Hurst & Co.

The history of the Latvian people begins some four and a half millennia ago with the arrival of the proto-Baltic Indo-Europeans to northern Europe. One branch of these migrants coalesced into a...

The huge number of security forces stationed around the world as United Nations peace- keepers is second only to the global military deployments of the USA. But most UN peacekeepers come from the...

A global energy revolution is unfolding before our eyes: ever-growing numbers of electric vehicles on our roads, laptops that last all day on a single charge and solar panels on our roofs, all...

As soldier and statesman, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim (1867-1951) occupies a unique place in the history of Finland. He served as Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Army in 1918 and again from 1939-1944...

In the humanitarian field those we rather mockingly call "French doctors" seem always to be in the vanguard, the first to arrive in any critical situation. If they hold such a position in modern...

Muslim intellectuals may try to define something called British Islam, but the truth is that as the Muslim community of Britain has grown in size and religiosity, so too has the opportunity to found...

While humanitarianism is unquestionably a fast-growing subject of practitioner and scholarly engagement, much discussion about it is predicated on a dangerous dichotomy between "aid givers" and...

Michael Chaplin's career includes executive roles at ITV and the BBC, and his writing credits include highly successful television series such as Monarch of the Glen, amongst others. When the boy...

Although the term "natural disaster" applies to the December 2004 tsunami, the images of huge devastation that were televised after the tragedy probably seemed a good deal less "natural" to us than...

Wim Van Meurs and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi have completed the first book on the history of institutions in the Balkans, commissioning a host of experts to write on the bureaucracies, judiciaries,...

In mid-2012 the previously almost forgotten Syrian Kurds suddenly emerged as a potential game-changer in the country's civil war when in an attempt to consolidate its increasingly desperate position...

Yunas Samad's trenchant analysis of contemporary Pakistan features five main players: the people, the army, the Islamists, the politicians and the Americans. His book explains how a series of...

In 1797 Jeremy Bentham prepared a map of poverty in Britain, which he called "Pauperland." More than two hundred years later, poverty and social deprivation remain widespread in Britain. Yet despite...

While governments are obliged to protect society and bring terrorists to justice, their effectiveness in tackling terrorism without undermining the support of the population for law and order or...

In 1988, the World Health Organization launched a twelve-year campaign to wipe out polio. Thirty years and several billion dollars over budget later, the campaign grinds on, vaccinating millions of...

Vladimir Putin has almost by stealth transformed himself into an historic Russian figure. His undeniable political dominance was reflected in his return to presidential control after the March 2012...

Seventy years on from the partition of India, a momentous event now recedes in memory. Despite being born into a family affected by the great divide, artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra had...

The media reporting of the Ethiopian Famine in 1984-5 was an iconic news event. It is widely believed to have had an unprecedented impact, challenging perceptions of Africa and mobilising public...

In January 2011 President Bashar al-Assad told the Wall Street Journal that Syria was stable and immune from revolt. In the months that followed, and as regimes fell in Egypt and Tunisia, thousands...

In the aftermath of the suicide bombings on London's transport infrastructure in July 2005, the then Prime Minister Tony Blair said that "the rules of the game have changed/" He referred to how his...

Moscow has the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe. In 2015, some 2 million Muslim Muscovites celebrated the opening of the continent's biggest mosque. One quarter of the Soviet...

Samora Machel led FRELIMO, the Mozambican Liberation Front, to victory against Portuguese colonialism in 1974, and the following year became independent Mozambique's first President. He died eleven...

The Saudi royal family has survived the events of the Arab Spring intact and unscathed. Any major upheavals were ostensibly averted with the help of oil revenues, while the Kingdom's influential...

When Pauline Terreehorst bid for a vintage Gucci suitcase at Sotheby's Amsterdam, she had no idea what was inside. The case turned out to be full of fine dresses, furs and lace, with boxes of...

The Times hailed Richard Burdon Haldane as 'one of the most powerful ... intellects' British statesmanship had ever seen. His brother John, a great physiologist, invented the first gas masks used in...

Britons all getting poorer. What does that look like for British children, and their life chances? If we found seven typical 5-year-olds to represent today's UK, who would they be? What would their...

Dr Adrian Massey has worked at the intersection of medicine and society for decades. He argues compellingly that our hyper-medicalized society has falsely equated sickness with illness, and sickness...

Warfare is at a tipping point today as it passes from the age of industrial warfare to a new era of computerized warfare and a renewed risk of "big war" between global powers. Humanitarian response...

A decade into its hard-won democracy, South Africa and its ruling party, the ANC, have been through turbulent times: confrontation between Thabo Mbeki and his then deputy Jacob Zuma; the dismissal of...

Stalin's American Spy tells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the...