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Discussing the early emergence of feminism but focusing on its development since the 1960s, these articles highlight the need for the movement, its challenges in areas including culture, the law, medicine and politics, and its impact around the world.

Could Artificial Intelligence solve all humanity’s problems, or should we be worried about the development of superintelligent machines? Science journalist Tom Chivers reports on a community of people who are using skills and methods of rationality to work out what might happen when machines are as clever as humans – and how to prevent AI from threatening our very existence.

Presenting a whip-smart analysis of modern masculinity and sexual economics, comedian, podcaster and writer Sara Pascoe investigates the evolutionary forces that influence human desire. Part comedy, part anthropological study, the book draws on anecdotal experience, interviews and in-depth research to offer a fresh, sometimes uncomfortable, take on subjects including paying for sex, pornography and the 'conundrum of heterosexuality'.

This in-depth exploration of the complex world of greetings and how they have developed across cultures and throughout history delves into the science of body language, the neuroscience of greeting strangers and friends, and etiquette as an artform, with an investigation into the evolutionary sources of one of the most unusual greetings of all – the genital grab.

Deborah Frances-White begins each chapter in this witty treatise with the line 'I'm a feminist, but…' – followed by a confession that undermines her assertion. Covering a broad range of feminist territory, both ideological and historical, she muses on subjects including the diet industry and Donald Trump and shares excerpts from her podcast interviews with like-minded performers and activists.

Medicine tailored to your individual DNA, teleportation, quantum computing and a space-based solar power station are just some of the technological possibilities discussed in this volume by 18 leading scientists and experts.

From the earliest people journeying across Africa to present day students studying abroad, this illustrated volume offers a broad narrative of human mobility. Looking at forced as well as self-motivated migrations, it features chapters on slavery and trafficking, historical events including the Irish ‘Famine Exodus’ and Jewish refugees escaping Nazi rule, as well as phenomena such as retiring abroad and misconceptions about migrant populations.

To reveal the realities of poverty, Orwell’s memoir draws on his experiences in the late 1920s when, as a young writer struggling to get work published, he worked as a dish-washer in Paris and lived on the road with tramps around London.

This German satire envisages a future with closed borders, where a TV star visits a vast African refugee camp to film her new series. Enabled by a sycophantic journalist, she accidentally triggers a huge march northward, with chaotic consequences.

Written in 1792, and possibly the earliest work of feminist literature, Mary Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet argued for the equality of the sexes and women’s right to education – the freedom to study or pursue a career rather than be condemned, as most women were at that time, to living within the domestic sphere.

From squalid origins on the streets of Paris, Nana trades on her sexuality to find fame and fortune as a high-class prostitute, advancing her career while destroying the lives of others. Nana (1880) is the ninth novel in Zola’s epic of French life in the Second Empire, the Rougon-Macquart series.

As a prison governor and later an academic criminologist, David Wilson has interviewed many killers. Recalling these often tense encounters, he explores the psychopathology of these men, some anonymized, others, including Dennis Nilsen, notorious.

This atlas reveals the way globalization is transforming the world. Each double-page statistical map is followed by a spread of text and graphics explaining the global patterns and forces at work. The book charts international debt, humanitarian aid, peacekeeping forces, and trade goods such as food, clothing, and raw materials. Slightly off-mint.

A chaotic ex-rough sleeper and ex-prisoner, Stuart Shorter dismissed Masters’s first draft of his biography as ‘boring’ and urged him to 'Make it more like a murder mystery. What murdered the boy I was? See? Write it backwards.' The resulting award-winning story, both funny and tragic, reveals a life lived among the ‘underclass’, told in reverse from his sudden death to a brawling 10-year old. Strong themes and language.

The two years from 1954 to 1956 transformed the personal and professional life of Marilyn Monroe. This book tells how, emboldened by winning the part of The Girl in The Seven Year Itch, she ended her marriage to Joe DiMaggio and seized control of her career, starting her own production company and studying at the Actors’ Studio.

