Katalog

Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the Fall of the Bastille or the Storming of the Winter Palace. In reality they take decades to burn out, if they ever do. One of our great historians, Donald Sassoon, takes the long view of some of the most celebrated upheavals: the English Civil War, which killed a king; the American War of Independence, which ejected the British but allowed slavery to persist; the French Revolution, which produced the Rights of Man and years of instability; the national revolutions that unified Italy and Germany; and the Russian and Chinese revolutions, which transformed the twentieth century. Revolutions adroitly compares these historical juggernauts to the many rebellions, coups and tumults that time forgot.

It is a history rich in irony and surprises. ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ was first sung by English troopers to make fun of dishevelled American colonials. The Long March of retreating Chinese Communists assumed a mythical dimension on a par with Washington crossing the Delaware. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries them-selves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom.

Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

The home where our hopes and dreams play out is at the heart many vital political questions

Housing is more than bricks and mortar. Feeling at Home grapples with the practical and emotional questions of housing – domestic labour, privacy, security, ownership, and health. Is it possible to imagine success without home ownership? Alva Gotby shows that solving the housing crisis is about much more than housing stock. It means revolutionising our everyday lives and labours.

An alternative history of housing in post-war Britain – a cautionary tale of rent, precarity, and working-class resistance

Grounded in personal experience, Eviction uncovers a hidden history of housing injustice and working-class resistance in what has become a perennial battleground for social conflict in modern Britain.

In 2017, Jessica Field’s parents and more than a hundred of their neighbours received warning of imminent eviction. Their corporate landlord intended to demolish their affordable, privately rented homes to replace them with middle-class houses for sale. Led by the women of the estate, tenants launched an anti-eviction campaign to save their close-knit community from destruction.

The neighbourhood was the last remnant of a 1950s National Coal Board estate constructed to house local miners. When the coal industry declined in the 1970s, whole estates were auctioned off to speculators. Low-income tenants were at the mercy of global investors. Houses were left to rot. Rents soared. Tenants were exploited every step of the way. Yet time and again, tenant activists – especially women – fought back.

Eviction is a history of the British housing crisis in microcosm.

An insider’s account of the videogame industry telling how gaming can become a force for good

Everything To Play For asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessible language and personal anecdotes, industry insider Marijam Did engages both novices and seasoned connoisseurs. From the innovations of Pong and Doom to the intricate multiplayer or narrative-driven games, the author highlights the multifaceted stories of the gaming communities and the political actors who organise among them. Crucially, the focus also includes the people who make the games, shedding light on the brutal processes necessary to bring titles to the public.

The videogame industry, now larger than the film and music industries combined, has a proven ability to challenge the status quo. With a rich array of examples, Did argues for a nuanced understanding of gaming’s influence so that this extraordinary power can be harnessed for good.

How technology and the attention economy shape contemporary art and performance

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling. Charting recent trends in contemporary practice — research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture — leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

The fact that communism did not prevail does not mean we are still in capitalism. Capitalist relations are undergoing systemic transformation and becoming something that might even be worse.

Bringing together analyses from different fields—law, technology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis—Jodi Dean shows the direction the contemporary world is heading: neofeudalism. Feudalism isn’t just a metaphor. It’s the operating system for the present. Politics and plunder thrive in the capitalist pursuit of profit, and the many are bound to serve the few, coerced into a system of rents, destruction, and hoarding driven by privilege and dependence.

The question is: In a society of serfs and servants, how do we get free?

With the rise of neofeudalism, and as more and more workers are drawn into the service sector—from nurses to Uber and delivery drivers—Dean argues that we can see the emergence of a new vanguard, the class that can lead the struggle for liberation from oppression and exploitation: what she calls the servant vanguard.

Good Mother myths find mothers at fault whatever they do. Alex Bollen proposes ‘motherdom’, a new way to live. Motherdom values and respects the different ways people raise their children, shifting our focus from mother blame to the relationships and resources children need to flourish

In this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality. This culture is thorough modern and, often, overlooked but can deeply enriches our understanding of what it means to be modern.

Up in the Air tells the story of Britain’s multistorey council housing from its beginnings to the present day. Across the decades, the high rise has symbolised the welfare state for better or worse. Here, Holly Smith takes the residents’ perspective, capturing the human side of high-rise Britain. Interrogating the complex inheritance of mid-century urban reconstruction, Smith shows how these buildings became a crucible in which the welfare state was shaped and reimagined.

Your Party sees leading figures make the case for Britain’s major new political project, laying out the challenges ahead and how to surmount them. Oliver Eagleton interviews Zarah Sultana MP; Leanne Mohamad, who came within 500 votes of unseating Labour’s Wes Streeting at the last general election; Stop the War co-founder Andrew Murray; Our Bloc author James Schneider; Andrew Feinstein, who took on Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras in 2024; and former Corbyn speechwriter Alex Nunns.

Wnyki dla światła Justyny Kulikowskiej raz są oślepiające jak blask kul dyskotekowych, a innym razem bezpośrednie niczym pogo na betonie; bywają ciche, ale też brutalne. W swoim najnowszym tomie poetka bada naturę uwikłania i zdrady, a kolejne wiersze i powracające frazy tworzą osobistą mitologię. Można powiedzieć, że Kulikowska uprawia sztukę poetycką kintsugi – eksponuje pęknięcia zamiast je ukrywać; nie zapisuje impresji, nie śledzi cieni ani nie czeka na promienie słońca. Wręcz przeciwnie: wnyki dla światła zastawia z porażającą precyzją, ale równocześnie z niewielką nadzieją na powodzenie podstępu. Jej wiersze są jak pułapki na to, co ulotne i niewidzialne: na zachwyt, traumę, stratę i język.

Jak to się stało, że Jorge Zalszupin, nieznany w Europie architekt, migrant z Polski, został współtwórcą brazylijskiego modernizmu, w tym ikonicznych projektów, jak stoliczki Petalas, które do dziś wpisują się w kanon eleganckiego wnętrza od Nowego Jorku po Warszawę? Odpowiedź na to pytanie jest bardzo złożona, podobnie jak biografia, którą spisał sam twórca. Poznajemy jego warszawskie dzieciństwo, okoliczności wyjazdu do Rumunii, potem realia studiów w czasie wojny. Zalszupin szczerze relacjonuje rozterki z czasów powojennych, pierwsze kroki w zawodzie i decyzję o wyprawie za ocean. A następnie brazylijski etap życia, który rozwija się pod znakiem rodziny i kariery zawodowej.

Już z chwilą ogłoszenia Kwiatów Zła drukiem w czerwcu 1857 roku, wiersze Charles’a Baudelaire’a czytano w atmosferze skandalu. Autor sam dostarczał krytykom powodów do opowieści, drażniąc czytelnicze przyzwyczajenia i przeciwstawiając się obyczajom paryskich mieszczan. Wytoczony wkrótce proces o obrazę moralności publicznej, zakończony przegraną poety, nałożeniem kary grzywny oraz nakazem usunięcia z tomu sześciu wierszy, na całe dekady ukształtował recepcję jego dzieła.