Simon appleby

Wellcome Collection and Profile Books are thrilled to announce the acquisition of HOW TO STAY SANE IN AN AGE OF DIVISION, a short manifesto from award winning novelist and internationally-acclaimed human rights advocate Elif Shafak. Profile Editorial Director Cecily Gayford acquired English Language UK & Commonwealth rights from Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown.

In HOW TO STAY SANE IN AN AGE OF DIVISION, Shafak argues that twenty years ago, we lived in a time of optimism where it seemed as though fascism had been defeated and liberal democracy had triumphed. Today, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme – we have entered the age of pessimism. In a rallying cry for hopefulness, Elif Shafak explores how writing can nurture democracy, tolerance and progress. Drawing on her own experiences and drawing upon her TED talks, Shafak examines the urgent questions of our time in this passionate plea for hope and truth.

“As the world becomes increasingly polarized, beset with anxiety, anger and tribalism, it’s time for us to turn to the art of storytelling for wisdom, connectivity and much-needed empathy,” says Elif Shafak.    

Cecily Gayford commented: “Elif is an extraordinary, inspiring voice even at the best of times – and now, in what has come to feel like it might just be the worst of times, her words are a vital resource for us all. We are extraordinarily proud to be publishing How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division at Wellcome Collection, a book that offers clarity and hope to everyone who reads it.” 

Acting Publisher at Wellcome, Anjali Bulley, said, “We are beyond delighted to be publishing award-winning author Elif Shafak at Wellcome Collection. In this age of uncertainty and misinformation, there is an urgent need for such a voice of clarity and compassion.”

Elif Shafak is an award-winning novelist and the most widely read female writer in Turkey. Her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2019, and her work has been translated into more than fifty languages. An advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak holds a PhD in political science, is an inspiring public speaker and twice a TED global speaker. She has taught at universities in Turkey, the US and the UK, including Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow. In 2017 she was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better. Shafak was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019.

HOW TO STAY SANE IN AN AGE OF DIVISION will be published in July 2020 by Wellcome Collection and Profile Books.  

Follow @explorewellcome, @profilebooks and @Elif_Safak  

‘There are few better guides to the glories of reefs than Callum Roberts. Reef Life is a vibrant memoir.’ Guardian

We are past the point where we can ignore the climate crisis and Professor of Marine Conservation at York University, Callum Roberts, has written a memoir to show us just why we should be doing everything in our power to conserve our mesmerising coral reefs. 

His stories allow us priviliged access to, and understanding of, the science of our oceans and reefs and will inspire you to believe that we can transform ourselves in time to rescue the future of our seas.

Follow @Prof_CallumYork on Twitter

Order your copy from Waterstones, Hive or Amazon

 

Looking back

York, UK, 2014

Sun has lifted the mist, driving away the early chill and touching the trees beyond my office window with autumn copper and gold. It is the beginning of a new academic year and there is an energy and excitement about campus today. Friends greet one another on the walkway outside and share stories of their summers in noisy laughter. Other faces, hesitant, expectant, lost, consult maps and smartphones. In half an hour I will meet twenty-five new students enrolled on our Masters course in Marine Environmental Management. Julie, the course director and my wife of twenty-seven years, has just passed by to check I am ready.

It feels almost like yesterday, looking back. That first taste of a coral reef remains as vivid today as it was in 1982, so often have I replayed it in my mind: the cobalt intensity of sea, the pause at the reef crest, the plunge, then revelation. Few moments in life can compare with that of sudden arrival on a reef; that headlong rush from the realm of air and people, buildings and cars, into the fluid domain of creatures that crowd and jostle, fearless and unconcerned.

After over thirty years of diving, I have never lost the sense of excitement on entering the water, but I no longer dive alone. I miss the solitude and freedom, but my university would never allow it today. Mind you, the thought of letting my own students do the things I once did brings on a cold sweat. I would happily head for the reef edge, tank strapped to my back, with little more than a wave and a ‘back in a couple of hours!’ shout. I wasn’t even certified to dive on my first trip to Saudi, not having completed the open-water tests. One time I reached the reef crest after a hazardous wade through churning breakers only to find I had left my fins on the beach. I went for the dive anyway, wading along the seabed like the hard helmet divers of old. Another entry in my dive log reads: ‘Unfortunately the compressor had been playing up, so the tank was only 20 per cent full. Fortunately, the reefs are very shallow here (6 m) so the efficiency of the census was not impaired. No buddy.’

To help write this book, I retrieved a horde of letters home to Julie, then my girlfriend, from a tin box in the attic. I am lucky to have married her for many reasons, but now have another: my letters were spared the bonfire of departed love. Rereading them, the memories flood back. So many things have changed. The letters show how fascinated I was by sharks, and frightened too. The movie Jaws had recently kindled the primal horror of becoming prey, reminding me that I was a clumsy intruder in a medium the sharks had mastered millions of years before. Moreover, the derring-do stories of pioneer divers like Hans Hass and Jacques Cousteau were full of encounters with ‘man-eaters’, many of which ended with a length of steel through the shark! So I savoured the excitement and unpredictability of their appearances. I am still drawn to sharks, all the more so because there are so few today compared to then: man eats shark happens millions of times more often every year than the other way around.1

But because of the recent collapse in shark numbers, it is hard to separate hype from reality in the accounts of early explorers.

Were they really so dangerous? I recently came across a telling passage in William Beebe’s The Arcturus Adventure. Born in New York in 1877, Beebe was a scientist at the New York Zoological Society and a great writer of natural history. His books were bestsellers and if anyone had an incentive to spice descriptions of sharks with machismo, it would be him. Published in 1926, The Arcturus Adventure tells the story of Beebe’s expedition to the eastern Pacific and of his visit to Cocos Island, 500 kilometres from the coast of Costa Rica. Cocos is a jungle-clad shard of land that had, and still has in depleted numbers, some of the sharkiest seas on the planet.

By coincidence, Beebe visited the same year as the big game fisherman Zane Grey, also a writer, and quotes Grey’s description of encounters with Cocos sharks: ‘It was a marvellous sight to peer down into that exquisitely clear water and see fish as thickly laid as fence pickets… We saw yellow-tail and amberjack swim among the sharks as if they were all friendly. But the instant we hooked a poor, luckless fish he was set upon by these voracious monsters and devoured.’ Having caught and killed a shark, Grey disposes of the corpse over the side of the boat: ‘A cloud of blood spread like smoke. Then I watched a performance that beggared description. Sharks came thick upon the scene from everywhere. Some far down seemed as long as our boat. They massed around the carcass of their slain comrade and a terrible battle ensued. Such swift action, such ferocity, such unparalleled instinct to kill and eat!’

