place, full of extraordinary people living extraordinary lives.

With the work of journalists under fire around the world, this year's anthology of National Magazine Awards finalists and winners is a timely reminder of the power of journalism. These pieces from writers driven to explore America's fault lines include Shane Bauer's harrowing "My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard" (Mother Jones), a visceral portrait of the abuses of the carceral system, and Sarah Stillman's account of the havoc wreaked on young people's lives when they are put on sex-offender registries (The New Yorker). In two different considerations of parenting, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks for a school for her daughter in a rapidly changing, racially divided Brooklyn (New York Times Magazine) and Michael Chabon takes his thirteen-year-old son to Fashion Week in Paris (GQ). Pamela Colloff explores how the 1966 University of Texas Tower mass shooting changed the course of one survivor's life (Texas Monthly), and Siddhartha Mukherjee depicts the art and agony of oncology (New York Times Magazine). Other selections take up the shocks of the election, including Matt Taibbi's irreverent dispatches from the campaign trail (Rolling Stone) and George Saunders's transfixing account of Trump's rallies (The New Yorker). Jeffrey Goldberg talks through Obama's foreign-policy legacy with the president (The Atlantic), Andrew Sullivan fears for the future of democracy (New York), and Gabriel Sherman relates how the women of Fox News brought to light Roger Ailes's predations (New York). Joining them are Rebecca Solnit's wide-ranging Harper's commentary, Becca Rothfeld's pondering women waiting from The Odyssey to Tinder (Hedgehog Review), and bold expeditions into nature: David Quammen ventures to Yellowstone to consider the future of wild places (National Geographic), and Mac McClelland sets off for Cuba in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker (Audubon).

'Naomi Klein's work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations' - Greta Thunberg For more than twenty years Naomi Klein's books have defined our era, chronicling the exploitation of people and the planet and demanding justice. On Fire gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing from the frontline of climate breakdown, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of what we choose to do next. Here is Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but also as a spiritual and imaginative one. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of 'perpetual now,' to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of 'climate barbarism,' this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. With dispatches from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, the smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, post-hurricane Puerto Rico and a Vatican attempting an unprecedented 'ecological conversion,' Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis. This is the fight for our lives. On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the energy of a rising political movement demanding change now.

What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the true spirit of a nation? In November 2017 the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle, and wrest their country back from over thirty years of Robert Mugabe's rule. In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir and critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the 'coup that was not a coup', the telling of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two women - her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.

In Citizens of Scandal, Vanessa Freije explores the causes and consequences of political scandals in Mexico from the 1960s through the 1980s. Tracing the process by which Mexico City reporters denounced official wrongdoing, she shows that by the 1980s political scandals were a common feature of the national media diet. News stories of state embezzlement, torture, police violence, and electoral fraud provided collective opportunities to voice dissent and offered an important, though unpredictable and inequitable, mechanism for political representation. The publicity of wrongdoing also disrupted top-down attempts by the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional to manage public discourse, exposing divisions within the party and forcing government officials to grapple with popular discontent. While critical reporters denounced corruption, they also withheld many secrets from public discussion, sometimes out of concern for their safety. Freije highlights the tensions-between free speech and censorship, representation and exclusion, and transparency and secrecy-that defined the Mexican public sphere in the late twentieth century.

The Believer, a ten-time National Magazine Award finalist, is a literature, arts, and culture magazine published by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute, and based in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Since 2003, The Believer has published writers that take the long view, and work that's too unusual or experimental for mainstream outlets. In each issue, readers will find journalism, essays, intimate interviews, an expansive comics section, poetry, timely and untimely reviews, and on occasion, delightful and unexpected bonus items. The Believer is edited by: Hayden Bennett, Vera Blossom, Camille Bromley, Jericho Brown, Daniel Gumbiner, Niela Orr, Tamar Peterson, Kristen Radtke, Ross Simonini, Summer Thomad, and James Yeh. The Believer is edited by a group of novelists, poets, artists, columnists, critics, regular readers of the Chicago Manual of Style, and aficionados of print and digital literature. The editors are far-flung, curious, and interested in the kinds of things that contributors are passionate about. Our regular columnists are Nick Hornby and Peter Orner. Each issue of the magazine is perfect-bound and printed by friendly Canadians on recycled, acid-free, heavy-stock paper and suitable for archiving, framing, or reading in the tub. Questions? Please give us a call: (866) 930-0264 or reach us by email: [email protected].

