'Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.'
It's been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell said these immortal words on the first ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between 10 March 1876 and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that was the sole preserve of science fiction.
When the world's first modern mobile telephone network was launched in 1979, there were just over 300 million telephones. Today, there are more than eight billion, most of which are mobile. Most people in most countries can now contact each other in a matter of seconds. Soon we'll all be connected, to each other, and to complex computer networks that provide us with instant information, but also observe and record our actions. No other phenomenon touches so many of us, so directly, each and every day of our lives.
This book describes how this transformation came about. It considers the technologies that underpin telecommunications - microcircuits, fibre-optics and satellites - and touches on financial aspects of the industry: privatisations, mergers and takeovers that have helped shape the $2-trillion telecom market. But for the most part, it's a story about us and our need to communicate.

'Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.'
It's been almost 150 years since Alexander Graham Bell said these immortal words on the first ever phone call, to his assistant in the next room. Between 10 March 1876 and now, the world has changed beyond recognition. And telecommunications, which has played a fundamental role in this change, has itself evolved into an industry that was the sole preserve of science fiction.
When the world's first modern mobile telephone network was launched in 1979, there were just over 300 million telephones. Today, there are more than eight billion, most of which are mobile. Most people in most countries can now contact each other in a matter of seconds. Soon we'll all be connected, to each other, and to complex computer networks that provide us with instant information, but also observe and record our actions. No other phenomenon touches so many of us, so directly, each and every day of our lives.
This book describes how this transformation came about. It considers the technologies that underpin telecommunications - microcircuits, fibre-optics and satellites - and touches on financial aspects of the industry: privatisations, mergers and takeovers that have helped shape the $2-trillion telecom market. But for the most part, it's a story about us and our need to communicate.

Beginning in 1820, Birmingham details the Portuguese attempt to create a third, African, empire in Angola after the virtual loss of Asia and America. He charts the great flows of migrant people to and from the country that underpinned these colonial efforts and the burgeoning slave trade that went hand in hand with it. The book is a journey through the 20th century in Angola - the playing out of its politics, trade and labour practices against the backdrop of white settlement, and the eventual fall of Portuguese colonialism and Angola‟s struggle for national identity. It concludes with an examination of the civil war that ravaged the country in the 70s and 80s, which ended in 2002, but from whose legacy the Angolan people are still trying to rebuild today.

Can anyone truly understand Russia? Russia is a country with no natural borders, no single ethos, no true central identity. At the crossroads of Europe and Asia, it is everyone's 'other'. And yet it is one of the most powerful nations on earth, a master game-player on the global stage with a rich history of war and peace, poets and revolutionaries. In this essential whistle-stop tour of the world's most complex nation, Mark Galeotti takes us behind the myths to the heart of the Russian story: from the formation of a nation to its early legends - including Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great - to the rise and fall of the Romanovs, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, Chernobyl and the end of the Soviet Union - plus the rise of a politician named Vladimir Putin, and the events leading to the Ukrainian war.

A Turn in the South is a reflective journey by V. S. Naipaul in the late 1980s through the American South. Naipaul writes of his encounters with politicians, rednecks, farmers, writers and ordinary men and women, both black and white, with the insight and originality we expect from one of our best travel writers. Fascinating and poetic, this is a remarkable book on race, culture and country. 'Naipaul's writing is supple and fluid, meticulously crafted, adventurous and quick to surprise. And, as usual, there's the freshness and originality of his way of looking at things' Sunday Times 'Naipaul writes as if a modern oracle has chosen to speak through him. It is a tissue of brilliantly recorded hearsay, of intense listening by a man with a remarkable ear' New York Times Review of Books 'This is a journey below the Mason-Dixon line into a society riven by too many defeats; the broken cause of the old Confederacy, and the frustrated anger of Southern blacks whose power is circumscribed. It is the best thing outside fiction that I have read on the Old South pregnant with the new since W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South published over fifty years ago' Sunday Telegraph

A Way in the World is a vastly innovative novel exploring colonial inheritance through a series of narratives that span continents, swing back and forth between past and present and delve into both autobiography and fiction. V. S. Naipaul offers a personal choice of examples of Spanish and British imperial history in the Caribbean, including an imagined vision of Raleigh's last expedition and an introduction to Francisco de Miranda, a would-be liberator and precursor to Bolivar, which are placed within a context of echoing modernity and framed by two more personal, heavily autobiographical sections sketching the narrator - an eloquent yet humble man of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad but spent much of his adult life in England and Africa. Meditative and dramatic, these historical reconstructions, imbued with Naipaul's acute perception, drawn with his deft and sensitive touch, and told in his beautifully wrought prose, are transmuted into an astonishing novel exploring the profound and mysterious effect of history on the individual.

