'A revolutionary book' Sunday Times

'A pulsating account' Peter Frankopan

*A SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR*

How did the People's Republic of China transform from a backwater economy in the 1970s into the world superpower of today? Drawing on hundreds of previously unseen archival documents, award-winning historian Frank Dikötter recasts our understanding of an era that both the regime and foreign admirers alike celebrate as an economic miracle. In a fascinating tale spanning f...

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist James Ball takes us into the depths of the internet to trace the origins and rapid ascent of QAnon, the movement that mutated from a niche online conspiracy theory into the world's first digital pandemic.

Imagine a deadly pathogen that, once created, could infect any person in any part of the globe within seconds. No need to wait for travellers, trains, or air traffic to spread it, all you need is an internet connection. In this grippin...

Following the Arab Spring, Syria descended into civil and sectarian conflict. It has since become a fractured warzone which operates as a breeding ground for new terrorist movements including ISIS as well as the root cause of the greatest refugee crisis in modern history. In this important book, former Special Envoy of the Netherlands to Syria, Nikolaos van Dam, explains the recent history of Syria, covering the growing disenchantment with the Asad regime, the chaos of civil war and the fract...

What is economics? What can - and can't - it explain about the world? Why does it matter?Ha-Joon Chang teaches economics at Cambridge University, and writes a column for the Guardian. The Observer called his book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which was a no.1 bestseller, 'a witty and timely debunking of some of the biggest myths surrounding the global economy.' He won the Wassily Leontief Prize for advancing the frontiers of economic thought, and is a vocal critic of the fai...

Persian literature is the jewel in the crown of Persian culture. It has profoundly influenced the literatures of Ottoman Turkey, Muslim India and Turkic Central Asia and been a source of inspiration for Goethe, Emerson, Matthew Arnold and Jorge Luis Borges among others. Yet Persian literature has never received the attention it truly deserves."A History of Persian Literature" answers this need and offers a new, comprehensive and detailed history of its subject.

This 18-volume, authoritative s...

The English language has changed dramatically over the past 500 years, making it increasingly difficult for students to read Chaucer's works. Assuming no previous linguistic knowledge or familiarity with Middle English, Simon Horobin introduces students to Chaucer's language and the importance of reading Chaucer in the original, rather than modern translation. Chaucer's Language- leads the reader gently through basic linguistic concepts with appropriate explanation- highlights how Chaucer's E...

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Sociolinguistic evidence is an undervalued resource for social theory. In this book, Jan Blommaert uses contemporary sociolinguistic insights to develop a new sociological imagination, exploring how we construct and operate in online spaces, and what the implications of this are for offline social practice.

Taking Emile Durkheim's concept of the 'social fact' (social ...

The 9th iteration of this go-to textbook on contemporary Russian politics offers comprehensive and critical discussion of the country's most recent developments, providing substantive coverage of the key areas in domestic and foreign Russian politics. Ranging from established topics such as executive leadership, parties and elections, to newer issues of national identity, protest, and Russia and Greater Eurasia, it reflects the changing nature of Russian politics in a globalising world define...