"[An] incredibly moving collection of oral histories . . . important enough to be added to the history curriculum" Telegraph "Essential reading" History Today "A moving evocation . . . An illuminating if harrowing insight into life in a totalitarian state." Clarissa de Waal, author of ALBANIA: PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY IN TRANSITION "Albania, enigmatic, mysterious Albania, was always the untold story of the Cold War, the 1989 revolutions and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mud Sweeter Than Honey goes a very long way indeed towards putting that right" New European After breaking ties with Yugoslavia, the USSR and then China, Enver Hoxha believed that Albania could become a self-sufficient bastion of communism. Every day, many of its citizens were thrown into prisons and forced labour camps for daring to think independently, for rebelling against the regime or trying to escape - the consequences of their actions were often tragic and irreversible. Mud Sweeter than Honey gives voice to those who lived in Albania at that time - from poets and teachers to shoe-makers and peasant farmers, and many others whose aspirations were brutally crushed in acts of unimaginable repression - creating a vivid, dynamic and often painful picture of this totalitarian state during the forty years of Hoxha's ruthless dictatorship. Very little emerged from Albania during communist times. With these personal accounts, Rejmer opens a window onto a terrifying period in the country's history. Mud Sweeter than Honey is not only a gripping work of reportage, but also a necessary and unique portrait of a nation. With an Introduction by Tony Barber *Winner of the Polityka Passport Prize**Winner of the Koscielski Award* Translated from the Polish by Zosia Krasodomska-Jones and Antonia Lloyd-Jones

On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. On route to a protest, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Hernandez reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available: her sources are unparalleled, since she has secured access to internal government documents that have not been made public, and to video surveillance footage the government has tried to hide and destroy. Hernandez demolishes the Mexican state's official version, which the Pena Nieto government cynically dubbed the "historic truth". As her research shows, state officials at all levels, from police and prosecutors to the upper echelons of the PRI administration, conspired to put together a fake case, concealing or manipulating evidence, and arresting and torturing dozens of "suspects" who then obliged with full "confessions" that matched the official lie. By following the role of the various Mexican state agencies through the events in such remarkable detail, Massacre in Mexico shows with exacting precision who is responsible for which component of this monumental crime.

The war against ISIS and the so-called caliphate it declared across Syria and Iraq was a battle to define not just the Middle East but the wider world. Growing from the aftermath of the U.S. war in Iraq and a brutal civil war in Syria, ISIS sought to usher in a new era of conflict as it launched terrorist attacks across Europe, while inflicting a savage extremism on the population in controlled. And the U.S. developed a new kind of war to stop it - one that that relied heavily on the sacrifices of local soldiers who fought on behalf of the American cause. This struggle came to a climax in the Iraqi city of Mosul, the crown jewel of the caliphate, in the deadliest urban combat the world had seen in a generation. Few journalists got as close to the war, and to protagonists on both sides of it, as Mike Giglio, who spent six years reporting on the rise and fall of the ISIS proto-state. He travelled along the Turkey-Syria border with the smugglers and operatives who worked in ISIS's criminal and financial networks, accompanied antiquities traders to visit stolen artefacts that helped to fund the ISIS war effort, sat with human traffickers at the heart of the migrant crisis, and met with ISIS defectors as they tried to free their minds from its grip. He also embedded often with the local soldiers on the front lines of the international effort to stop ISIS, tracking a war effort that saw these soldiers take heavy casualties as U.S. special forces worked in the shadows and U.S. pilots and drone operators dropped bombs. In Mosul, the war's central battle, he travelled in the attacking convoys of elite Kurdish and Iraqi commandos as car bombs plunged into their ranks and ISIS drones dropped grenades. Behind the drama on the battlefield, the suspense was in how much ISIS might change the world before its cities fell and how many of America's allies it could kill along the way. The story is a chilling portrait of the destructive power of extremism and of the tenacity and astonishing courage required to defeat it.

Ce livre est la premiere monographie qui tente de presenter l'oeuvre de Ryszard Kapuscinski dans toute sa diversite intrinseque (journalisme d'opinion, correspondances de presse, reportages, recits, notes essayistiques, poesie, photographie) et dans toute sa duree, soit plus de cinquante ans: des premiers poemes au volume posthume Lapidarium VI. Les auteurs considerent Kapuscinski avant tout comme un ecrivain qui s'est incarne dans la figure d'un journaliste-voyageur et qui, grace a son talent, a transforme le reportage en outil permettant de formuler des significations universelles tout en preservant sa sensibilite de journaliste aux changements et aux besoins du monde. Le livre propose des interpretations theoriques litteraires des principaux ouvrages de Kapuscinski, mais les auteurs etudient egalement avec attention le destin personnel de l'ecrivain qui etait souvent le heros de ses propres textes. La biographie a ete traduite en espagnol et en italien.

