In 1943, there was an urgent need for Animal Farm. The Soviet Union had become Britain’s ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and criticism of Stalin’s brutal regime was either censored or discouraged. In any case, many intellectuals on the left still celebrated the Soviet Union, claiming that the terrors of its show trials, summary executions and secret police were either exaggerated or necessary. But, to Orwell, Stalin was always a “disgusting murderer” and he wanted to remind people of this fact in a powerful and memorable way. But how to do it? A political essay would never reach a wide enough audience; a traditional novel would take too long to write. Orwell hit on the inspired idea of combining the moralism of the traditional ‘beast fable’ with the satire of Gulliver’s Travels.

A group of farmyard animals, led by the pigs, overthrow their human masters. Their revolution is inspired by high ideals: the farm will be run in the interests of its animals with no more slaughtering, plenty of food for all and comfort in retirement. But when Napoleon the pig takes command, he quickly corrupts their principles, creating a new tyranny worse than the old.

Orwell wrote Animal Farm in the middle of the Second World War, but at first no publishers wanted to touch it. It was finally published in August 1945, once the war was over. This little book quickly became a seminal text in the emerging ‘cold war’ (a phrase that Orwell himself coined). It also became a site of that conflict itself, suffering various attempts to subvert or change its meaning. Today, Animal Farm remains a powerful fable about the nature of tyranny and corruption which applies for all ages.

Our edition also includes the following essays:

• Shooting an Elephant;
• Charles Dickens;
• Inside the Whale;
• The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda;
• Literature and Totalitarianism;
• Fascism and Democracy;
• Patriots and Revolutionaries;
• Catastrophic Gradualism;
• Some Thoughts on the Common Toad;
• Why I Write;
• Writers and Leviathan

The Remembered Dead explores the ways poets of the First World War - and later poets writing in the memory of that war - address the difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those killed in conflict. It looks closely at the way poets struggled to meaningfully represent dying, death, and the trauma of witness, while responding to the pressing need for commemoration. The authors pay close attention to specific poems while maintaining a strong awareness of literary and philosophical contexts. The poems are discussed in relation to modernism and myth, other forms of commemoration (such as photographs and memorials), and theories of cultural memory. There is fresh analysis of canonical poets which, at the same time, challenges the confines of the canon by integrating discussion of lesser-known figures, including non-combatants and poets of later decades. The final chapter reaches beyond the war's centenary in a discussion of one remarkable commemoration of Wilfred Owen.

The Life of Theodotus of Amida is that rare thing: a securely dated eye-witness account of life under Arab Muslim rule in the first century of Islam, and one of the few extant texts from seventh-century North Mesopotamia. It is imbued with local color and contemporary detail, revealing an intimate knowlredge of the terrain, its inhabitants and officialdom, as well as the precariousness of the lives of those living in the borderlands between the Byzantine and Islamic empires.

Seven years after the financial crisis of 2008, financiers remain villains in the public mind. Most Americans believe that their irresponsible actions and complex financial products wrecked the economy and destroyed people's savings, and that bankers never adequately paid for their crimes.But as Economist journalist Andrew Palmer argues in Smart Money , this much maligned industry is not only capable of doing great good for society, but offers the most powerful means we have for solving some of our most intractable social problems. From Babylon to the present, the history of finance has always been one of powerful innovation. Now a new generation of financial entrepreneurs is working to revive this tradition of useful innovation, and Palmer shows why we need their ideas today more than ever.Traveling to the centres of finance across the world, Palmer introduces us to peer-to-peer lenders who are financing entrepreneurs the big banks won't bet on, creating opportunities where none existed. He explores the world of social-impact bonds, which fund programs for the impoverished and homeless, simultaneously easing the burden on national governments and producing better results. And he explores the idea of human-capital contracts, whereby investors fund the educations of cash-strapped young people in return for a percentage of their future earnings.In this far-ranging tour of the extraordinarily creative financial ideas of today and of the future, Smart Money offers an inspiring look at the new era of financial innovation that promises to benefit us all.

Calvin Coolidge was one of America's most unusual presidents. Selected as vice president by rebellious convention delegates and thrust unexpectedly into the presidency on the death of his predecessor, he nonetheless imprinted his authority on both party and country. Like Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, he came to personify not just an administration but a social and political era'. Although historians still dispute his legacy, the thirtieth president's image remains both distinctive and enduring. This is partly because Coolidge was a walking contradiction of his times. He had little of the charisma' deemed essential to political success and was obsessed with fiscal prudence in an age of acquisitiveness and wild financial speculation. His economic views were more suited to a nineteenth century agrarian nation than to an emerging industrial-capitalist giant. His personal life embodied the values of white, Puritan New England, not those of the big northern cities, whose cosmopolitanism and moral relativism increasingly set the tone for the nation in the Coolidge years.

"The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles" makes accessible to a wide public sources vital for the reconstruction of events in the first Islamic century, covering the period which ends with the unsuccessful Arab siege of Constantinople, an event which both modern historians and Syriac chronographers see as making a decisive caesura in history. The general introduction enables a newcomer to the field to establish his bearings before tackling the texts.

Piracy is a significant global threat to international sea-borne trade - the life-blood of modern industrial economies and vital for world economic survival. The pirates of today are constantly in the world's news media, preying on private and merchant shipping from small, high-speed vessels. Andrew Palmer here provides the historical background to the new piracy, its impact on the shipping and insurance industries and also considers the role of international bodies like the UN and the International Maritime Bureau, international law and the development of advanced naval and military measures. He shows how this 'new' piracy is rooted in the geopolitics and socio-economic conditions of the late-20th century where populations live on the margins and where weak or 'failed states' can encourage criminal activity and even international terrorism. Somalia is considered to be the nest of piracy, but hotspots include not only the Red Sea region, but also the whole Indian Ocean, West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the South China Seas.

The Remembered Dead explores the ways poets of the First World War - and later poets writing in the memory of that war - address the difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those killed in conflict. It looks closely at the way poets struggled to meaningfully represent dying, death, and the trauma of witness, while responding to the pressing need for commemoration. The authors pay close attention to specific poems while maintaining a strong awareness of literary and philosophical contexts. The poems are discussed in relation to modernism and myth, other forms of commemoration (such as photographs and memorials), and theories of cultural memory. There is fresh analysis of canonical poets which, at the same time, challenges the confines of the canon by integrating discussion of lesser-known figures, including non-combatants and poets of later decades. The final chapter reaches beyond the war's centenary in a discussion of one remarkable commemoration of Wilfred Owen.