Less than a month later, William Beebe anchored in the same bay where he and the rest of his staff ‘were diving in helmets and walking about on the bottom, with these self-same ‘man-eating’ sharks swimming by and around and over us, dashing at and taking our hooked fish, but, except for a mild curiosity, paying no attention to ourselves. It was as unexpected to me as to anyone, yet I will go on record as saying it is perfectly safe.’

So that settles it. It isn’t sharks that have changed so much as the way we see them. The bold adventurers of today don’t fight sharks underwater but commune with them, cageless and exposed, even among the most feared tigers and great whites. I once sat next to a South African on a plane who had pioneered out-of-the-cage encounters with great whites, which he somewhat disconcertingly called his ‘puppies’. Rupert has joined this shark-loving band. After a long stint at the University of York and then as director of a Scottish marine station, he joined the Save our Seas Foundation as chief scientist. In a pleasing about-turn from the indifference which many Saudis showed to marine life in the early 1980s, Save our Seas was established by a rich Saudi Arabian and is dedicated to studying and saving ocean giants. Its work is desperately needed today.

The unalloyed optimism that flies off the pages of my letters home has been tempered by experience. When was it that I first sensed something big happening to coral reefs? Right from the start I remember an argument raging among established scientists about whether coral reefs were robust or fragile. Certainly, there was plenty of evidence that reefs could easily be damaged by careless use. It is telling that in my very first letter home, back in 1982, I write of the damage done by construction of Jeddah’s Corniche road. In 1980, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature had just established a group to consider the protection of coral reefs. I met its chairman in 1983 at a conference, an elegant, white-jacketed Frenchman named Bernard Salvat who was kind enough to invite me to his research station on the French Polynesian island of Moorea two years later. In his first statement of the group’s purpose, published in 1980 and titled ‘Death for the coral reefs’ (which sounds more like a message of intent than a clarion call for protection; something lost in translation, one hopes), he listed his main coral reef worries as fishing, shell collecting, coastal development and mining for building materials. There is no hint of the trouble ahead.

The robust/fragile debate burned out after a few years when people noticed that members of the robust camp were mostly geologists, while those taking the fragile view were ecologists who spent their time with living reefs. Coral reefs might be prone to local damage and collapse, but over the long run they would endure, or so we believed.

Looking back, it seems that the first events to rock our confidence in the permanence of coral reefs, in their solid, vibrant immortality, were unfolding at the time of my first trip to Saudi Arabia. This was in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean in late 1982 and early 1983, when an almighty El Niño, a periodic reversal of ocean currents and airflow over the tropical Pacific, stewed reefs in a pool of overheated water. The corals lost their bright colours and turned deathly white when water temperatures rose to excess, a phenomenon soon dubbed ‘mass bleaching’. Hot water causes the delicate symbiosis of the coral animal and their plant-like microbes to break down. Mutual benefit turns to cost and the coral either kills or expels its zooxanthellae. A bleached coral is a starving coral; if conditions don’t soon swing back to normal, it dies. Excessive warmth led to the almost complete annihilation of corals in the Galápagos, a catastrophe from which they have never recovered.

Meanwhile, an unknown affliction was sweeping the Caribbean that would destroy almost every long-spine sea urchin by the end of 1984. To those who have ever been impaled by an urchin, this might seem a matter of little regret, but it unleashed a chain of events with terrible consequences that would only be fully appreciated years later. For the moment, untroubled by such news, I was content to follow my ambition to understand how reefs could sustain so many species. It would not be until 2001 that I would adopt the moniker of Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York, substituting the word ‘Conservation’ for ‘Science’. As in past years, I find the new students on our course united by a passion for the ocean. They share my younger self’s love of the sea, but where I was unconcerned by any sense that this world might be threatened, they know it is and are here to learn how to protect and look after it better. In just thirty years, humanity has gained the upper hand in planetary affairs and the environment is suffering. But still they bubble with enthusiasm and hope. I am careful not to dent their optimism.

1. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed by people each year, compared to an average of six people killed by sharks. Only one in twelve shark attacks is fatal.

 

What do bomb-carrying bats and listening devices implanted into specially-trained cats have in common?

Surprisingly, or perhaps less so in the bizarre undercover world of espionage, both bats and cats formed central roles in military intelligence plans gone awry.

In Nuking the Moon, curator of the International Spy Museum Vince Houghton traces the unique, terrifying and hilarious story of history left on the drawing board.

Read an extract at nukingthemoon.com

Follow @intelhistorian on Twitter

Do you love cheese? Then get yourself to one of expert cheesemonger Ned Palmer’s events, where he’ll be discussing the finest cheeses and how they tell our history in a delicious journey across Britain and Ireland.

Revisit beloved old favourites like Cheddar and Wensleydale and meet fresh innovations like the Irish Cashel Blue or the rambunctious Renegade Monk. Along the way we learn the craft and culture of cheesemaking from the eccentric and engaging characters who have revived and reinvented farmhouse and artisan traditions. And we get to know the major cheese styles – the blues, washed rinds, semi-softs and, unique to the British Isles, the territorials – and discover how best to enjoy them, on a cheeseboard with a glass of Riesling, or as a Welsh rarebit alongside a pint of Pale Ale.

TOUR DATES

1st Nov – Stratford Literature festival
8th Nov – Nantwitch Bookshop
12th Nov – Cambridge Heffers Bookshop 
13th Nov – Chorleywood Bookshop
19th Nov – Richmond Literature festival 
21st Nov – Atkinson-Pryce Books
22nd Nov – Toppings Edinburgh 
6th Dec – Toppings Bath 
7th Dec – Blackwells Oxford 
11th Dec – Red Lion Books, Colchester

Introduction

FRESH OUT OF RED LEICESTER

Working as a cheesemonger, you get to hear the Monty Python cheese sketch a lot. You know the one: John Cleese attempts to buy cheese and reels off a list of forty-three varieties, only to be cheerfully rebuffed on each request by Michael Palin as Mr Wensleydale the cheesemonger (‘I’m afraid we’re fresh out of Red Leicester, sir’). People often feel moved to perform a bit of it when they enter a cheese shop. Fair enough – some of them do it quite well, and I’m happy to wait. But the curious thing is that, when the sketch was first performed in 1972, it wasn’t far off the mark.

