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  Operation Kronstadt - The True...

  Harry Ferguson

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  An MI6 officer’s account of a heart-pounding mission to rescue a spy trapped in Russia, “as exciting as anything found in fiction” (Daily Mail).   Paul Dukes, a thirty-year-old concert pianist, was a master of disguise—dubbed ‘The Man with a Hundred Faces’—and an English spy in Russia. As the First World War was drawing to a close, and as the revolutionaries sought to consolidate their newfound power, Dukes was cut off in Petrograd after infiltrating the Bolshevik Government and stealing top-secret information. With the government in London desperately in need of the documents in Dukes’s possession, and the Bolshevik secret police closing in, a seemingly suicidal plan was hatched to rescue him.   Young naval lieutenant Gus Agar and his handpicked team of seven men boarded plywood boats—the fastest naval vessels in existence, most armed with only two machine guns and a single torpedo. They set out for the island fortress of Kronstadt, the most well-defended naval target in Russia—and into the jaws of the Soviet police.   Written by a former MI6 officer, Operation Kronstadt tells the full story, making for an extraordinarily gripping nonfiction thriller.

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  The New Leviathans - Thoughts...

  John Gray

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  Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities.In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments. The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past. Since then, so many terrible events have occurred and so many poisonous ideas have flourished, and yet our liberal certainties treat them as aberrations that will somehow dissolve. Hobbes would not be so confident.Filled with fascinating and challenging observations, The New Leviathans is a powerful meditation on historical and current folly. As a species we always seem to be struggling to face the reality of base and delusive human instincts. Might a more self-aware, realistic, and disabused ethics help us?

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  Bank Job

  Hilary Powell, Daniel Edelstyn

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  Art hacks life when two filmmakers launch a project to cancel more than £1m of high-interest debt from their local community.
   
  Bank Job is a white-knuckle ride into the dark heart of our financial system, in which filmmaker and artist duo Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn risk their sanity to buy up and abolish debt by printing their own money in a disused bank in Walthamstow, London. Tired of struggling in an economic system that leaves creative people on the fringes, the duo weave a different story, both risky and empowering, of self-education and mutual action. Behind the opaque language and defunct diagrams, they find a system flawed by design but ripe for hacking. This is the inspiring story of how they listen and act upon the widespread desire to change the system to meet the needs of many and not just the few. And for those among us brave enough, they show how we can do this too in our own communities one bank job at a time.

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  Bullsh*t Comparisons - A Field...

  Andrew Brooks

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  Bullshit Comparisons will challenge the way you think about rankings, charts, and other marketing and political tools designed to create odious and dangerous comparisons.Is Boris Johnson really like Winston Churchill? Are electric cars actually greener than petrol ones? Which is the world's most successful university? Is Lisbon the new Barcelona? Should we compare the achievements of younger and older siblings even when we know it damages their self-worth? We make comparisons every day, but how helpful are they?Looking across a dazzling range of situations both familiar and unfamiliar, Bullshit Comparisons is a groundbreaking examination of the role of comparison in modern society, illuminated by examples spanning from the FIFA World Footballer of the year, to wine-tasting in London, hospital care in Sierra Leone, and avocado farming in Colombia.Challenging us to think critically about the use of comparison through accessible, personal, and often amusing research, Andrew Brooks reveals the uses and abuses of comparisons in a book that isn't like anything else.

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  People's War - New Light on the...

  Anthea Jeffery

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  Twenty years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political conflict; and the memory of the trauma has faded. Some 20 500 people were nevertheless killed between 1984 and 1994. The conventional wisdom is that they died at the hands of a state-backed Third Force, but the more accurate explanation is that they died as a result of the people's war the ANC unleashed.
  As the people's war accelerated from September 1984, intimidation and political killings rapidly accelerated. At the same time, a remarkably effective propaganda campaign put the blame for violence on the National Party government and its alleged Inkatha surrogate. Sympathy for the ANC soared, while its rivals suffered crippling losses in credibility and support.
  By 1993 the ANC was able to dominate the negotiating process, as well as to control the (undefeated) South African police and army and bend them to its will. By mid-1994 it had trounced its rivals and taken over government.
  People's War shows the extraordinary success of this war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power. It also shows, in part at least, the great cost at which this was achieved. Apart from the killings, the terror, and the destruction that marked the period from 1984 to 1994, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be reversed. For violence cannot be turned off 'like a tap', as the ANC suggested, and neither can anarchy easily be converted into order.
  Anthea Jeffery holds law degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and from Cambridge, and a doctorate in human rights law from the University of London. Her previous books include The Natal Story: Sixteen years of conflict and The Truth about the Truth Commission. Both books have been acclaimed for their meticulous and objective approach, and for breaking new ground on important and contentious issues.

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  Kim Philby - A story of...

  Tim Milne

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  Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, was the Cold War's most infamous traitor, a Soviet spy at the heart of British intelligence. Philby joined Britain's secret service MI6 during the war and went on to head the section tasked with rooting out Russian spies before becoming the service's chief liaison officer with the CIA. He betrayed hundreds of British and US agents to the Russians and compromised numerous operations inside the Soviet Union. Tim Milne was Philby's closest and oldest friend. They studied at Westminster School together and when Philby joined MI6 he immediately recruited Milne as his deputy. Philby's treachery was a huge blow to Milne and, after he retired, he wrote a highly revealing description of Philby's time in the secret service. Publication of the memoirs was banned by MI6 but, after Milne's death in 2010, his family were determined that this insider's account of the Philby affair be published. Edited to include newly released top-secret documents showing how the KGB's 'master spy' managed to fool MI6 even after he defected to Moscow, this is the final word on one of the world's most notorious spies by the MI6 colleague who knew him best, the insider account of the Philby affair that Britain's spy chiefs did not want you to read.

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