In 1925, Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine's first fiction editor, discovering and championing the work of Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, James Thurber, Marianne Moore, and her husband-to-be, E. B. White, among others. After years of cultivating fiction, she set her sights on a new genre: garden writing. On March 1, 1958, The New Yorker ran a column entitled "Onward and Upward in the Garden," a critical review of garden catalogs, in which White extolled the writings of "seedmen and nurserymen," those unsung authors who produced her "favorite reading matter." Thirteen more columns followed, exploring the history and literature of gardens, flower arranging, herbalists, and developments in gardening. Two years after her death in 1977, E. B. White collected and published the series, with a fond introduction. The result is this sharp-eyed appreciation of the green world of growing things, of the aesthetic pleasures of gardens and garden writing, and of the dreams that gardens inspire.

"Somewhere in the tangle of the subject's burden and the subject's desire is your story."-Alex Tizon Every human being has an epic story. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alex Tizon told the epic stories of marginalized people-from lonely immigrants struggling to forge a new American identity to a high school custodian who penned a New Yorker short story. Edited by Tizon's friend and former colleague Sam Howe Verhovek, Invisible People collects the best of Tizon's rich, empathetic accounts-including "My Family's Slave," the Atlantic magazine cover story about the woman who raised him and his siblings under conditions that amounted to indentured servitude. Mining his Filipino American background, Tizon tells the stories of immigrants from Cambodia and Laos. He gives a fascinating account of the Beltway sniper and insightful profiles of Surfers for Jesus and a man who tracks UFOs. His articles-many originally published in the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times-are brimming with enlightening details about people who existed outside the mainstream's field of vision. In their introductions to Tizon's pieces, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winners Kim Murphy and Jacqui Banaszynski, and others salute Tizon's respect for his subjects and the beauty and brilliance of his writing. Invisible People is a loving tribute to a journalist whose search for his own identity prompted him to chronicle the lives of others.

'China', Napoleon once remarked, 'is a sleeping lion. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world.' In 2014, President Xi Jinping triumphantly declared that the lion had awoken. From holding its ground in trade wars with the US, to presenting itself as a world leader in the fight against climate change, a newly confident China is flexing its economic muscles for strategic ends. With the Belt and Road initiative, billed as a new Silk Road for the 21st Century, China is set to extend its influence throughout Eurasia and across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. But with the Chinese and US militaries also vying over the Pacific, does this newfound confidence put China on a collision course with the US? Combining a geopolitical overview with on-the-ground reportage from a dozen countries, this new edition of China's Asian Dream engages with the most recent developments in the ongoing story of China's ascendency, and offers new insights into what the rise of China means not only for Asia, but for the world.

Travelling from Madrid to The Valley of the Fallen, through Castile and Leon and across the fiercely contested region of Catalonia, Christopher Finnigan meets a remarkable cast of characters behind some of the biggest political events Spain has witnessed in decades. Whether it is the Indignados left-wing activists rethinking society, the everyday citizens sitting in parliament, or the Catalan separatists fighting for a new nation, The New Spanish Revolutions meets those struggling at the heart of historic change. Spain today finds itself in the grip of immense social upheaval, still shaken by the financial crash of 2008 and still struggling with its fascist past. Against a fragmented and polarised backdrop, Christopher Finnigan discovers how individuals and ideas that were once outside the mainstream are now shaping the nation's future.

The New York Times bestseller 'Full of rich characters, bad actors, heroes, drama, suffering, courage, conflict, and vivid detail' John Grisham **************** From one of America's most beloved sportswriters, a collection of true stories about the dream of greatness and its cost in the world of sports. There is only one Wright Thompson. His work includes the most read articles in the history of ESPN and has been anthologised in The Best American Sports Writing books ten times. But to say his pieces are about sports, while true as far as it goes, is like saying Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove is a book about a cattle drive. Wright Thompson figures people out. Whether it be Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods or Lionel Messi or Pat Riley, he strips away the self-serving myths and fantasies to fully reveal his characters, and what drives them, in a way that few others can. Ludicrously entertaining and often powerfully moving, The Cost of These Dreams is an ode to the reporter's art and a celebration of true greatness and the high price that it exacts. **************** 'Proves that the best sports writing is never about sport, but the human condition. Thompson writes vividly about things I didn't see but wish I had done' Duncan Hamilton, Guardian Best Books of the Year 'Wright Thompson performs that nifty bit of sportswriting hoodoo, virtually out of vogue today: he subordinates self to story. Stylishly, intelligently, incisively, deftly, he keeps his priorities straight. It's why I read him' Richard Ford