For, back in the Dark Ages of the early 1970s, you would have been hard-pressed to buy a decent piece of British cheese. Of course, there was Stilton for Christmas, and blocks of Cheddar the rest of the year, maybe even some Cheshire or Lancashire. But that was pretty much your lot. British cheese had become virtually extinct, as had the tradition of ‘farmhouse’ dairies. Stilton aside, the cheese of Britain and Ireland was virtually all factory produced – acceptable perhaps for a Welsh rarebit, or as a cube on a cocktail stick poised between a bottled olive and a pineapple chunk. But if you wanted ‘fancy cheese’, for a cheeseboard, it was French or Italian – and even then only half a dozen kinds.

Which makes this book something of a miracle. The British Isles today boasts more than eight hundred named cheeses, from soft cheeses like the fresh and delicate goat’s milk Perroche to full-on, funky washed-rinds like the aptly named Renegade Monk. 8 Introduction Fresh out of Red Leicester Renegade is also a great example of a new current in cheesemaking – as a combination of washed-rind and blue, it’s a modern mash up of two distinct cheese styles. At the same time there has been a revival of some classic farmhouse varieties, which had all but disappeared. Rich, smooth and earthy, Sparkenhoe Red Leicester is a great example of this resurgence of tradition. You can buy these local, artisanal cheeses at farmers’ markets and dedicated cheese shops, and there are decent arrays at any respectable supermarket. Charles de Gaulle famously asked, ‘How can you govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?’ Well, we too have become that country.

But how did all this happen? How did we create dozens of regional varieties, in farmhouses across the British Isles? How did the first British cheese get made, for that matter? How was the world of cheesemaking revolutionised in the Middle Ages by the labours of monks? Why did we then allow our cheeses to disappear, in the first half of the twentieth century, and just how did we get them back in its last decades? That is the subject of this book, and, as you read on, I hope to reveal that its title is not as fanciful as it might first appear. You can, in a very real sense, explore the history of the British Isles through the cheeses its people have made, from the arrival of farming in Neolithic times right through to the present.

I have divided the history of the British Isles into ten periods, each of them accompanied by a cheese that characterises the era. Of course, I’m not saying that Stilton is the only cheese that mattered in the eighteenth century, nor that the only way to look at the Industrial Revolution is with a ploughman’s lunch of Cheddar. But the cheese that heads each chapter has something to tell you about that time. I’ll recount the stories of how these cheeses came to be, why they were popular at that time, how they might have tasted or looked, who made them, who ate them, what those people’s lives might have been like, and how they and their cheeses were shaped by the currents of history, religion, war, plague, supermarkets and the Milk Marketing Board.

Along the way, we’ll meet cheeses that have been lost and found, revived, reinvented, industrialised, or returned to farmhouse traditions. I’ll share my own cheesemonger lore and show how to pick a really great example of a particular cheese – and what you might want to consider drinking with it to enhance its flavours. I will also, I hope, explain something of the magic of cheesemaking. How a liquid as bland as milk can be transformed into a rich, savoury and complex food that has graced the tables of the British Isles for thousands of years.

G.K. Chesterton lamented that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’, but one at least wasn’t. In November 1935, T.S. Eliot wrote to The Times in response to a letter by John Squire, suggesting that a statue be erected to the inventor of Stilton cheese. While Eliot appreciated Squire’s ‘spirited defence of Stilton’, he thought that putting up a statue was not going far enough. ‘If British cheese is to be brought back from the brink of extinction, a Society for the Preservation of Ancient Cheeses must be formed without delay’, he wrote. Eliot was a big Cheshire fan, prizing a ‘noble Old Cheshire’ against a Stilton any day, but quite rightly he finishes his letter with this stirring call: ‘this is no time for disputes between eaters of English cheese. The situation is too precarious and we must stick together.’ Happily for us, the situation is no longer quite so precarious…

Follow Ned Palmer on Twitter and Instagram @cheesetastingco, and search #ACheesemongersHistoryoftheBritishIsles for cheesy goodness.

A London cycle courier with a taste for adventure, Emily Chappell entered an extraordinary new race – The Transcontinental – in which riders must find their own way, entirely unassisted, across Europe in the shortest time possible. On her second attempt, she won the women’s event, covering nearly 4,000 miles in 13 days and ten hours, sleeping in short bursts wherever exhaustion took her.

Where There’s a Will is a book about a normal person finding the capacity to do something extraordinary; the paradoxes of comradeship, competition, vulnerability and will and the shock of grief, combined in a beautifully written and very human story.

Join Emily for an event that will be full of inspiration and jaw-dropping anecdotes.

12th Oct – Cheltenham Literature Festival
2nd Nov – Rouleur Classic, London
12th Nov – The Verdict, Brighton
13th Nov – Dynamo Cafe, London
14th Nov – Rossiter Books, Ross-on-Wye
16th Nov – Kendal Mountain Festival
19th Nov – Mainstreet Trading Co., St Boswells
23rd Nov – Hermon Chapel Arts Centre, Oswestry
25th Nov – Great Oak Bookshop, Llanidloes
27th Nov – Ride My Bike Cafe, Cardiff
10th Dec – Buxton Adventure Festival

Follow @emilychappell on Twitter

 

When did you last make time for play?

Today, we don’t get nearly enough play in our lives. At school, kids are drilled on exams, while at home we’re all glued to our phones and screens. Former children’s laureate and bestselling author, Michael Rosen, is here to show us how to put this right – and why it matters so much for creativity, resilience and much more.

Packed with silliness, activities and prompts for creative indoor and outdoor play for all ages – with specially illustrated pages for everything from doodling to word play and after-dinner games.

