He could tell you things! Things I've tried to forget; thing I never did know." Joseph Conrad "…his was a heroic nature. I should like to write upon him subtly, so that his enemies would think I was with them till they finished my book and rose from reading it to call him a hero. He has the appeal of a broken archangel." T.E. Lawrence British Consul Roger Casement was knighted in 1911 for his investigations into the genocide of trival peoples in the Congo Free State and Amazon rainforest. ...

A fascinating examination of the extraordinary life of Roger Casement, executed as part of the 1916 rising, fighting the empire that had previously knighted him.Roger Casement was a British consul for two decades. However, his investigation into atrocities in the Congo led Casement to anti-Imperialist views. Ultimately, this led him to side with the Irish Republican movement, leading up to the 1916 rising.Arrested by the British for gun trafficking, he was incarcer...

An illumination of the life of diplomat Roger Casement.At the time of his execution for treason in 1916, few were aware who Roger Casement was or what he represented. Since then, he has been lauded for his investigations into Belgian brutality in the Congo Free State and human rights abuses in the Peruvian rubber industry, but much else about him has remained obscured behind speculation about his sexuality and secret Irish revolutionary activity while in service of...

The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon w...

One Bold Deed of Open Treason describes the astonishing journey by Roger Casement to Germany in 1914, via New York and Norway. Arriving into Berlin under a false identity, Casement entered a space of conspiracy and subterfuge. Through his vivid and gripping diary entries, a picture emerges of a man caught in the crossfire of international events and spiralling towards a tragic denouement.In recording his daily thoughts, emotions and movements, Casement chronicles his despair at the...

James Connolly (1868-1916) became a leading Irish socialist and revolutionary, and was one of the leaders of Ireland's rebellion in 1916. As a youth he had served in the British army in Ireland and, seeing how they treated the local population, became hugely disillusioned with the British Army. He became involved in socialism in Scotland and was the driving force behind the creation of Ireland's trade union movement. He was Commandant of the Dublin Brigade in the Easter Rising and, too inj...

The masterpiece of travel writing that revolutionized the genre and made its author famous overnightAn exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin’s exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history, and unforgettable anecdotes. Fueled by an unmistakable lust for life and adventure and a singular gift for storytelling, Chatwin treks through...

An updated edition of Ben Pimlott’s classic biography of the Queen: ‘There is no better biography of Elizabeth II.’ PETER HENNESSY, Independent on Sunday‘A magisterial biography and the only one that seriously deals with her constitutional and political role' Tim Shipman, Sunday TimesThe royal family have been through a tumultuous decade, but with the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, Prince Philip’s 90th birthday and the forthcoming Diamond Jubilee cele...

First published in the 1950s, this is a classic account of the discovery in 1911 of the lost city of Machu Picchu.In 1911 Hiram Bingham, a pre-historian with a love of exotic destinations, set out to Peru in search of the legendary city of Vilcabamba, capital city of the last Inca ruler, Manco Inca. With a combination of doggedness and good fortune he stumbled on the perfectly preserved ruins of Machu Picchu perched on a cloud-capped ledge 2000 feet above the torre...

John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was the twentieth century's most influential economist. His ideas inspired Franklin D. Roosevelt to launch the New Deal and instructed Western nations on how to ward off revolutionary unrest, economic instability, high unemployment, and social dissolution. Keynes was nothing less than the Adam Smith of his time: his The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Moneybecame as important in the twentieth century as Smith's The Wealth of Nations

For centuries, the Andes have caught the imagination of travelers, inspiring fear and wonder. The groundbreaking scientist Alexander von Humboldt claimed that ""everything here is grander and more majestic than in the Swiss Alps, the Pyrenees, the Carpathians, the Apennines, and all other mountains I have known."" Rivaled in height only by the Himalayas and stretching more than 4,500 miles, the sheer immensity of the Andes is matched by its concentration of radically contrasting scenery an...

In the century before the great famine of the late 1840s, the Irish people, and the poor especially, became increasingly dependent on the potato for their food. So when potato blight struck, causing the tubers to rot in the ground, they suffered a grievous loss. Thus began a catastrophe in which approximately one million people lost their lives and many more left Ireland for North America, changing the country forever. During and after this terrible human crisis, the Briti...