What takes place when we examine texts close-up? The art of close reading, once the closely guarded province of professional literary critics, now underpins the everyday processes of forensic scrutiny conducted by those brigades of citizen commentators who patrol the realms of social media. This study examines at close quarters a series of key English texts from the last hundred years: the novels of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the plays of Samuel Beckett, the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the tweets of Donald Trump. It digs beneath their surface meanings to discover microcosmic ambiguities, allusions, ironies and contradictions which reveal tensions and conflicts at the heart of the paradox of patriarchal history. It suggests that acts of close reading may offer radical perspectives upon the bigger picture, as well as the means by which to deconstruct it. In doing so, it suggests an alternative to a classical vision of cultural progress characterised by irreconcilable conflicts between genders, genres and generations.

In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution's symbolic birthplace. This is the story of the women and men who formed Opantish - Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment - who deployed hundreds of volunteers, scouts rescue teams, and getaway drivers to intervene in the spiraling cases of sexual violence against women protesters in the square. Organized and led by women during 2012-2013 - the final, chaotic months of Egypt's revolution - teams of volunteers fought their way into circles of men to pull the woman at the center to safety. Often, they risked assault themselves. Journalist Yasmin El-Rifae was one of Opantish's organizers, and this is her evocative, aching account of their work, as they raced to develop new tactics, struggled with a revolution bleeding into counter-revolution, and dealt with the long aftermath of assault and devastation. Told in a daring, hybrid narrative style drawn from years of interviews and her own, intimate experience, it is a story of overlapping circles: the circles of male attackers activists had to break through, the ways sexual violence can be circled off as "irrelevant" to political struggle, and the endless repetitive loops of living with trauma. Introducing a powerful new voice, a writer whose searchingly beautiful, spare prose cuts to the core of a story ever more urgent and relevant: of women's resistance when all else has failed.

For more than 35 years, John 'Hoppy' Hopkins covered the biggest stories in golf, from Major Championships to Ryder Cups and Amateur competitions. During these four decades, he wrote about all the golfing greats and covered the biggest stories of the times. Collected together here for the first time are the very best of his articles, covering a diverse range of golfing stories, from the most memorable of the 120 major championships he covered to his writing on amateur tournaments including the Walker Cup and the Presidents' Putter, as well as profiles and interviews of the finest players to grace the sport. The articles are arranged month by month - giving a unique perspective on the golfing calendar, the changing seasons and stories throughout the golfing year. Perfect reading for John's many fans, and a fascinating portrait of the game's recent history, Hoppy on Golf is the ideal gift for any golf fanatic.

A.A. Gill was an exceptional writer. Savage and compassionate in equal measure, he was always opinionated, always original, often surprising, and his writing illuminated every page. This second collection of his journalism brings together pieces from near and far. He was ferociously well-travelled and wrote 'abroad is as foreign and funny and strange and shocking as it ever was, and our need to know our neighbours every bit as great'. Far and Away is a book about meeting those neighbours. Wherever he was - with the glitterati in St Tropez or in the ruins of earthquake-stricken Haiti - he had the ability to pin down the heart of a story and render it unforgettable. He was a peerless writer about food, and we also join him at tables all around the globe. A.A. Gill had the gift of making his readers see the world in a different way. And, always, of making them laugh. This collection is an opportunity to marvel at a master at work.

In 1991 Andrew Solomon faced down tanks in Moscow with a band of Russian artists protesting the August coup. We find him on the quest for a rare bird in Zambia in 1998, and in Greenland in 2001 researching widespread depression among the Inuit. In 2002 he was in Afghanistan for the fall of the Taliban. He was brought in for questioning in Qaddafi's Libya in 2006. In 2014 he travelled to Myanmar to meet ex-political prisoners as the country fitfully pushed towards freedom. Far and Away tells these and many other stories. With his signature compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities shift when governments change. A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon chronicles a life's travels to the nexus of hope, courage, and the uncertainty of lived experience and tracks seismic shifts - cultural, political and spiritual. He takes us on a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences via intimate, deeply moving stories that reveal and revel in our common humanity.