 

Buy your copy:

Waterstones

Wellcome

Amazon

Hive

When barefoot running guru Christopher McDougall takes in a neglected donkey, his aim is to get Sherman back to reasonable health. But Sherman is ill-tempered, obstinate and uncooperative – and it’s clear his poor treatment has made him deeply fearful of humans. Chris knows that donkeys need a purpose – they are working, pack animals – and so when he learns of the sport of Burro Racing or running with donkeys, he sets out to give Sherman something worth living for. With the aid of Chris’s menagerie on his farm in rural Pennsylvania, his wife Mika and their friends and neighbours including the local Amish population, Sherman begins to build trust in Chris. To give him a purpose, they start to run together. But what Sherman gains in confidence and meaning is something we all need: a connection with nature, the outdoors, with movement. And as Chris learns, the side benefits of exercise and animal contact are surprising, helping with mental and physical health in unexpected ways.

 

On October 8, 2019, Profile Books will publish MINDF*CK: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World by Christopher Wylie. The book will also be simultaneously released in the US by Random House. For the first time, WYLIE, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, tells the inside story of the data mining and psychological manipulation behind the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum, connecting Facebook, WikiLeaks, Russian intelligence, and international hackers.

Buy your copy:

Waterstones
Amazon
Hive 

Wylie’s decision to become a whistleblower prompted the largest data crime investigation in history. His story is both exposé and dire warning about a sudden problem born of very new and powerful capabilities. It has not only exposed the profound vulnerabilities and profound carelessness in the enormous companies that drive the attention economy, it has also exposed the profound vulnerabilities of democracy itself. What happened in 2016 was just a trial run. Ruthless actors are coming for your data, and they want to control what you think.

UK rights were acquired by Profile publisher Helen Conford and editorial director Ed Lake from Matilda Forbes Watson at William Morris Endeavor.

Lake said: ‘I thought I knew the Cambridge Analytica story backwards but reading Mindf*ck felt like having the lights switched on. There aren’t many people who understand the new landscape of political control like Christopher Wylie, and perhaps none who are willing to go on the record. Mindf*ck is an astonishing journey through the underworlds of modern power, lit up with savage humour and guided by a steely sense of purpose. Amid talk of riots on the streets, this is the riot we need.’

Christopher Wylie has been called ‘the millennials’ first great whistleblower’ by The Guardian and ‘a pink-haired, nose-ringed oracle sent from the future’ by The New York Times. He is known for his role in setting up—and then taking down—Cambridge Analytica. His revelations exposing the rampant misuse of data rocked Silicon Valley and led to some of the largest multinational investigations into data crime ever. Born in British Columbia, Canada, he studied law at the London School of Economics before moving into cultural data science and fashion trend forecasting. He lives in London, England.

Buy your copy:

Waterstones
Amazon
Hive 

Follow @chrisinsilico on Twitter

#Mindfck

For press enquiries, please contact:

[email protected] | 020 7841 6306

[email protected] | 020 7841 3382

Anxious? Angry? Waking up in the middle of the night to worry about plastic pollution, Brexit and why everything seems to be so horrible all the time? 

Us too.

Help is here, in the shape of Stuart Heritage’s hilarious Bedtime Stories for Worried Liberals. Put down your phone, log off Twitter, and let yourself be lulled to sleep by stories from a world where Brexit disappears in a puff of smoke, Waitrose is free, and Fairy Godmothers look a lot like Barack Obama.

In the week that David Cameron launches his memoir, we share with you Camerella, the story of how David Cameron was granted one wish – and asked to go to Wilderness Festival…

Follow @stuartheritage on Twitter

Pre-order your copy from Waterstones, Hive or Amazon

 

 

Camerella

Once upon a time, big news came to town. The king was to hold a ball, the biggest ball in the land, full of dancing and merriment. It was to be called The Wilderness Festival, and it was to be headlined by Groove Armada. Everyone was invited.

Well, everyone except for David Cameron. He longed to attend the ball, but his wicked stepmother always refused, telling him that he couldn’t go anywhere until he’d cleaned up all the mess. So instead he passed his days glumly staring through the window of his £25,000 shepherd’s hut and dreaming of what could have been. Oh, the things he’d do if he ever got to visit the Wilderness Festival. He’d drink beer. He’d smoke cigarettes. He’d dress up in a nice anorak and just sort of wander around the place weighed down by a cloak of pure sadness.

But instead he had to stay in his hut. When the day of the ball came, David Cameron watched as his wicked stepmother, his wicked stepsisters and his wife Samantha all laced up their most beautiful frocks, put on their Barbour jackets and set off to the festival in a fleet of golden coaches.

‘Goodbye!’ he called out to them. ‘Have a wonderful time!’ But nobody replied, except for his stepmother, who simply shouted ‘Clean up all the mess!’

David Cameron slumped down in his chair, surrounded by Post-It notes covered with rejected titles for his memoir, including This Wasn’t My Fault and I Just Want To Go Outside Again, and he sighed. ‘I wish I could go to the Wilderness Festival too.’

And then – boomf – a fairy godmother appeared before him in a puff of smoke.

‘You called?’ said the fairy godmother.

‘I don’t think I did,’ replied David Cameron. ‘Who are you?’

‘Why, your fairy godmother, of course,’ she answered. ‘I have come to grant your one true wish! By the way, nice shed you’ve got here.’

‘It’s actually a shepherd’s hut,’ replied David Cameron. ‘But thank you. I sort of wish it hadn’t come to single-handedly represent the gilded isolation that I forced upon myself the moment I called the referendum all those years ago, but I suppose beggars can’t be choosers, ha ha.’

The fairy godmother had never heard a laugh quite like it in all of her days. It sounded incredibly sad, like a collapsed circus tent. So disturbed was she, in fact, that she instantly tried to change the subject.

‘What colour is this, anyway?’ she asked, gesturing vaguely at the walls.

‘Clunch’, repeated David Cameron. “It’s a Farrow and Ball shade. You can look it up online and everything’.

‘I beg your pardon?’ asked the fairy godmother.

‘Clunch,’ repeated David Cameron. ‘It’s a Farrow and Ball shade.’

‘Weird,’ said the fairy godmother. ‘But now you must tell me the wish you would like to be granted.’

David Cameron gulped. This was really going to be it. This was the moment where he would finally be given everything he ever wanted.

‘I wish to go to the Wilderness Festival,’ he smiled.

The fairy godmother looked confused. ‘Sorry, what?’ she stammered.

‘The Wilderness Festival,’ he replied. ‘I would like one ticket to the Wilderness Festival please.’