Surveying artistic, archaeological and literary sources, Boardman demonstrates the extent of ancient Greek cultural interactions with the much older civilizations of Central Asia, India and Western China. He discusses how the Greeks ‘came to leave a very distinctive imprint on the lives and arts of many distant peoples’, not least through the enduring influence of their art on the Buddhist Gandhara sculptural style.

In this exploration of the nature of schizophrenia, best-selling novelist and former mental health nurse Nathan Filer tells the stories of patients and family members living with the condition and interviews mental health professionals and experts.

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Against the background of the 1885 Act that criminalized male homosexuality and led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, two young scholars, Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, began writing and campaigning for the rights of gay men. Drawing on primary sources, this book explores their pioneering ideas, the personal cost to themselves, and their connection with Havelock Ellis, whose Sexual Inversion (1897) became the first English study of homosexuality.

In sections on thinking, living and subsisting with animals, this collection of eleven papers emphasizes the interdependence of people and their animals in society. The topics discussed include the sacrifice of horses in Iron Age Pazyryk burials; parallels in ancient and modern livestock guardian dogs; the use of garfish by Native Americans; and professional butchering in the Mahas region of Sudan.

As a prison governor and later an academic criminologist, David Wilson has interviewed many killers. Recalling these often tense encounters, he explores the psychopathology of these men, some anonymized, others, including Dennis Nilsen, notorious.

Ronan Farrow won the Pulitzer Prize for his exposés of the sexual abuse carried out by Harvey Weinstein and Hollywood’s casting couch culture. This account of his long-term investigative campaign describes how rich and powerful men conspired to suppress the stories and silence the reporters and victims – a well-established process known as catch and kill.

Focusing on women, children, and ‘illegal’ boat migrants, Tony Kushner examines Jewish refugee movements before, during and after the Holocaust and places them in a longer history of forced migrations, from the 1880s to the present.

Throughout history, human society has been threatened by earthquakes, floods and volcanic eruptions. This chronological survey of natural disasters, from Pompeii to Fukushima, examines their causes, effects and how people have responded to them. It demonstrates their global consequences – a volcanic eruption in Iceland, for example, caused a famine that may have ignited the French Revolution – and contemplates how they might be dealt with in future.

With unprecedented access to her personal and professional archive at Melbourne University, this first biography of Germaine Greer in two decades records her difficult childhood in 1940s Australia, her simultaneous immersion in the worlds of academia and hippie counterculture, the international success of The Female Eunuch, and the more recent pronouncements that have angered many former admirers.

Emily Davison’s death beneath the king’s horse at the 1913 Derby has overshadowed the life that led up to it. Drawing on her own words and those of people who knew her, this biography records the formative experiences of this intelligent, resourceful and determined woman: an education thwarted by lack of money, work as a governess, and involvement in campaigns about the injustices faced by women that resulted in her imprisonment and force-feeding.

In 1918 the dancer Maud Allan brought a libel case against Noel Billing MP for claiming in print that she was a lesbian. Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Wendy Buonaventura explores Allan’s controversial career, and examines the way the case embodied early 20th-century attitudes to ‘dangerous’ women, whose independence, freedom from convention, and erotic allure were seen as a threat to the fabric of society, and even a cause of the First World War.

In 2009, as a temporary organizer for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, Whitney Brown first experienced the satisfaction of manual labour, working with the blacksmiths and dry-stone wallers who were creating the Welsh exhibition area. Eventually she accepted their invitation to travel to Wales and build walls out in the countryside. This is the story of her journey from academic folklorist in America to dry-stone waller in Wales and the friendships forged along the way.

A worldwide sensation following its publication in 1859, Smiles’ Self-Help still influences our thinking about ‘the search for happiness’ in everyday life. This first biography of the man behind a modern phenomenon draws on his many other writings to trace how his ideas developed throughout his long life. It provides insights into the Victorians’ responses to their fast-changing world but also highlights the relevance of Smiles’ perspectives to today’s pressing questions about progress and freedom.

