Books We Like.

Read much, not many.

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David and Goliath is the dazzling and provocative new book from Malcolm Gladwell, no.1 bestselling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and What the Dog Saw

Why do underdogs succeed so much more than we expect? How do the weak outsmart the strong? In David and Goliath Malcolm Gladwell takes us on a scintillating and surprising journey through the hidden dynamics that shape the balance of power between the small and the mighty.

From the conflicts in Northern Ireland through the tactics of civil rights leaders and the problem of privilege, Gladwell demonstrates how we misunderstand the true meaning of advantage and disadvantage. When does a traumatic childhood work in someone's favour? How can a disability leave someone better off? And do you really want your child to go to the best school he or she can get into?

David and Goliath draws on the stories of remarkable underdogs, history, science, psychology and on Malcolm Gladwell's unparalleled ability to make the connections others miss. It's a brilliant, illuminating book that overturns conventional thinking about power and advantage.

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and What The Dog Saw.

'A global phenomenon... there is, it seems, no subject over which he cannot scatter some magic dust' Observer

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The average are done for. You don't need to be.

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"The key questions will be: Are you good at working with intelligent machines or not? Are your skills a complement to the skills of the computer, or is the computer doing better without you? Worst of all, are you competing against the computer?" If you were paired with a machine to do a task, could together you do better than the machine alone? For Cowen, the answer matters more than you might think - with intelligent machines, he believes, lies the answer to The Great Stagnation he has worried about in the past.

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Tamara Mellon shares her whole larger-than-life story, with candour and detail that has never before been made public. From her troubled childhood and her time as a young editor at Vogue to her partnership with cobbler Jimmy Choo and her very public relationships, she offers a gripping account of the episodes that have made her who she is today.

Mellon made a fortune building Jimmy Choo into a billion-dollar fashion brand. She became the prime minister's trade envoy and was honoured by the Queen with the Order of the British Empire, yet it's her personal glamour that keeps her an object of global media fascination. Vogue photographed her wedding; Vanity Fair covered her divorce and the criminal trial that followed. Harper's Bazaar toured her London town house and her New York mansion, right down to the closets. And the Wall Street Journal hinted at the real red meat: the three private equity deals, the relentless battle between "the suits" and "the creatives," and Mellon's triumph against a brutally hostile takeover attempt.

In My Shoes is a must read for entrepreneurs, fashionistas, and anyone who loves a juicy true story about sex, drugs, money, power, high heels, and overcoming adversity.

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Beaten by her mother and whipped by her stepfather, Emily eventually finds her way into the care system at the age of twelve, and has an abortion after being gang-raped at thirteen. Continuously abused in a sequence of homes, she runs away at sixteen, becomes a prostitute in Soho, and convinces herself she is being punished for killing her baby. But it was never meant to be like that. Adopted at birth in 1956 by a middle-class family, Emily shared a golden childhood with her adopted sister Amy, attending private schools, and enjoying singing and dancing lessons. Things soon changed when Emily's jealous mother came to regard her as a rival. A bored and restless woman, she beat Emily for the first time when she was seven years old and from then on seemed to become addicted to inflicting pain on her daughter. Despite Emily's father's attempts to protect her, the parental rows grew more malicious, until the mother moved out and remarried a narcissistic widower with alcohol problems and a vicious, bullying temper. The abuse intensified until Emily was placed into voluntary care. And so began a toxic spiral of remand homes, psychiatric hospitals, and sleeping rough. It wasn't long before Emily became a teenage 'working girl', where she was paid to engage in bizarre sadomasochistic acts for perverted clients, including a senior judge and a policeman. It was only when she was almost murdered that she turned her life around. Set principally between 1966 and 1972, Runaway captures the sleazy Soho of the period, and the frightening conditions in which many children were kept in care.

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When RBS collapsed and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer in the financial crisis of October 2008 it played a leading role in tipping Britain into its deepest economic downturn in seven decades. The economy shrank, bank lending froze, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs, living standards are still falling and Britons will be paying higher taxes for decades to pay the clean-up bill. How on earth had a small Scottish bank grown so quickly to become a global financial giant that could do such immense damage when it collapsed? At the centre of the story was Fred Goodwin, the former chief executive known as "Fred the Shred" who terrorised some of his staff and beguiled others. Not a banker by training, he nonetheless was given control of RBS and set about trying to make it one of the biggest brands in the world. It was said confidently that computerisation and new banking products had made the world safer. Only they hadn't...Based on more than 80 interviews and with access to diaries and papers kept by those at the heart of the meltdown, this is the definitive account of the RBS disaster, a disaster which still casts such a shadow over our economy. In Making It Happen, senior executives, board members, Treasury insiders and regulators reveal how the bank's mania for expansion led it to take enormous risks its leaders didn't understand. From the birth of the Royal Bank in 18th century Scotland, to the manic expansion under Fred Goodwin in the middle of a mad boom and culminating in the epoch-defining collapse, Making It Happen is the full, extraordinary story.

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Drawing on new research, Julie Kavanagh brilliantly re-creates the short, intense, and passionate life of the tall, pale, slender girl who at thirteen fled her brute of a father and Normandy to go to Paris, where she would become one of the grand courtesans of the 1840s. France’s national treasure, Alexandre Dumas père, was intrigued by her, his son became her lover, and Franz Liszt, too, fell under her spell. Quick to adapt an aristocratic mien, with elegant clothes, a coach, and a grand apartment, she entertained a salon of dandies, writers, and artists. Fascinating to both men and women, Marie, with her stylish outfits and signature camellias, was always a subject of great interest at the opera or at the Café de Paris, where she sat at the table of the director of the Paris Opéra, along with the director of the Théâtre Variétés, the infamous dancer Lola Montez, and others. Her early death at age twenty-three from tuberculosis created an outpouring of sympathy, noted by Charles Dickens, who wrote in February 1847: “For several days all questions political, artistic, commercial have been abandoned by the papers. Everything is erased in the face of an incident which is far more important, the romantic death of one of the glories of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis.”    With The Girl Who Loved Camellias, Kavanagh has written a compelling and poignant life of a nineteenth-century muse whose independent and modern spirit has timeless appeal.

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What can a brain scan, or our reaction to a Caravaggio painting, reveal about the deep seat of guilt?

How can reading Heidegger, or conducting experiments on rats, help us to cope with anxiety in the face of the world's economic crisis?

Can ancient remedies fight sadness more effectively than anti-depressants?

What does the neuroscience of acting tell us about how we feel empathy, and fall for an actor on stage?

What can writing poetry tell us about how joy works?

And how can a bizarre neurological syndrome or a Shakespearean sonnet explain love and intimacy?

We live at a time when neuroscience is unlocking the secrets of our emotions. But is science ever enough to explain why we feel the way we feel?

Giovanni Frazzetto takes us on a journey through our everyday lives and most common emotions. In each chapter, his scientific knowledge mixes with personal experience to offer a compelling account of the continual contrast between rationality and sentiment, science and poetry. And he shows us that by facing this contrast, we can more fully understand ourselves and how we feel.

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When Sheelu was arrested for stealing from a powerful politician in the notoriously crooked region of Uttar Pradesh, she was sure that she would be forced to accept a prison sentence, not least because she had alleged that she had been assaulted by a man in the politician s household. But then Sampat Pal heard word of the charges, and the formidable commander of the pink-sari-wearing, pink-baton-wielding, 20,000-strong Pink Gang decided to shake things up. Narrating the story of Sampat Pal and the Pink Gang s fight for Sheelu, as well as for others facing injustice and oppression, journalist Amana Fontanella-Khan delivers a riveting portrait of women grabbing fate with their own hands and winning back their lives.

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When it comes to sex, common wisdom holds that men roam while women crave closeness and commitment. But in this provocative, headline-making book, Daniel Bergner turns everything we thought we knew about women's arousal and desire inside out. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with renowned behavioural scientists, sexologists, psychologists, and everyday women, he forces us to reconsider long-held notions about female sexuality.

This bold and captivating journey into the world of female desire explores answers to such thought-provoking questions as: Are women perhaps the less monogamous sex? What effect do intimacy and emotional connection really have on lust? What is the role of narcissism - the desire to be desired - in female sexuality? Are political gains for women ('No means no') detrimental in the bedroom? And is the hunt for a female Viagra anything but a search for the cure for monogamy?

Bergner goes behind the scenes of some of the most groundbreaking experiments on sexuality today and confronts us with controversial, sometimes uncomfortable findings. Incendiary, profoundly insightful, and brilliantly illuminating, What Do Women Want? will change the conversation about women and sex, and is sure to spark dynamic discussion for years to come.

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It is possible for someone who has entered the second half of their life to start a new career, get remarried, have a young family, run a marathon, travel the world, take up a new high-risk sport or start a new business. In Live the Life you Love at 50+, life and business coach Keren Smedley shows you how to do just that - through following groundbreaking coaching exercises that led hundreds of her clients to success.

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Sugar. It's killing us. Why do we eat so much of it? What are its hidden dangers?

In 1972, when British scientist John Yudkin first proved that sugar was bad for our health, he was ignored by the majority of the medical profession and rubbished by the food industry.

We should have heeded his warning.

Today, 1 in 4 adults in the UK are overweight.

There is an epidemic of obese six month olds around the globe.

Sugar consumption has tripled since World War II.

Using everyday language and a range of scientific evidence, Professor Yudkin explores the ins and out of sugar, from the different types - is brown sugar really better than white? - to how it is hidden inside our everyday foods, and how it is damaging our health.

Brought up-to-date by childhood obesity expert Dr Robert Lustig M.D., his classic exposé on the hidden dangers of sugar is essential reading for anyone interested in their health, the health of their children and the health of modern society.

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Why do women excel at bitching? And are there ways to do it well? In this unique and entertaining book, Kate Figes explores girltalk, the way bitching erupts amongst teenage girls, the tenacity of female stereotypes as well as essential guidance on being the best kind of bitch - strong and self-assured rather than the bitch that needs to put other women down to feel stronger. Packed with witty anecdote, etiquette, interviews and contributions from strong bitches such as Kathy Lette, Wendy Holden and Virginia Ironside this is a must read for all women on the most delicious, yet dangerous of verbal art forms.

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Just over a decade into the new millennium, America is beset by a sense of crisis. The seismic shifts that occurred in the space of a generation have created a country of winners and losers, leaving the social contract in pieces. In The Unwinding, George Packer narrates the story of America over the past three decades, bringing to the task his empathy with people facing difficult challenges, his sharp eye for detail and a gift for weaving together engaging narratives.

The Unwinding moves deftly back and forth through the lives of half a dozen characters, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the industrial Midwest trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington careerist; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire. The narrative alternates these intimately told stories with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs, capturing the year-by-year flow of events. The Unwinding portrays a superpower coming apart at the seams, its elites and institutions no longer working, leaving ordinary people to improvise their own schemes for salvation.

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Before we go any further, let's get this out of the way first. I want you to do three things for me.

One. Do not be offended by anything you read beyond this point.

Two. Leave your inhibitions at the door.

Three, and most importantly. Everything you see and hear from now on must remain between us...

Catherine, a blossoming film student whose sexuality has been recently stirred, finds herself drawn into a secret club where the world's most powerful people meet to explore their deepest, often darkest sexual fantasies. But even as these new experiences open intense new pleasures for Catherine, they also threaten to destroy everything she holds dear. In her debut novel, Sasha Grey takes us inside a private, high-profile, sex society where anything and everything can happen.

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On 23 May 1992 the Mafia assassinated its 'Number One Enemy', the legendary prosecutor Judge Falcone, with a motorway bomb that also killed his wife Francesca and three bodyguards. Fifty-seven days later, the Mafia killed Falcone's friend and colleague, Judge Paolo Borsellino, with a car bomb outside his mother's home that also killed five bodyguards.  These two murders changed forever how Italy viewed the Mafia. VENDETTA tells the inside story of the assassination plots and the investigation that followed. Follain reveals Borsellino's desperate race against time to find out who killed his friend while knowing he was next on the list and reveals the daring undercover police mission which unmasked the killers. Based on new and exclusive interviews and the testimony of investigators, Mafia supergrasses, survivors, relatives and friends, VENDETTA recounts the events hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute as the Mafiosi plan and carry out the murders, and as the police hunt them down.

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Eva was arrested by the Nazis on her fifteenth birthday and sent to Auschwitz. Her survival depended on endless strokes of luck, her own determination and the love and protection of her mother Fritzi, who was deported with her. When Auschwitz was liberated, Eva and Fritzi began the long journey home. They searched desperately for Eva's father and brother, from whom they had been separated. The news came some months later. Tragically, both men had been killed. Before the war, in Amsterdam, Eva had become friendly with a young girl called Anne Frank. Though their fates were very different, Eva's life was set to be entwined with her friend's for ever more, after her mother Fritzi married Anne's father Otto Frank in 1953. This is a searingly honest account of how an ordinary person survived the Holocaust. Eva's memories and descriptions are heartbreakingly clear, her account brings the horror as close as it can possibly be. But this is also an exploration of what happened next, of Eva's struggle to live with herself after the war and to continue the work of her step-father Otto, ensuring that the legacy of Anne Frank is never forgotten. 

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Published alongside the 2013 film The Bling Ring, directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Emma Watson, this is the explosive true story of the seven celebrity-obsessed teens who became the most audacious burglary gang in Hollywood history.

It’s 19 September 2010, and 21-year-old Rachel Lee has emerged from Los Angeles Superior Court, having just been sentenced to four years behind bars.

A few months earlier, she had been running the Bling Ring: a gang of rich, beautiful, wild-living Valley teens who idolised celebrity, designer labels and luxury brands. Who, in 2009, became the most audacious thieves in recent Hollywood history.

In a case that has shocked the nation, the seven schoolfriends stole millions of dollars’ worth of clothing, jewellery and possessions from the sprawling mansions of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Orlando Bloom, among others – using gossip websites, Google Earth and Twitter to aid their crimes.

But what made these kids – all of whom already enjoyed designer clothes, money, cars and social status – gamble with their lives at such high stakes?

Journalist Nancy Jo Sales, the author of Vanity Fair’s acclaimed exposé of the Bling Ring, gained unprecedented access to the group to answer that question. In the process she uncovered a world of teenage greed, obsession, arrogance and delusion that surpassed her wildest expectations.

Now, for the first time, Sales tells their story in full. Publishing to tie into Sofia Coppola’s film of the same name, this is a fascinating look at the dark and seedy world of the real young Hollywood.

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