‘That’s your wish?’

‘Yes, that’s my wish.’

‘Not going back in time and reversing your decision to call the referendum?’

David Cameron stopped dead in his tracks. He hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps she had a point. Perhaps he could choose to go back in time and take a harder line against the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party, preventing the referendum and the Brexit chaos and Britain’s slow slide towards irreparable international irrelevance.

‘Nah,’ he said after a pause. ‘One ticket to Wilderness please.’

The fairy godmother was furious. The whole reason she had visited David Cameron in the first place was to offer him one last shot at redeeming his tattered reputation. But no, here he was, spunking it all away on a ticket to watch Tom Odell perform to a crowd of disinterested toffs. She couldn’t let him blow his big chance like this. She had to think of something to salvage this mess.

‘Let’s put it to a vote,’ she said.

‘A what?’ whispered David Cameron, suddenly terrified.

‘A vote!’ said the fairy godmother. ‘What a brilliant idea!’

So the fairy godmother invited one hundred of her fairy godmother friends to the hut, so that she and Cameron could argue their respective cases to them – remain in the shed or leave for the festival – before the godmothers had a decisive say in the matter.

One by one the fairy godmothers boomf-ed into view, and David Cameron went first. He argued that Wilderness would let him indulge all his favourite hobbies, like smoking cigarettes and drinking lager and taking slightly shamefaced ironic selfies with people who openly disliked him. He made beer mats extolling the benefits of Wilderness. He invented wild promises and painted them on the side of a bus. When he finished, an uneasy silence fell over the group.

Then it was the fairy godmother’s turn. She put much less effort into her argument, because she was arguing to a group of other fairy godmothers, and surely none of them would be stupid enough to buy any of Cameron’s crap.

Then came the vote. The fairy godmothers huddled together for a few minutes, before the leader stepped forward.

‘The fairy godmothers have made their decision,’ she stated. ‘We vote forty-eight in favour of time travel, and fifty-two in favour of Wilderness.’

‘Score!’ said David Cameron, pumping his arm like a stockbroker on a tennis court.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ spluttered the fairy godmother. ‘Are you sure you all fully understood the consequences of the vote?’

‘Yes, they’re sure,’ crowed David Cameron. ‘Now give me my ticket.’

The fairy godmother thought about this for a moment, and then made the only logical decision available to her.

‘I quit,’ she said.

David Cameron was appalled. ‘You can’t quit! Not without delivering me my ticket! This whole vote was your idea! Just because you failed to take the electorate seriously during your campaign, it doesn’t mean you get to swan off scot-free and leave everyone else to clean up your … ah, no, OK, I see what’s going on now. OK, that’s fair enough.’

And just like that – boomf! – the fairy godmother vanished in another puff of smoke.

David Cameron looked at the fifty-two fairy godmothers who’d voted his way. A flicker of hope flashed across his eyes. ‘Which of you will deliver your promise to send me to Wilderness?’ he asked.

From the back of the group, two fairy godmothers pushed their way forwards. It was Theresa May and David Davis.

‘We will!’ they cried.

‘Oh fuck,’ muttered David Cameron.

As Westminster descends into the ‘chaos’ promised to us by tabloids for so long, we’re turning to the experts to help us make sense of what’s going on. Our authors offer everything from deep political insight to a reminder that all our cursing might actually be good for us. Here’s our reading list to help you through a very unpredictable autumn.

Join us on Twitter & Instagram for more books (both Brexit related – and not). 

---

 

From the presenter of Talking Politics podcast

Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Theresa May, Donald Trump: each had different motivations, methods, and paths, but they all sought the highest office. And yet when they reached their goal, they often found that the power they had imagined was illusory. They faced bureaucratic obstructions, but often the biggest obstruction was their own character. 

David Runciman explores how personal histories help to define successes and failures in office. These portraits show what characters are most effective in these offices. Could this be a blueprint for good and effective leadership in an age lacking good leaders?

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

---

 

What it means to be a minister in the UK government

The ministers of the UK are a cast of roles that expand and contract based on the whims and political needs of the Prime Minister. Within their portfolios those MPs and Lords are able to reshape whole sectors of British society.

Any misstep or scandal can invite media attention, public outcry, and their swift departure. At the same time, their resignations can shatter political alliances and bring down Prime Ministers and even governments. In Fifteen Minutes of Power, Peter Riddell draws on interviews with former ministers, conducted on behalf of the Institute of Government, to reveal the fraught existence of these powerful men and women.

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

---

 

Sunday Times Bestseller  

In the past few decades, legislatures throughout the world have suffered from gridlock. In democracies, laws and policies are just as soon unpicked as made. Moreover, courts often overturn decisions made by elected representatives.

In the absence of effective politicians, many turn to the courts to solve political and moral questions. Rulings from the Supreme Courts in the United States and United Kingdom, or the European court in Strasbourg may seem to end the debate but the division and debate does not subside. In fact, the absence of democratic accountability leads to radicalisation. Judicial overreach cannot make up for the shortcomings of politicians. This is especially acute in the field of human rights. For instance, who should decide on abortion or prisoners’ rights to vote, elected politicians or appointed judges?

Expanding on arguments first laid out in the 2019 Reith Lectures, Jonathan Sumption argues that the time has come to return some problems to the politicians.

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

---

 

‘Anyone who wishes to understand why Brexit is so intractable should read this book.’ The Times

A history of the region at the centre of Brexit negotiations. Baffled about the backstop? Learn how we got here. 
Did you know:

• The border is approx 310 miles long and includes 208 crossing points
• It runs along the middle of 11 roads, divides rivers, cuts bridges and even the odd house in two
• Up to 35,000 people commute across it daily
• For comparison, the entire border between the European Union and the countries to its east has a mere 137 crossings
• The 1998 Good Friday ended years of Army checkpoints, closed crossings (just a handful remained open during the Troubles) and violence.

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

---

 

Worried about all the effing and blinding you seem to be doing at the moment? Don’t be. In her brilliant science book, Emma Byrne proves that swearing reduce physical pain, help stroke victims recover their language, and encourage people to work together as a team.

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

---

 

‘Mind-expanding’ Guardian

Learn how to simplify complex decisions without over-simplifying them. Discover the power of analogies and the dangers of false equivalences. Find out how people construct misleading arguments, and how to always be right.