Mohamed Makhzangi was an Egyptian doctor studying in Kiev in April 1986 when the nuclear reactor exploded at Chernobyl, just 85 kilometres away. This book is his literary response, as an exile, to the tragedy of radiation and lies that befell the Soviet people.

‘By the seventeenth century the detection, conviction, and punishment of illegitimate lethal violence were firmly and irrevocably tied to the central government.’ Matthew Lockwood’s study shows how definitions of legitimate and illegitimate violence were negotiated in coroners’ courts from the late 15th century and gradually gave government the power to enforce a monopoly of violence – a basic prerequisite of a modern state.

As Minister for Women and Equalities in the coalition government, Jo Swinson learned the hard way that gender imbalance was ‘the most intractable and biggest of problems to address’ – and not only for government. In this book, she explains how inequality permeates our lives and institutions and, focusing on how power is conferred in favour of men, her ‘call to arms’ offers ways for the individual to make a difference.

Animals played an often eclectic role in 18th- and 19th-century life, and this compendium includes the stories of the four-legged friends of famous figures including Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens, the purloined pet donkey that was the subject of a famous lawsuit, the Regency-era pony who took a ride in a hot air balloon, and the bloodhounds that were hired to hunt Jack the Ripper.

Colin Fisher tells the story of Stefan Vallerio Pieroni (1819–1900), a seller of plaster figurines who came to England from Tuscany in 1837. Eventually, he settled in Bath, where he became prominent in the city’s social, cultural and political life.

For some, the fox is a beautiful, intelligent creature; for others, a ravager of henhouses. Lucy Jones probes these conflicted attitudes, and examines her own family history of foxhunting. She investigates the animal’s behaviour and reputation for cunning, charts attempts to exterminate it from the Tudor ‘Vermin Acts’ onwards, and traces the fox through folklore and literature from Aesop’s fables to Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.

Muriel Matters (1877–1969), ‘that daring Australian girl’ who chained herself to a grille in Parliament and demanded votes for women, dedicated her life to campaigning for social reform. This biography reveals the lengths the former actress and executive of the Women’s Freedom League went to for causes including prison reform, Montessori schools and help for the poor. Her direct action ranged from attending demonstrations to boarding an airship in 1909 to drop leaflets onto Edward VII’s carriage.

First published in 2003, this oral history used interviews with 100 people then in their late nineties, who had lived through the First World War, not as combatants, but as children and young adults on the home front. Their words, along with letters, diary entries and the authors’ linking narrative, offer an unusual view of the war, from fears of the Kaiser’s ambition in the years before its outbreak, to the jubilation, readjustment and mourning following the Armistice.

Arguing that public policy failures result from a simplistic model of human behaviour, Brooks explains what brain research has revealed about the influence of the unconscious mind on our actions. He illustrates these ideas through a fictional story of two ordinary people who led lives fulfilled, not by intelligence, wealth or prestige but through the character and ‘street smarts’ developed in the unconscious realm of emotions, intuitions and social norms.

First published in 1983, this landmark history shed new light on the struggle for social justice and drew attention to the achievements of many forgotten women activists. Reissued with a new introduction, it remains as relevant as ever today.

Despite deer being central to human cultures throughout time, from hunter-gatherers to post-medieval deer hunting, this is the first multi-disciplinary volume dedicated to research into human–cervid relationships. Covering Europe, North America and Asia, the 24 essays range from the archaezoology of deer to the image of the courtly huntress, and include studies of dispersal patterns, exploitation, symbolic significance, and effects on landscape and land management.

‘The Pekingese is a tinkered wolf, not redesigned wholesale from its wolf ancestors.’ This study examines recent developments in evolutionary biology through the lens of domestication. The rapid physical and behavioural changes which, through centuries of breeding, have been wrought on pets and farm animals, allow us to see evolutionary processes accelerated, and therefore, Francis argues, to understand them better; particularly their conservative nature, a notion espoused by the fields of genomics and evolutionary developmental biology, which feature prominently here. Slightly off-mint.

