Profile Books

The plight of John McCarthy MBE captured the imagination of the entire country when he was abducted by Islamic Jihad in Beirut in 1986, and spent 1943 days in captivity in Beirut - the UK's longest held hostage - until his release in 1991. He'll be talking with Dr Emily Mayhew, the military medical historian specialising in casualty and its long-term outcomes and author of Wounded and A Heavy Reckoning, about the impact of trauma and conflict on people, soldiers or civilians. They will consider the human capacity for conflict and our astonishing ability to survive the suffering it causes - something John knows from first hand experience.

How do we craft identities? Is identity personal? Or are the identities that shape the world, our struggles and our hopes actually social ones, shared with countless others? What roles do family, nationality, culture, class, race and religion play in the shaping of our sense of self? Kwame Anthony Appiah challenges our assumptions about how identity works, weaving personal anecdotes with historical, cultural and literary examples to explore the entanglements within the stories we tell ourselves. He examines how identities are created by conflict, questioning misleading myths and offering a new way for us to think about ourselves and our communities. Louise Erdrich says of Appiah's The Lies That Bind: 'Understanding what draws us together and what tears us apart lies at the core of democracy. This is a vital book, an antidote to violent nativism, and a key to success in the human experiment.' This event is an opportunity to listen as Appiah - in the words of Zadie Smith - 'dismantles the humbug, dogma, pseudo-science and propaganda that have long dogged our attempts to discuss "identity" and offers in their place a practical and philosophical tool kit, as subtly radical in its aims as it is humane in application.'

Mary Shelley was brought up by her father in a house filled with radical thinkers, poets, philosophers and writers of the day. Aged sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, embarking on a relationship that was lived on the move across Britain and Europe, as she coped with debt, infidelity and the deaths of three children, before early widowhood changed her life forever. Most astonishingly, it was while she was still a teenager that Mary composed her canonical novel Frankenstein, creating two of our most enduring archetypes today. The life story is well-known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character - friend, intellectual, lover and mother - trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly. Published for the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, this is a major new work of biography by a prize-winning writer and poet.