A STRONG WORDS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2025'CHILLING AND THRILLING' JOHN BANVILLE'IRRESISTIBLE STORYTELLING' THE TIMESOn Tuesday morning, 23rd September 1975, the corpses of three unmarried siblings, last surviving members of the ancient Luxton clan of Winkleigh, North Devon, were found on their remote farm. All three had had their heads blown off. Robbie's cheeks and neck had been stabbed; Frances had a br...

This is the story of two British men from very different social backgrounds, who both joined a new Pals battalion during World War I.To encourage men to volunteer, the British Army established Pals battalions that allowed men who enlisted together to serve together during the First World War. One of these men was Vivian Simpson, a 31-year-old solicitor who was well known in the city; partly because he was an outstanding footballer, playing for Sheffield Wednesday a...

John Henry Newman was the most eminent English-speaking Christian thinker and writer of the past two hundred years. James Joyce hailed him the 'greatest' prose stylist of the Victorian age.A problematic campaign to canonise Newman started fifty years ago. After many delays John Paul II declared him a 'Venerable'. Then Pope Benedict XVI, a keen student of Newman's works, pressed for his beatification. Finally, in 2019 and after authentication of the second of two miracles attributed...

The “explosive” (The New York Times) bestseller that “redefined the history of the twentieth century” (The Washington Post )This shocking book was the first account to tell the whole truth about Pope Pius XII's actions during World War II, and it remains the definitive account of that era. It sparked a firestorm of controversy both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Award-winning journalist John Cornwell has also included in this seminal work...

Church, Interrupted: Havoc & Hope: The Tender Revolt of Pope Francis is a revealing portrait of Pope Francis's hopeful yet controversial efforts to recreate the Catholic Church to become, once again, a welcoming place of empathy, love, and inclusiveness.Bestselling author, Vanity Fair contributor, and papal biographer John Cornwell tells the gripping insider story of Pope Francis's bid to bring renewal and hope to a crisis-plagued Church and the world at l...

An eye-opening account of the rise of science in Germany through to Hitler’s regime, and the frightening Nazi experiments that occurred during the ReichA shocking account of Nazi science, and a compelling look at the the dramatic rise of German science in the nineteenth century, its preeminence in the early twentieth, and the frightening developments that led to its collapse in 1945, this is the compelling story of German scientists under Hitler’s regime. Weaving the history of sci...

On September 14, 1989, Joseph Wesbecker entered a Louisville, Kentucky printing plant and shot twenty people with an automatic rifle before turning the gun on himself. Wesbecker had been severely depressed and was taking Prozac, and the families of the victims sued Prozac's manufacturer, Eli Lilly, on the grounds that the popular antidepressant had caused Wesbecker's deranged mental state. The resulting trial instigated unprecedented research into the mind of a "spree killer" — and raised ...

Over more than a quarter of a century, John Paul II has firmly set his stamp on the billion-member strong Catholic Church for future generations and he has become one of the most influential political figures in the world. His key role in the downfall of communism in Europe, as well as his apologies for the Catholic Church’s treatment of Jews and to victims of the Inquisition, racism, and religious wars, won him worldwide admiration. Yet his papacy has also been marked by what many perceiv...

Our lives, states of health, relationships, behaviour, experiences of the natural world, and the technologies that shape our contemporary existence are subject to a superfluity of competing, multi-faceted and sometimes incompatible explanations. Widespread confusion about the nature of 'explanation' and its scope and limits pervades popular exposition of the natural sciences, popular history and philosophy of science. This fascinating and intriguing book explores the way explanations work,...

John Cornwell evokes a vanished time and way of life in this moving and, at times, troubling memoir of an adolescence spent in the isolated all-male world of the seminary.Born into a destitute family with a dominating Irish-Catholic mother and an absconding father during World War II in London, John Cornwell's childhood was deeply dysfunctional. When he was thirteen years old he was sent to Cotton College, a remote seminary for boys in the West Midlands countryside. For the next fi...

A bestselling journalist exposes the connection between the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis and the practice of confession.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Germany was the Mecca of science and technology in the world. However, by the beginning of the First World War, Germany began to display some of the features that would blight the conduct of ideal science through the rest of the century.After Hitler came into power in 1933, science and technology were quickly pressed into service by racist, xenophobic idealologies. From 1939 to the war's end, scientists working under military control began rese...