Throughout the burgeoning cities of Victorian Britain, lodging houses provided shelter to those who flocked from the countryside in search of work. Crowded, insanitary and often disreputable, they aroused the horror of respectable society, and were viewed as hotbeds of crime and disease. Drawing on contemporary accounts, newspaper reports and court cases, this fascinating social history shines a light into the shadowy world of itinerant labourers, criminals, street entertainers, peddlers, prostitutes, abandoned children, and families fallen on hard times.

On 3 March 2011 a powerful earthquake shook northern Japan, killing more than 15,000 people and triggering a tsunami that sent the Fukushima nuclear plant into meltdown. Five years later, survivors were allowed to revisit the evacuated town of Tomioka. Rebecca Bathory accompanied them into the exclusion zone. Her photographs of abandoned streets and schoolrooms vividly convey the human cost of the disaster, and offer a stark warning for the future.

Fiona Shaw reads the unabridged text of Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous argument for the education of woman and against a social system that kept women in ‘ignorance and slavish dependence’. First published in 1792.

Raised amid the grandeur of Knebworth House, Lady Constance Lytton was an unlikely radical. Drawing on unpublished family papers, this biography tells her story for the first time: how, witnessing the trial of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, she became convinced that women must win the right to vote; and how, in jail, she discovered that her status afforded her preferential treatment, and on release disguised herself to discover the horrors that other suffragettes were forced to endure.

This series introduces the texts that have helped shape Western civilization, every volume providing a detailed examination of the central ideas and arguments of a seminal text and discussion of its lasting significance.

In short essays, each of these volumes focuses on the 50 essential writers, movements, works or themes in disciplines ranging from ancient history to modern media studies.

From the early 19th century, millions of people crossed the seas to escape war, famine or poverty, or were taken against their will as slaves, convicts or indentured labourers. Based on original sources and first-hand accounts, this book examines the transition from one life to another, beginning with the journey to the port, the perils of the voyage and their reception in the Americas or Australasia.

Focusing on a period of consolidation of the USA as a nation, this study explores the Indian and the immigrant, two entangled figures that preoccupied American public opinion at the turn of the 20th century. The book examines the figure of the Indian in the light of Longfellow's popular poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), and discusses the East's perception of the West - widely associated with native peoples - which became a powerful nationalizing force.

Ten people died in the Staplehurst train crash of 1865, but accidents were not uncommon at the time and the disaster is now most notable because Dickens was one of the passengers. This history focuses on the most serious accidents on the British network from the beginnings of rail travel to the present day, comparing official reports with contemporary newspaper accounts and examining how attitudes changed as court claims became more common and safety was taken more seriously.

Six million European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, but three million managed to escape death by fleeing, hiding or simply enduring. From victims of the early discriminations to perilous escapes during the height of the persecution and the resettlement of concentration camp survivors, this book pieces together official documents and personal accounts to examine the experience of Jewish refugees forced to flee to neighbouring countries, to Palestine, to America and ultimately to all over the world.

A physician, professor of neurology and author, Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) has been described by the New York Times as 'a kind of poet laureate of contemporary medicine'. His books are made up of case histories of his patients, and explore both their neurological disorders and the strategies they adopted to cope with them. In Seeing Voices, a journey into the world of the profoundly deaf, Sacks examines the consequences of living in silence, including the different ways in which the deaf and the hearing learn to categorize and convey the experience of their respective worlds.

While 1913 is often seen as the prelude to an apocalypse, that was not how it felt at the time. Presented largely from the perspective of contemporary travellers and writers, the world presented in this account was wealthier and better connected than ever before. Encompassing 28 cities, it highlights technological progress across the globe, the scale of optimism for the future, and how oblivious people were to the catastrophe that lay ahead.

Subtitled The Impact of the Good Friday Agreement on Northern Ireland, this volume looks at post-conflict peace- building efforts in the political, social and economic long-term peace.

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Providing insights into the development of American racial thought, Berry's anthology represents both black and white voices of different cultural backgrounds, from the beginnings of American history to the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance.