Before the Bomb, there were simply 'bombs', lower case. But it was the twentieth century, one hundred years of almost incredible scientific progress, that saw the birth of the Bomb, the human race's most powerful and most destructive discovery.In this magisterial and enthralling account, Gerard DeGroot gives us the life story of the Bomb, from its birth in the turn-of-the-century physics labs of Europe to a childhood in the New Mexico desert of the 1940s, from adolescence and early...

World War One had a devastating, cataclysmic impact on the world and the British people. As its reverberations were so long-lasting and significant, it is easy to assume that the social consequences were as profound.In this highly readable and moving survey of life back at home during the First World War, Gerard DeGroot challenges this assumption, finding pre-war social structures were surprisingly resilient. Despite economic and technological changes, the British peoplemanaged to ...

If the 1960s was the decade of peace, love and understanding, the 1970s was the decade of glitter and glam rock. Or was it? Gerard DeGroot peels away the polyester to examine what really happened in a decade that began with the death of Jimi Hendrix and ended with Ronald Reagan in the White House and Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street.Some commentators have written off the Seventies as a period in which nothing happened, yet politically it was a time of great hope. Dictatorial ...

Before 1966, the idea of Reagan in politics provoked widespread scorn. To most people, he seemed a has-been actor, a right-wing extremist and a 'dunce'. Journalists therefore ridiculed his aspirations to be governor of California. No one, however, doubted his incredible ability to communicate with a crowd. In order to succeed in his campaign, Reagan had to be packaged as an outsider - an antidote to politics as usual. A highly sophisticated team of marketers and ad-men turned the scary rig...

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award****The definitive history of nuclear weapons—**from the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project—this epic work details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.This sweeping account begins in the 19th cen...

'This is the book I've been waiting for - for years. It's personal, historical, political, and it speaks to where we are now' Benjamin ZephaniahFrom the first time he was stopped and searched as a child, to the day he realised his mum was white, to his first encounters with racist teachers - race and class have shaped Akala's life and outlook. In this unique book he takes his own experiences and widens them out to look at the social, histo...

Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in NonfictionFinalist for The California Book Award in NonfictionThe San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year ListForeign Affairs Best Books of the YearIn These Times “Best Books of the Year"Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books ListLitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week”

Peter Clarke brilliantly challenges the commonly held view of Britain in the twentieth century as a nation in decline. Adopting a wide perspective, he examines the political. social and economic changes that transformed Britain. He looks at how jobs and prices, food and shelter, and education and welfare, shaped society and explores such areas as architecture, sport and popular culture. Embracing a century of national experience, Hope and Glory superbly conveys the diverse aspects of three...

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would ...

Before Easter 1916 Dublin had been a city much like any other British city, comparable to Bristol or Liverpool and part of a complex, deep-rooted British world. Many of Dublin's inhabitants wanted to weaken or terminate London's rule but there remained a vast and conflicting range of visions of that future: far more immediate was the unfolding disaster of the First World War that had put 'home rule' issues on ice for the duration. The devastating events of that Easter changed everything. B...

Chris Hedges on the most taboo topics in America, with David Talbot.The War on Terror is a profitable crusade against convenient enemies. Muslim rage” is an understandable response to US state terror. Rising oligarchy in America has made democracy a sham and turned the electoral process into an increasingly absurd circus. Police violence against minorities is part of a systematic effort to crush social discontent. Proliferating violence against women’s health clin...

Benjamin Disraeli was the most gifted parliamentarian of the nineteenth century and a superb orator, writer and wit - but how much do we really know about the man behind the words?'As Douglas Hurd and Edward Young point out in their splendidly written, finely judged and thoroughly persuasive book, a vast chasm yawned between the real Disraeli and his posthumous reinvention' Dominic Sandbrook, SUNDAY TIMES'Not only, they tell us in this vigorously debunking ...