A practical and inspiring guide to decoding the modern world – and argue your case, whatever you believe about Brexit.

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

 

---

 

For those sweet, sweet moments when everything is going horribly wrong for those you really don’t like.

Theresa May would appreciate this, we reckon.

Buy your copy from:
Waterstones
Hive
Amazon

 

 

 

 

Join us on Twitter & instagram & sign up for our newsletter to get our book news straight to your inbox.

‘Nobody evokes the transformative joy of cycling the way Fournel does here … magical’ – Herbie Sykes

“I ride to rest and to tire myself out; I ride to do myself good and to do myself harm”

… one of the many cycling paradoxes explored in this unique and delightful book.

“I’ve never got over this miracle”

Starting with the childhood joy of learning to ride a bike, Need for the Bike goes on to relate the agony of climbing, the angst of crashing, and all the other universal moments and feelings which all cyclists will recognise.

“To get on a bike is to take possession of the landscape”

The sounds, smells, pains and joys of riding with friends or alone, finding things on the road; getting lost, “re-reading” familiar routes; Paul Fournel’s classic comes as close as any book has to an encapsulation of why we all need the bike …

Buy your copy

You are a prize-winning poet, novelist and playwright (among other things), but the sport of cycling has maintained a place in your life and work. Will it always?

I would love it to, but it’s not just my decision: my old quadriceps, my old breath and my old inspiration will also have something to say about it! For the moment, I’m still pedalling away (though not so fast) and I’m still writing about bicycles (among other things). Let’s hope it lasts.

 Do you ‘write’ while on the bike? Do ideas come to you?

It depends. On a hard climb, my only intellectual activity consists of opening my mouth as wide as possible to get a bit of oxygen; on a long descent, I’m thinking more about my brakes and my trajectory. Sometimes, when it’s flat and I’m rolling along peacefully, I’ll turn over a few ideas, make small sentences, build stories I may never write. It happens automatically, without planning.  

In truth, my bicycle serves more to liberate me from my work, to draw me away for a moment from the text and allow me to return to it refreshed, mind cleansed. Like new.

As President of Oulipo, have you proposed any ‘constrained writing’ ideas based on cycling (eg gearing)?

Yes. I’ve actually just finished creating a little poetic form inspired by the bicycle. It’s called ‘in two ways’ and explores two possible paths for a ride. Here’s an example:

The fork

The route tempts me, I am lost.

I’ve stopped talking to my calves.

I can see coming the fork towards elsewhere

Or rather towards here. I am lost.

Here the forest                                                 There the sloping field

And the night so green                                   And the green brook

Great forests of fir trees                                And the blue horizon

The shiver and the eye                                  The route the wind.

Who is slow to see                                          Serpent uncovered.

More than the curve.                                     Without doubt cows

Maybe wolves                                                   Occasionally a hamlet.

In the noise of the brakes                             Change gears

                Between the wind the fear you are lost,

                But I chose my wind, chose my fear.

                At this point in the journey and afterwards

                So many kilometres I look for my legs. 

 In the “Violent Bike” section of Need for the Bike you describe several unfortunate ‘chutes’. When was your last crash (and whose fault was it)?

I used to be an enthusiastic and clumsy cyclist, so I fell off a lot out of sheer enthusiasm. Now I’m still a clumsy cyclist, but I’m calmer – much calmer. I’ve thus decided not to fall off anymore. And I’ve not done so in a long time. On the other hand, I remember very clearly that when I have fallen off in the past, it was always my fault.

How would you judge the aesthetics of cycling now compared with the era of Jacques Anquetil, in the 60s, when you fell in love with the sport?

The wind tunnel introduced a revolution in cycling aesthetics. All the racers today look more or less the same as each other. They’re well balanced on their machines, as elegant and aerodynamic as possible. If we add that they’re also carefully hidden behind their sunglasses and helmet, then they’re often impossible to identify. Even the professional reporters get them mixed up. This is with the notable exception of Froome, who remains different to, but not necessarily more beautiful than, his comrades.

In the old days of cycling, you could recognise at first glance the lopsided posture of a Pollentier, the contorted look of an Agostinho, the balanced shoulders of little Robic, the elegant peaked cap of a Poulidor, the conflicting expressions of a Geminiani. In this varied world, Anquetil stood out as the perfect mark of his class and his ideal position. Perhaps today he would be drowned out in the collective efficiency of the peloton shaped by the wind.

How have you enjoyed the experience of adapting your other cycling book Anquetil, Alone, for the stage?

I’ve been very lucky. My texts have always been adapted by talented people. I had nothing to do for André Dussolier when he performed my book ‘Les athlètes dans leur tête’: he simply played my text just as I’d written it, and had enormous success with it.

For Anquetil, Alone, it was Roland Guenoun, the director, who did the work of adaptation. He asked me my opinion, and I simply advised him to take a bit more liberty with the text – which he did not do. He must have been right, since the play is about to run for its fifth season!

Today, Jean-Pierre Bourdaleix is bringing my new cyclists to the stage and, like Dussolier, he will perform the text itself.

For me it’s a great joy to see my words and characters performed, to see them on stage coming to meet me. A pure pleasure.

Buy your copy

This is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the ‘problem of escape from the Earth by rocket’.

It’s a wild ride. Jack Parsons, Malina’s chemistry-expert research partner, was a bed-hopping occultist with delusions of grandeur. There are drug parties and sex magic, cameos by Aleister Crowley and L Ron Hubbard, and an ill-fated attempt to start a mail-order religion.

Armed with hitherto unpublished letters, journals, and documents from the Malina family archives, Fraser MacDonald reveals the secret history of the space rocket.

Discover Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket

Space flight may seem like a transcendent theme – the stuff of soaring visions and azure skies – but its history is grounded in the dirt. This book is the unearthing.

It is a story that I’ve reconstructed from archives buried in obscure places. Perhaps that’s why the research has so often felt like an exhumation. It’s not just that the principal characters in this book are dead, which they are, but that their reputations have followed them down to the grave. This is about people who have, for the most part, been forgotten, even though their lives are central to the achievements of the twentieth century. I only found out about them through an accident of geography.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, I was conducting some doctoral fieldwork on the island of North Uist, in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. I didn’t go there to study rockets but my interest in the cultural landscape made me curious about the one place on the island to which I was denied access: a hilltop called Cleatrabhal, ‘hill of the ridge’ in Old Norse. Its militarised summit gives a commanding view over the irregular carpet of moor and loch; there are even traces of Neolithic and Iron Age communities. But it’s the Cold War infrastructure that still dominates Cleatrabhal, and it was there that I first started to dig into the story of the Space Age.

I learned that this site had been part of a rocket testing range built on the neighbouring island of South Uist in the late 1950s. The next time I was down in London, I dredged the National Archives to find declassified military files about the planning of the range. I discovered that it had been built to test a type of American rocket. And not just any rocket: the Corporal was the first guided missile authorised to carry a nuclear warhead. To my mild shame, I had never heard of it. I wrote a few dry academic papers about missile testing and Cold War geopolitics, but the origins of this technology remained a bit hazy. I knew that the Corporal had been designed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and I knew, too, that JPL was at the forefront of space exploration today. But I thought it a bit odd that the key engineer behind both the rocket and the laboratory should be such a distant figure. His name was Frank J. Malina.

In 2006, I noticed a new Wikipedia article about Malina – a one sentence entry that described him as an ‘aeronautical engineer and painter’. Ploughing through a few books and oral histories turned up more information. I read that when he was little more than a graduate student, with the help of friends whose credentials were even less impressive than his own, he developed the first US rocket to reach an extreme altitude. It’s called the WAC Corporal, the precursor to the Corporal. These days ‘rocket science’ is a cliché for complexity, a shorthand for engineering brilliance. In the 1930s, however, the opposite was the case: rocketry was so discredited that it didn’t belong anywhere near the word ‘science’. Yet it was Frank Malina, arguably more than anyone else in the United States, who made it respectable. Why then was his name absent from histories of space flight? There were rumours about his politics, and even more outlandish stories about his colleagues.

Years passed. I was invited to give a paper at the International Astronautical Congress, where by chance I ran into the astronomer Roger Malina, Frank’s son. I had no particular plans to write about his father but I was intrigued by why he wasn’t better known. Why did he walk away from practical rocketry? Why did he leave the United States? ‘You should come to our home in Paris,’ Roger suggested. ‘We have a family archive there.’

It took me a few more years – life happens; I wasn’t in a hurry – but eventually I made it to the Malina house. Roger opened the gate and welcomed me through the courtyard into the home where he grew up. Tucked away off a quiet back street in Boulogne-Billancourt, the house exudes a kind of homely modernism: simple concrete lines, a quirky spiral staircase, high ceilings and low furniture. In the study was a panorama of books, photographs and paintings, preserved in a state of lifelike disorder.

In the adjacent office I scanned the shelves. Each was laden with box files of letters, drawings, photos, sketches, more letters, magazines, exhibition catalogues, receipts, so many letters. There were documents of every conceivable kind – many of them intimate rather than institutional. Love letters. Letters to his mother. There were more formal papers too: a thick correspondence with lawyers, an archive box on which was written ‘Box V: Witchhunt file’. Frank’s life felt so close at hand, it was as if he had just stepped out to the patisserie. On his bedside table I spotted his wristwatch, a tiny calendar clipped to the strap: November 1981.

I had only been in Paris for a few hours when I realised that what had been an idle curiosity on Cleatrabhal, then an academic interest in London’s National Archives, was now something urgent and personal. Here was an extraordinary life. I didn’t know the full story then, not even half of it, but I felt certain that there was a story.

With Roger’s permission, I photographed everything I could find, page by page, and read the material back in Scotland. I filled notebooks with details of Malina’s friends and colleagues. I pieced together his relationships from the letters, working out who he trusted and who he didn’t. I started to find gaps: letters missing; things that didn’t add up. I found Frank Malina’s FBI file and blinked at some of the allegations it contained. I submitted my own Freedom of Information requests to declassify the FBI files on Malina’s friends. There were thousands of pages to examine in this house, but it was only a starting point; the search took me spiralling outwards, into other circuits of association.

The momentum I built up in Frank’s archive was dragged by the search for FBI files. First you have to prove that the subject is dead and provide enough information (social security number, dates of birth, death, marriage) to identify the relevant files. If any are found you then join the declassification queue; that can take five years. Released files have many of the names redacted – blacked out – so that although you have some idea of what has happened, it’s difficult to know who it happened to. It requires endless comparisons with other files and other archives. Much of this is repetitive and boring. Now and again, I’d find a little nugget. In the spring of 2016, a new file arrived. And with a single name on a single page, mistakenly left unredacted, I found the motherlode.

The trouble with FBI files as sources is that they’re only as reliable as the agents and their informants. They can be useful, but they aren’t the Truth. On reading them I still needed wider evidence – letters, diaries, oral histories – to give a more nuanced picture. Foremost here were the papers and journals kept by Frank’s first wife, Liljan. Even with all this material, getting the measure of this story depended on getting to know its characters; that in turn meant getting to know their children, even grandchildren. These conversations weren’t always relaxed. I was asking about past membership in the US Communist Party, not the kind of talk that puts anyone at ease. But in time, unseen and often unknown sources began to emerge, sometimes dramatically changing the story: the people who remembered FBI agents sitting in cars at the bottom of their driveway; or those who recalled the suited men watching as they bought ice cream as children; the family that came home one day to find a nail driven into a door frame, preventing its tight closure. Some of these recollections cut deep.

Half a century after the moon landings, we have inherited a particular image of America’s Space Age pioneers: the steely-eyed missile man facing the great unknown. In the mass of papers and testimonies piling up in my own study, I saw something else: something repressed and unspeakable, something hidden and shameful. Something secret.

This is the story of the birth of the space rocket. In the pages that follow, you’ll learn how humankind first reached beyond the atmosphere of Earth to worlds beyond. But it is more than that. It’s about what we will allow ourselves to know about the darker legacies of the twentieth century, and the dangerous ideas that won’t stay buried. I didn’t expect this story to turn out as it did. Then again, I didn’t think I’d be the one to uncover it.

Buy your copy

 

Summer’s here, in all its unpredicatable-weathered glory! Come rain or shine (or thunderstorms, or humidity, or thick cloud cover, or surprise hail … we could go on) we have the ideal book for you, whether you’re on a sun lounger or furtively slipping on your warm socks one chilly evening. 

