Cold War Steve Presents... The Festival of Brexit Thames&Hudson

Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism-that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband: "you've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it... I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait." • Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work

In August 1978, the Iron Curtain still hung heavily across Europe. To escape from oppressive East Berlin, an East German couple, Hans Detlef Alexander Tiede and Ingrid Ruske, hijacked a Polish airliner and diverted it to the American sector of West Berlin. Along with the couple, several passengers spontaneously defected to the West, and were welcomed by US officials. But within hours, Communist officials reminded the West of the anti-hijacking agreements in the Warsaw Pact, and thus the fugitives were arrested by the US State Department • Thirty-four years after World War II, the United States built a court in the middle of West Berlin, the former capital of the Third Reich, in the building that once housed the Luftwaffe, to try the hijacking couple

For Mallory, as for all of his generation, death was but ‘a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day’. As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. What mattered now was how one lived, and the moments of being alive • While the quest for Mount Everest may have begun as a grand imperial gesture, it ended as a mission of revival for a country and a lost generation bled white by war. In a monumental work of history and adventure, Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept climbing on that fateful day

Robert Fisk’s bestselling eyewitness account of the events that have shaped the Middle East is alive with vivid reporting and incisive historical analysis • The history of the Middle East is an epic story of tragedy, betrayal and world-shaking events. It is a story that Robert Fisk has been reporting for over thirty years. His masterful narrative spans the most volatile regions of the Middle East, chronicling with both rage and compassion the death by deceit of tens of thousands of Muslims, Christians and Jews • Robert Fisk’s remarkable history is also the tale of a journalist at war – learning of the 9/11 attacks while aboard a passenger jet, reporting from a bombed-out Baghdad, interviewing Osama bin Laden – and of the courage and frustration of a life spent writing the first draft of history

This delightful book is the latest in the series of Ladybird books which have been specially planned to help grown-ups with the world about them • The large clear script, the careful choice of words, the frequent repetition and the thoughtful matching of text with pictures all enable grown-ups to think they have taught themselves to cope. Featuring original Ladybird artwork alongside brilliantly funny, brand new text

Внешняя политика США претерпевает серьезные преобразования, навсегда меняющие место Америки в мире. Институты дипломатии и развития истекают кровью после серьезных бюджетных сокращений; дипломаты, которые заключают сделки с Америкой и защищают демократические интересы по всему миру, массово уходят. Офисы Государственного департамента пустуют, в то время как военно-промышленный комплекс за рубежом взял на себя работу, которую когда-то выполняли миротворцы. Америка все чаще становится нацией, которая сначала стреляет, а потом задает вопросы • Опираясь на недавно обнаруженные документы и богатую информацию из редких интервью с военачальниками, разоблачителями и политиками, включая всех ныне живущих госсекретарей от Генри Киссинджера до Хиллари Клинтон и Рекса Тиллерсона, "Война против мира" убедительно доказывает, что профессия, находящаяся под угрозой исчезновения

The extraordinary life story of Song Huai-Kuei, better known as Madame Song, follows the arc of 20th-century history. Artist, entrepreneur and impresario, Song broke cultural barriers for love, transcended Cold War borders for her art, and laid the foundations for a global fashion industry. With her cosmopolitan outlook, she defined an influential vision for Chinese culture on the world stage and asserted an Asian perspective in 21st-century art and design. Madame Song is a name that everyone interested in the roots of contemporary visual culture needs to know • At the heart of this volume is a critical biography that explores Song's youth in revolutionary China, her cross-cultural marriage to Bulgarian fibre artist Maryn Varbanov, her success within avant-garde circles in Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War, and finally her efforts within China to revive traditional aesthetics in tandem with the explosive rise of global couture

The first-ever translation of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead of Sobekmose-fully illustrated and explained by a leading Egyptologist, offering fascinating insights into one of the greatest civilizations of the ancient world • The Book of the Dead of Sobekmose, in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, is one of the most important surviving examples of ancient Egyptian Books of the Dead. Such "books"-actually papyrus scrolls-were composed of traditional funerary texts, including magic spells, which were thought to assist the deceased on their journeys into the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians believed in an underworld fraught with dangers that needed to be carefully navigated, from the familiar, such as snakes and scorpions, to the extraordinary: lakes of fire to cross, animal-headed demons to pass, and the ritual Weighing of the Heart, whose outcome determined whether or not the deceased would be born again into the afterlife for eternity

The Russian Empire was among the most mysterious of the world's great powers, profoundly torn between a rural population living almost medieval lives and industrial and social change in the cities. The tsar's gigantic realm struggled with the advent of modernity and with its own internal contradictions between Asia and Europe, faith and science, different ethnic groups, and the divergent interests of the aristocracy, the middle classes, the urban workers, and the rural poor: a continent of contradictions from abject poverty to fairy-tale wealth captured by authors from Tolstoy to Chekhov, from Gogol to Gorky. Twilight of the Romanovs opens a door into the world of pre-revolutionary Russia using original photographs taken during the last decades of Romanov rule

The art and architecture of Egypt during the age of the pharaohs capture the imagination of the modern world. Vivid, graceful forms decorating monuments that emanated ambition and authority spark our wonder about this distant culture. Ever youthful and elegant men and women encounter odd, animal-headed gods and monsters amid scenes of work and leisure, in a paradise of plain, bright colours, where hieroglyphic texts hint at grand ideas • The tombs and temples of ancient Egypt reveal how art and monumental building first flowered at the heart of civilization. Among the great creative achievements of ancient Egypt we discover a set of constant forms: archetypes in art and architecture that state clearly and concisely the contemporary view of authority, divinity, beauty and meaning

The first novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk about Kevin is a compelling and provocative story of love and how we suffer for it • Still unattached and childless at fifty-nine, world-renowned anthropologist Gray Kaiser is seemingly invincible-and untouchable. Returning to make a documentary at the site of her first great triumph in Kenya, she is accompanied by her faithful middle-aged assistant, Errol McEchern, who has loved her for years in silence • When young graduate assistant Raphael Sarasola arrives on the scene, Gray is captivated and falls hopelessly in love-before an amazed Errol's eyes. As he follows their affair with jealous fascination, Errol watches helplessly from the sidelines as a proud and fierce woman is reduced to miserable dependence through miserable dependence