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The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan, by Lyse Doucet
£11.99 in paperback, 440 pages.
The story of a hotel. The story of a nation.
When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world.
More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.
Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.
It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days—an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy—only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.
The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.
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Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, by Jeremy Paxman
£12.99 in paperback
The influence of the British Empire is everywhere, from the very existence of the United Kingdom to the ethnic composition of our cities. It affects everything, from Prime Ministers' decisions to send troops to war to the adventurers we admire. From the sports we think we're good at to the architecture of our buildings; the way we travel to the way we trade; the hopeless losers we will on, and the food we hunger for, the British Empire is never very far away.
In this acute and witty analysis, Jeremy Paxman goes to the very heart of empire. As he describes the selection process for colonial officers ('intended to weed out the cad, the feeble and the too clever') the importance of sport, the sweating domestic life of the colonial officer's wife ('the challenge with cooking meat was 'to grasp the fleeting moment between toughness and putrefaction when the joint may possibly prove eatable'') and the crazed end for General Gordon of Khartoum, Paxman brings brilliantly to life the tragedy and comedy of empire and reveals its profound and lasting effect on our nation and ourselves.
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The Walking Cure:A Healthier, Happier Life - One Step at a Time, by Annabel Streets
£10.99 in paperback
The right place, walked at the right time, can heal, energise, restore and inspire. Instead of ambling the same old track, find a route to match and mend your mood … and prepare to be astonished.
In this inspirational guide, Annabel Streets explores the curative and therapeutic benefits of both rural and urban landscapes: from mountains to meadows, disused railway lines to rivers, and coastal cliffs to city parks. She investigates how walking benefits us not only physically, but also how we see, feel and experience ourselves and the world.
With warmth, wisdom and a compelling blend of anecdotal and scientific evidence, Streets identifies the perfect place to walk whatever your mood. Whether it be a canal path to spark creativity, a bustling city to allay boredom or the coastline to heal grief and worry. The Walking Cure celebrates the joy of walking and shares the extraordinary health benefits that landscape unlocks.
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Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, by Anne Applebaum
£10.99 paperback, 272 pages
Guardian ReviewFrom the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them
We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.
International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don’t stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren’t linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan’s essay calling for “containment” of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.
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Who We are and how We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, by David Reich
£13.49 in paperback, 2019, 335 pages
A groundbreaking book about how technological advances in genomics and the extraction of ancient DNA have profoundly changed our understanding of human prehistory while resolving many long-standing controversies. Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze ancient DNA as never before, and it has become clear–in part from David Reich’s own contributions to the field–that genomics is as important a means of understanding the human past as archeology, linguistics, and the written word. Now, in The New Science of the Human Past, Reich describes with unprecedented clarity just how the human genome provides not only all the information that a fertilized human egg needs to develop but also contains within it the history of our species. He delineates how the Genomic Revolution and ancient DNA are transforming our understanding of our own lineage as modern humans ; how genomics deconstructs the idea that there are no biologically meaningful differences among human populations (though without adherence to pernicious racist hierarchies) ; and how DNA studies reveal the deep history of human inequality–among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals within a population.