---

 

‘A sparkling and illuminating study,one of those rare books that could genuinely improve your life’ Sunday Times

Bursting with cutting-edge science and eye-opening advice, Chasing the Sun explores the extraordinary significance of sunlight. – from ancient solstice celebrations to modern sleep labs, and from the unexpected health benefits of sun exposure to what the Amish know about sleep that the rest of us don’t.

As we move into longer, lighter days, it’s imperative to know how important this light is to us – and how to make the most of it.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

---

 

SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

In her groundbreaking new work The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power Shoshana Zuboff exposes the corporations that are fighting to predict and control our online activity – and our lives.

Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

---

 

Sunday Times Bestseller + Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month

Moneyland is the secret country of the lawless, stateless superrich. In Bullough’s jaw-dropping and entertaining book, we learn how the institutions of Europe and the United States have become money-laundering operations, undermining the foundations of Western stability. We discover the true cost of being open for business no matter how corrupt and dangerous the customer. Meet the kleptocrats. Meet their awful children. And we find out how heroic activists around the world are fighting back.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

---

 

 

A secret history of the space rocket

This is the untold story of the engineers, dreamers and rebels who started the American space programme. In particular, it is the story of Frank Malina, founder of what became Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the scientist who cracked the ‘problem of escape from the Earth by rocket’.

It’s a wild ride. Jack Parsons, Malina’s chemistry-expert research partner, was a bed-hopping occultist with delusions of grandeur. There are drug parties and sex magic, cameos by Aleister Crowley and L Ron Hubbard, and an ill-fated attempt to start a mail-order religion.

Armed with hitherto unpublished letters, journals, and documents from the Malina family archives, Fraser MacDonald reveals the secret history of the space rocket.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

 

---

 

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

‘It couldn’t be more relevant’ Daily Telegraph

 Armed with the data, Emily Oster debunks myths around breastfeeding (not a panacea), sleep training (not so bad!), potty training (wait until they’re ready or possibly bribe with M&Ms), language acquisition (early talkers aren’t necessarily geniuses), vaccines (there is no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism, and much evidence to refute such a link), and many other topics. She also shows parents how to think through freighted questions like if and how to go back to work, how to think about toddler discipline, and how to have a relationship and parent at the same time. 

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

---

 

‘Mind-expanding’ Guardian

Learn how to simplify complex decisions without over-simplifying them. Discover the power of analogies and the dangers of false equivalences. Find out how people construct misleading arguments, and how to always be right.

A practical and inspiring guide to decoding the modern world.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

---

What it means to be a minister in the UK government

The ministers of the UK are a cast of roles that expand and contract based on the whims and political needs of the Prime Minister. Within their portfolios those MPs and Lords are able to reshape whole sectors of British society.

Any misstep or scandal can invite media attention, public outcry, and their swift departure. At the same time, their resignations can shatter political alliances and bring down Prime Ministers and even governments. In Fifteen Minutes of Power, Peter Riddell draws on interviews with former ministers, conducted on behalf of the Institute of Government, to reveal the fraught existence of these powerful men and women.

 Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

---

‘Nobody evokes the transformative joy of cycling the way Fournel does here … magical’ – Herbie Sykes

Starting with the childhood joy of learning to ride a bike, Need for the Bike, by award-winning cycling writer Paul Fournel, explores the agony of climbing, the angst of crashing, and all the other universal moments and feelings which all cyclists will recognise.

The sounds, smells, pains and joys of riding with friends or alone, finding things on the road; getting lost, “re-reading” familiar routes; Paul Fournel’s classic comes as close as any book has to an encapsulation of why we all need the bike.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

 

---

Shortlisted for the 2019 PEN Ackerley Prize

An evocative portrait of an extraordinary street, William Miller’s memoir tells stories of his father, Jonathan Miller, his bohemian upbringing and their neighbours, who include the philosopher A. J. Ayer and the writers Alan Bennett and Clare Tomalin. Out now in paperback. 

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

---

 

Join us on Twitter & instagram & sign up for our newsletter to get our book news straight to your inbox.

The Sunday Times bestselling Moneyland: Why Thieves And Crooks Now Rule The World And How To Take It Back  by journalist Oliver Bullough has been shortlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

The Orwell Prizes aim to encourage excellence in writing and thinking about politics. Judges look for books that make ‘Orwell’s own ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’.’

Moneyland is the secret country of the lawless, stateless superrich. In Bullough’s jaw-dropping and entertaining book, we learn how the institutions of Europe and the United States have become money-laundering operations, undermining the foundations of Western stability. We discover the true cost of being open for business no matter how corrupt and dangerous the customer. Meet the kleptocrats. Meet their awful children. And we find out how heroic activists around the world are fighting back.

Read the Orwell Prize shortlists in full.

Follow @oliverbullough on Twitter & #Moneyland for updates.

Read the opening of Moneyland.

‘Emily Oster is the non-judgemental girlfriend holding our hand and guiding us through pregnancy and motherhood. She has done the work to get us the hard facts in a soft, understandable way’ AMY SCHUMER

Parenting is full of decisions, nearly all of which can be agonized over. There is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the trade-offs can be profound. How do you make your own best decision?

With her previous book (and now parenting classic) Expecting Better award-winning US economist Emily Oster showed us – by digging into the data – that much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom was wrong. In Cribsheet, she now tackles an even greater challenge: decision-making in the early years of parenting. Armed with the data, Oster debunks myths around breastfeeding (not a panacea), sleep training (not so bad!), potty training (wait until they’re ready or possibly bribe with M&Ms), language acquisition (early talkers aren’t necessarily geniuses), vaccines (there is no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism, and much evidence to refute such a link), and many other topics. She also shows parents how to think through freighted questions like if and how to go back to work, how to think about toddler discipline, and how to have a relationship and parent at the same time.

Economics is the science of decision-making, and Cribsheet is a thinking parent’s guide to the chaos and frequent misinformation of the early years. Oster is a trained expert – and mother of two – who can empower parents to make better, less fraught decisions and stay sane in the years before preschool.

Emily Oster is a professor of economics at Brown University and the author of Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong – and What You Really Need to Know. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Esquire. Oster is married to economist Jesse Shapiro and is also the daughter of two economists. She has two children.

Find out more about Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool

Watch Emily Oster discuss Cribsheet on Good Morning America: