In vivid detail, Francis Wheen tells the story of Das Kapital and Karl Marx's twenty-year struggle to complete his unfinished masterpiece. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the first volume of Das Kapital was published in 1867, to muted praise. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries, from George Bernard Shaw to V. I. Lenin, changing the direction of twentieth-century history. Wheen's captivating, accessible book shows that, far from being a dry economic treatise, Das Kapital is like a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created: capitalism. Furthermore, Wheen argues, as long as capitalism endures, Das Kapital demands to be read and understood.

Golden Duck's edition of the 1934 bestseller Cheapjack by Margery Allingham's brother, Philip, containsover 30 photographs from the National Fairground Archive, the Allingham Society and other sources. An introduction by FRANCIS WHEEN discuses slumming in the 1930s and describes Cheapjack as an extraordinary autobiography. VANESSA TOULMIN of Sheffield University puts Cheapjack and its language in the context of the secretive society of showmen, hawkers and Gypsy travellers and calls it an important historic record. Margery Allingham's biographer, JULIA JONES, reveals the extent of detective novelist's involvement in Cheapjack and gives the wider story of this naive, eccentric and charming young man.

A compelling, wide-ranging collection of Karl Marx's journalism-available only from Penguin Classics
Karl Marx is arguably the most famous political philosopher of all time, but he was also one of the great foreign correspondents of the nineteenth century. Drawing on his eleven- year tenure at the New York "Tribune" (which began in 1852), this completely new collection presents Marx's writings on an abundance of topics, from issues of class and state to world affairs. Particularly moving pieces highlight social inequality and starvation in Britain, while others explore his groundbreaking views on the slave and opium trades. Throughout, Marx's fresh perspective on nineteenth-century events reveals a social consciousness that remains inspiring to this day.

An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century. An intellectual call to arms, Francis Wheen's Sunday Times bestseller is one of 2004's most talked about books. In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era - including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer - while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.

While walking in the Swiss Alps, two English travellers fall into a space-warp, and suddenly find themselves in another world. In many ways the same as our own - even down to the characters that inhabit it - this new planet is still somehow radically different, for the two walkers are now upon a Utopian Earth controlled by a single World Government. Here, as they soon learn, all share a common language, there is sexual, economic and racial equality, and society is ruled by socialist ideals enforced by an austere, voluntary elite: the 'Samurai'. But what will the Utopians make of these new visitors from a less perfect world?

Only a dozen mourners attended Karl Marx's funeral in Highgate cemetery, but within a hundred years of his death half the world's population was ruled by governments that professed Marxism as their guiding faith. Not since Jesus Christ has an obscure pauper achieved such astonishing global influence.

It is easy to forget that Marx was also human. Neither his enemies nor his disciples have been willing to admit as much: in the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin he was beatified, while the West demonised him as the begetter of all evil. In this biography Francis Wheen for the first time presents Marx the man in all his fiery brilliance and frailty: as a Prussian Jew who became a middle-class English gentleman; as an angry agitator who spent much of his adult life in scholarly silence in the British Museum Reading Room; as a gregarious and convivial host who none the less fell out with almost all his friends; as a devoted family man who impregnated his housemaid; as a deeply earnest thinker who loved drink, cigars and jokes; and as a prodigal son to whom his mother said 'I wish you would make some capital instead of just writing about it.'

Karl Marx emerges here as a flamboyantly unmistakable individual, not the stony head of a monolithic, faceless organisation. Indeed, rather like Groucho, Karl could hardly bear to be a member of any club that would accept him: he memorably dismissed a new French party that claimed to be Marxist, replying that, in that case, 'I, at least, am not a Marxist'.

Francis Wheen has written a captivating, at times richly comic biography of the dominant figure of our century, whose life and ideas, charm and irascibility are here revealed in all their glorious complexity and contradiction, the brilliant and provocative philosopher living the Dickensian life of a gent fallen on hard times.

Shortlisted for;
The Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction,
The Channel 4 Politico Award
The W.H.Smith Literary Award
The Orwell Prize

In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In America and Britain, an era of weary consensus was displaced by the arrival of a political marriage of fiery idealists: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher transformed politics with a combination of breezy charm and assertive "Victorian values." In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History.
What colonized the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of idiocy, the proof of which was to be found in every state, every work-place, and every library. In "Idiot Proof," columnist Francis Wheen brilliantly evokes the key personalities of the post-political era--including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama bin Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer--while lamenting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century.
In turn comic, indignant, outraged and just plain baffled by the idiocy of it all, "Idiot Proof" is a masterful depiction of the daftness of our times and a plea that we might just think a little more and believe a little less.

In this stunning book, the first comprehensive biography of Marx since the end of the Cold War, Francis Wheen gives us not a socialist ogre but a fascinating, ultimately humane man, while still examining the criticisms of his detractors. A study in contradictions, Karl Marx was at once a reserved scholar, a fiery agitator, and a gregarious socialite, while his intellect and ideology were once described as "Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hegel fused into one person." He lived both at the center and on the fringes of his age, and his oratory and writing continue to change the contemporary world. In his entertaining, offbeat style, Wheen offers an eminently readable biography of one of history's most unforgettable figures. "Wheen's portrait of Marx's life is artfully shaped and makes delectable reading." New York Times "A magnificent portrait of Marx.... Bravo " A. N. Wilson " E]xpertly researched, admirably objective, eminently humane, and plenty entertaining." Boston Book Review"