A World on Edge reveals Europe in 1918, left in ruins by World War I. But with the end of hostilities, a radical new start seems not only possible, but essential, even unavoidable. Unorthodox ideas light up the age like the comets that have recently passed overhead: new politics, new societies, new art and culture, new thinking. The struggle to determine the future has begun. The sculptor Käthe Kollwitz, whose son died in the war, was translating sorrow and loss into art. Ho Chi Minh was working as a dishwasher in Paris and dreaming of liberating Vietnam, his homeland. Captain Harry S. Truman was running a men's haberdashery in Kansas City, hardly expecting that he was about to go bankrupt - and later become president of the United States. Professor Moina Michael was about to invent the 'remembrance poppy', a symbol of sacrifice that will stand for generations to come. Meanwhile Virginia Woolf had just published her first book and was questioning whether that sacrifice was worth it, while the artist George Grosz was so revolted by the violence on the streets of Berlin that he decides everything is meaningless. For rulers and revolutionaries, a world of power and privilege was dying - while for others, a dream of overthrowing democracy was being born. With novelistic virtuosity, historian Daniel Schönpflug describes this watershed year as it was experienced on the ground - open ended, unfathomable, its outcome unclear. Told from the vantage points of people, famous and ordinary, good and evil, who lived through the turmoil and combining a multitude of acutely observed details, Schönpflug composes a brilliantly conceived panorama of a world suspended between enthusiasm and disappointment, and of a moment in which the window of opportunity was suddenly open, only to quickly close shut once again.

In a quiet English village in 1942, an elegant housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted wife and mother-of-three, the woman known to her neighbours as Mrs Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity.
However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, she was racing through the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific intelligence from one of the country's most brilliant nuclear physicists. Secrets that she would transmit to Soviet intelligence headquarters via the radio transmitter she was hiding in her outdoor privy.
Far from a British housewife, 'Mrs Burton' - born Ursula Kuczynski, and codenamed 'Sonya' - was a German Jew, a dedicated communist, a colonel in Russia's Red Army, and a highly-trained spy. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, and helping the Soviet Union build the atom bomb, Sonya conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. Her story has never been told - until now.
Agent Sonya is the exhilarating account of one woman's life; a life that encompasses the rise and fall of communism itself, and altered the course of history.

American Kompromat tells the story of the unimaginably corrupt, dissolute, and decadent subculture of the most powerful people in the world and how they have orchestrated, obtained, and used kompromat—Russian for compromising information—as leverage to achieve their political goals.
In the followup to New York Times bestseller House of Trump, House of Putin, American Kompromat will be situated in the context of the Trump-Russia scandal and the new era of hybrid warfare, kleptocrats, and authoritarian right-wing populism. But this time, rather than follow a trail of laundered money, Craig Unger will be reporting on kompromat—the Russian word for compromising information—operations that amassed the dirty little secrets of the richest and most powerful men on earth.

Set in a world of Upper East Side mansions and private Caribbean islands, of gigantic yachts and private jets, American Kompromat will show that something much more sinister and important was taking place than the public could ever imagine—namely, that from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, kompromat operations documented the darkest secrets of the most powerful people in the world and transformed them into potent weapons.

Unger will explore the nature of the compromising material they obtained, how it was obtained, who was behind it (be they Russians, Israelis, or the new American variety of oligarch), who has had access to the material since it was produced, whether it has been used for blackmail or extortion, and what roles it has played in the Trump-Russia scandal.

Among the Believers is V. S. Naipaul's classic account of his journeys through Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia; 'the believers' are the Muslims he met on those journeys, young men and women battling to regain the original purity of their faith in the hope of restoring order to a chaotic world. It is a uniquely valuable insight into modern Islam and the comforting simplifications of religious fanaticism. 'This book investigates the Islamic revolution and tries to understand the fundamentalist zeal that has gripped the young in Iran and other Muslim countries. He is a modern master.' - Sunday Times 'His level of perception is of the highest, and his prose has become the perfect instrument for realizing those perceptions on the page. His travel writing is perhaps the most important body of work of its kind in the second half of the century.' - Martin Amis, author of Time's Arrow.

Anderkant Cuito is die verhaal van 'n groep oudsoldate wat teruggaan na ou basisse en slagvelde in Namibië en Angola, waar die Grensoorlog van 1966 tot 1989 gewoed het.
Hulle deel herinneringe, onthou makkers, ontlaai, reik uit na ou vyande, maak vriende langs die pad, reis deur die geskiedenis en soek na die waarheid. Hulle is die generasie wat 'n vuur - in 1914 aangesteek en aan die gang gehou deur politici - ver buite die grense van Suid-Afrika moes gaan blus.
'n Reis van 17 dae word uiteindelik 'n reis van meer as 'n 100 jaar deur die verlede. Die toergeselskap maak kennis met geskiedenis wat verswyg is, maar gedurende die Grensoorlog teruggekom het om die Suid-Afrikaanse Weermag aan die hakskeen te byt. So byvoorbeeld was daar die eerste Suid-Afrikaanse militêre operasie op die grens (1917) om die Ovakwanyama koning, Mandume ya Nedemufayo, te elimineer. Die Owambo's het dit nooit vergeet nie en koning Mandume se spook het Suid-Afrikaanse soldate gedurende die Grensoorlog agtervolg, sonder dat hulle dit geweet het. Maar die sluier word ook gelig oor Operasie Firewood (1987), een van die heel bloedigste gevegte van die Grensoorlog, toe SWAPO se PLAN-guerrillas 'n Suid-Afrikaanse aanvalsmag trompop stormgeloop het.
Die oudsoldate se reis lei uiteindelik na die veelbesproke Cuito Cuanavale: Wie het gewen? Anders as destyds word die brug by Cuito hierdie keer oorgesteek. Anderkant Cuito is waarheid, bevryding en verligting. Maar die pad lê gesaai met wrakke en geraamtes…
Anderkant Cuito - 'n reisverhaal van die Grensoorlog, is drie reise in een: 'n Fisiese reis van plek tot plek, 'n reis deur die geskiedenis, maar bowenal 'n kopreis wat die leser by 'n nuwe bestemming uitbring. Die Grensoorlog word deur 'n ander bril beskou as die een wat politici en generaals vir die soldate, hulle ouers en geliefdes opgesit het.
Miskien is hierdie die belangrikste reis in die lewens van duisende wat steeds vra: Vir wat…?
Wie behoort die boek te lees? Almal wat direk en indirek by die Grensoorlog betrokke was, in die geskiedenis belangstel en die waarheid oor dié oorlog wil weet. Dit is 'n lekkerlees boek vir diegene wat graag self 'n reis deur die ou grensgebied wil onderneem, maar om welke rede ookal nie kan nie.
2019 Hersiene uitgawe. Sagteband, 428 bladsye, 32 bladsye foto's volkleur. 12 Kaarte wat teks toelig. 110 episodes met mense se facebook kommentaar. 14 Bylaes onder andere 'n herinneringskrif oor Operasie Firewood.

This is a story about how the extreme became mainstream. It reveals how the truth became 'fake news', how fringe ideas spread, and how a candidate many dismissed as a joke was propelled to the presidency by the dark side of the internet. For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded with alt-right propagandists, who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. He also spent time with the social-media entrepreneurs who made this possible, through their naive and reckless ambition, by disrupting all of the traditional information systems. Join Marantz as some of the biggest brains in Silicon Valley teach him how to make content go viral; as he hangs out with the conspiracists, white supremacists and nihilist trolls using these ideas to make their memes, blogs and podcasts incredibly successful; and as he meets some of the people led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization. Antisocial is about how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then becomes reality. By telling the story of the people who hijacked the American conversation, Antisocial will help you understand the world they have created, in which we all now live.

Die derde deel van die reeks Imperiale somer word aan Johannesburg in die onmiddellike nasleep van die Anglo-Boereoorlog gewy, waarby alle dele van die destydse gemeenskap aandag geniet, met inbegrip van die swart stadsinwoners en die ontwikkeling van 'n eie stadskultuur onder hulle en die mynwerkers. Dit is 'n vertelling - deur middel van anekdotes en klein kameebeskrywings - van die inwoners se uiteenlopende belewing van Johannesburg tussen 1902 en 1910. Schoeman maak gebruik van verhandelinge en bekom verdere inligting uit onder andere sosiologiese verslae, hofsake en sensasionele koerantberigte.

Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941, aimed at nothing less than a war of extermination to annihilate Soviet communism, liquidate the Jews and create Lebensraum for the German master race. But it led to the destruction of the Third Reich, and was cataclysmic for Germany with millions of men killed, wounded or registered as missing in action. It was this colossal mistake -- rather than any action in Western Europe -- that lost Hitler the Second World War. Drawing on hitherto unseen archival material, including previously untranslated Russian sources, Jonathan Dimbleby puts Barbarossa in its proper place in history for the first time. From its origins in the ashes of the First World War to its impact on post-war Europe, and covering the military, political and diplomatic story from all sides, he paints a full and vivid picture of this monumental campaign whose full nature and impact has remained unexplored. At the heart of the narrative, written in Dimbleby's usual gripping style, are compelling descriptions of the leaders who made the crucial decisions, of the men and women who fought on the front lines, of the soldiers who committed heinous crimes on an unparalleled scale and of those who were killed when the Holocaust began. Hitler's fatal gamble had the most terrifying of consequences. Written with authority and humanity, Barbarossa is a masterwork that transforms our understanding of the Second World War and of the twentieth century.

The largest military operation in history. The turning point of the Second World War. The most important year of the twentieth century.

Operation Barbarossa, Hitler's invasion of Russia in June 1941, aimed at nothing less than a war of extermination to annihilate Soviet communism, liquidate the Jews and create Lebensraum for the German master race. But it led to the destruction of the Third Reich, and was cataclysmic for Germany with millions of men killed, wounded or registered as missing in action. It was this colossal mistake -- rather than any action in Western Europe -- that lost Hitler the Second World War.

Drawing on hitherto unseen archival material, including previously untranslated Russian sources, Jonathan Dimbleby puts Barbarossa in its proper place in history for the first time. From its origins in the ashes of the First World War to its impact on post-war Europe, and covering the military, political and diplomatic story from all sides, he paints a full and vivid picture of this monumental campaign whose full nature and impact has remained unexplored.

Written with authority and humanity, Barbarossa is a masterwork that transforms our understanding of the Second World War and of the twentieth century.