'Here's the history that really matters' Financial Times The UK is, at the same time, both one of the world's most successful economies and one of Europe's laggards. The country contains some of Western Europe's richest areas such as the south east of England, but also some of its poorest such as the north east or Wales. It's really not much of an exaggeration to describe the UK, in economic terms, as 'Portugal but with Singapore in the bottom corner'. Looking into the past helps understand why. Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through tells the story of how Britain's economy and politics have interacted with each other from the time of the Industrial Revolution right up to the pandemic of 2020. A few politicians, such as Peel, Gladstone, Attlee and Thatcher have managed to shape the economy but far more have been shaped by it. Depressing little in British economic debate is really new. This time is rarely, if ever, really different. The debates about the balance between economic openness and sovereignty that re-emerged after Brexit would have been familiar to Peel and Cobden in the 1840s. The size of the government's deficit has dominated politics since 2010 but fretting about the scale of the national debt was almost a national pastime during Victoria's reign. Worries about the failure of vocational training and a paranoia that German manufacturing was powering ahead were common in the days of Lloyd George and Asquith. Supposedly modern concerns about the impacts of new technology on jobs and inequality date back to at least Captain Swing and Ned Ludd. As the economy emerges from the Covid-19 recession and sets out on a new post-Brexit future an understanding of the past is vital to seeing how the future might play out.

Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through

FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF V2 AND MUNICH 'A master storyteller' Observer 'From what is it they flee?' He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.' 1660, General Edward Whalley and Colonel William Goffe, father- and son-in-law, cross the Atlantic. They are on the run and wanted for the murder of Charles I. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, they have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. In London, Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is tasked with tracking down the fugitives. He'll stop at nothing until the two men are brought to justice. A reward of e100 hangs over their heads - for their capture, dead or alive. ACT OF OBLIVION is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other. It is the thrilling new novel by Robert Harris. 'The king of the page-turning thriller' i Paper 'Harris's cleverness, judgment and eye for detail are second to none' Sunday Times 'Harris writes with a skill and ingenuity that few other novelists can match' Financial Times 'Harris is a master of historical fiction, a compelling author who brings to life the recent and ancient past' TLS

Act of Oblivion

**National Bestseller * *New York Times* Editors’ Choice *** ***Financial Times* “Books to Read in 2022”**  
   
**“A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (*The Wall Street Journal*)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared.**  
  
Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.  
   
Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.  
   
In *The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley*, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success.  
   
Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (*The New York Times*) and “engrossing” (*Business Insider*), *The Founders* is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

The Founders

A daring CIA operation threatens chaos in the Kremlin. Its execution is foiled by a Russian woman with secret loyalties CIA operatives Sia and Max enter Russia to recruit Vladimir Putin's moneyman. Sia works for a London firm that conceals the wealth of the super-rich. Max's family business in Mexico - a CIA front since the 1960s - is a farm that breeds high-end racehorses. ﻿ They pose as a couple, and their targets are Vadim, Putin's private banker, and his wife Anna, who is both a banker and an intelligence officer. As they descend further into a Russian world dripping with luxury and rife with gangland violence, Sia and Max's hope may be Anna, who is playing a game of her own. Careening between the horse ranch and the dark opulence of Saint Petersburg, Moscow X is both a gripping thriller of modern espionage and a daring work of political commentary on the conflict between Washington and Moscow. Praise for Damascus Station 'Simply marvellous storytelling...a stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre' - Financial Times 'The best spy novel I have ever read' - General David Petraeus, former director of the CIA

Jonathan Davies

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