We are in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Sixty five million people are fleeing for their lives. The choices are urgent, not just for them but for all of us. What can we possibly do to help? With compassion and clarity, David Miliband shows why we should care and how we can make a difference. He takes us from war zones in the Middle East to peaceful suburbs in America to explain the crisis and show what can be done, not just by governments with the power to change policy but by citizens with the urge to change lives. His innovative and practical call to action shows that the crisis need not overwhelm us. Miliband says this is a fight to uphold the best of human nature in the face of rhetoric and policy that humor the worst. He defends the international order built by western leaders out of the ashes of World War II, but says now is the time for reform. Describing his family story and drawing revealing lessons from his life in politics, David Miliband shows that if we fail refugees, then we betray our own history, values, and interests. The message is simple: rescue refugees and we rescue ourselves.

This revelatory memoir from Britain's former Prime Minister offers vital insights into our extraordinary times. Former Prime Minister and the country's longest-serving Chancellor, Gordon Brown has been a guiding force for Britain and the world over three decades. This is his candid, poignant and deeply relevant story. In describing his upbringing in Scotland as the son of a minister, the near loss of his eyesight as a student and the death of his daughter within days of her birth, he shares the passionately-held principles that have shaped and driven him, reminding us that politics can and should be a calling to serve. Reflecting on the personal and ideological tensions within Labour and its successes and failures in power, he describes how to meet the challenge of pursuing a radical agenda within a credible party of government. From the invasion of Iraq to the tragedy of Afghanistan, from the coalition negotiations of 2010 to the referendums on Scottish independence and Europe, Gordon Brown draws on his unique experiences to explain Britain's current fractured condition. By showing us what progressive politics has achieved in recent decades, he inspires us with a vision of what it might yet achieve. Riveting, expert and highly personal, this historic memoir is an invaluable insight into our times.

This highly readable book offers a contemporary interpretation of the political thought of Edmund Burke, drawing on his experiences to illuminate and address fundamental questions of politics and society that are of particular interest today. In Edmund Burke for Our Time, Byrne asserts that Burke's politics is reflective of unique and sophisticated ideas about how people think and learn and about determinants of political behavior.

Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, the essential biography of the father of the Arts and Crafts movement. The author, Fiona MacCarthy, is the curator of the National Portrait Gallery's 2014-15 exhibition Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy.'One of the finest biographies ever published in this country' A. S. Byatt Since his death in 1896, William Morris has come to be regarded as one of the giants of the Victorian era. But his genius was so many-sided and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time, possibly of all time, could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and could have been ranked as a poet together with Tennyson and Browning.With penetrating insight, Fiona MacCarthy has managed to encompass all the different facets of Morris's complex character, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry and books, and as a poet, novelist and translator; his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Fiona MacCarthy's skilful drawing together of these disparate elements makes for a comprehensive and compelling biography.

This groundbreaking book represents the most systematic examination to date of the often-invoked but rarely examined declaration that "history matters." Most contemporary social scientists unconsciously take a "snapshot" view of the social world. Yet the meaning of social events or processes is frequently distorted when they are ripped from their temporal context. Paul Pierson argues that placing politics in time--constructing "moving pictures" rather than snapshots--can vastly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics, and greatly improve the theories and methods that we use to explain them. Politics in Time opens a new window on the temporal aspects of the social world. It explores a range of important features and implications of evolving social processes: the variety of processes that unfold over significant periods of time, the circumstances under which such different processes are likely to occur, and above all, the significance of these temporal dimensions of social life for our understanding of important political and social outcomes. Ranging widely across the social sciences, Pierson's analysis reveals the high price social science pays when it becomes ahistorical. And it provides a wealth of ideas for restoring our sense of historical process. By placing politics back in time, Pierson's book is destined to have a resounding and enduring impact on the work of scholars and students in fields from political science, history, and sociology to economics and policy analysis.

In his memoirs, John Kenneth Galbraith recalls amusingly, even brilliantly, the important and low moments in his life, the men and women he met who were great, only interesting, entertaining or even absurd. Galbraith studied agriculture in his native Canada and agricultural economics at UC-Berkeley. He taught at the University of California, served briefly in FDR’s administration and went on to Harvard. In Cambridge, England, he discovered the new economics of John Maynard Keynes. During World War II in Washington, he held the key job of organizing and administering the system of wartime price controls. After the war, Galbraith directed the survey that interrogated former Nazi leaders to assess the effects of the air war on the German economy. He then worked for the State Department as administrator for economic affairs in the occupied countries and served as an editor of Fortune when the magazine employed some of the best writers around. Galbraith returned to Harvard in 1948 and wrote three of the most influential books on economics of his time, The Affluent Society, The New Industrial State and Economics and the Public Purpose. In these lively memoirs, the author relates all of this and more — his two major political campaigns, with Adlai E. Stevenson for whom he was adviser and speech-writer, and John F. Kennedy, for whom he campaigned across the country; his years as ambassador in India; and his long opposition to the Vietnam war. And he shares the lessons learned from these experiences. “On every subject Mr. Galbraith is succinct and witty... The book is full of strong opinion and proceeds by the vehicle of anecdote... The serious business of the book... is to trace the steps of its author’s astonishingly varied and useful life... Mr. Galbraith’s vigor of expression, as well as an account of a period of gloom and psychotherapy, prevents the writing from ever sounding impersonal. That serious business is also to set the record straight — on what his books were about and how he evolved his theory of The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, as two of his most important works were named; on why the bombing of Germany during World War II was less than useless, why it was patently unnecessary to wage atomic warfare on Japan and why he came to be a dissenter on the war in Vietnam. On inflation. On the ‘secular priesthood’ that once presided at the State Department. And, enchantingly, on such movers and shakers he came to know well as the New Dealer Leon Henderson, Paul Baran (‘the most interesting economist I have ever known’), Bernard M. Baruch, Adlai E. Stevenson, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times “As a raconteur and a literary stylist, [Galbraith] stands with the best... As entertainment, the book is a total success. Its charm comes from the combination of Mr. Galbraith’s smooth comic timing and his not always charitable wit.” — James Fallows, The New York Times “Galbraith ranks with the most entertaining and provocative political writers in America in this century... Without Galbraith the political literature of our time would be far drearier.” — Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs “[Galbraith] has assembled a well-nigh complete record of what he has been up to, professionally at least, since leaving his family’s Ontario farm. The account is fascinating... The narrative... consistently holds the distinctive Galbraith style that makes all his books read like a nippy breeze.” — Geoffrey Colvin, Christian Science Monitor “Absorbing and irresistible.” — The New Yorker “An enjoyable book, full of fun, full of wisdom, and full of rare insights into the history of our times.” — The New Republic “A delightfully teeming book... Galbraith’s comic voice is a distinctive and durable literary achievement.” — Atlantic Monthly “A highly perceptive commentary on all our yesterdays... anecdotal, amusing, animated and above all, illuminating.” — John Barkham Reviews

From New York Times bestselling author of Lead From The Outside and political leader Stacey Abrams, a blueprint to end voter suppression, empower our citizens, and take back our country. "With each page, she inspires and empowers us to create systems that reflect a world in which all voices are heard and all people believe and feel that they matter." —Kerry Washington A recognized expert on fair voting and civic engagement, Abrams chronicles a chilling account of how the right to vote and the principle of democracy have been and continue to be under attack. Abrams would have been the first African American woman governor, but experienced these effects firsthand, despite running the most innovative race in modern politics as the Democratic nominee in Georgia. Abrams didn’t win, but she has not conceded. The book compellingly argues for the importance of robust voter protections, an elevation of identity politics, engagement in the census, and a return to moral international leadership. Our Time Is Now draws on extensive research from national organizations and renowned scholars, as well as anecdotes from her life and others’ who have fought throughout our country’s history for the power to be heard. The stakes could not be higher. Here are concrete solutions and inspiration to stand up for who we are?now. "This is a narrative that describes the urgency that compels me and millions more to push for a different American story than the one being told today. It's a story that is one part danger, one part action, and all true. It's a story about how and why we fight for our democracy and win." - Stacey Abrams

Lincoln’s incredible ascent to power in a world of chaos is newly revealed in this “compelling, original, and elegantly written” (Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author) third volume of the “magisterial” (The New York Times Book Review) Political Life of Abraham Lincoln series, following A Self-Made Man and Wrestling with His Angel. After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a senate seat. He sidelines the frontrunner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party’s nomination. All the Powers of Earth is the political story of all time. Lincoln achieves the presidency by force of strategy, of political savvy and determination. This is Abraham Lincoln, who indisputably becomes the greatest president and moral leader in the nation’s history. But he must first build a new political party, brilliantly state the anti-slavery case and overcome shattering defeat to win the presidency. In the years of civil war to follow, he will show mightily that the nation was right to bet on him. He was its preserver, a politician of moral integrity. All the Powers of Earth is “as essential as any political biography is likely to be” and Sidney Bluementhal is “the definitive chronicler of Lincoln’s political career” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers; as a TV presenter he changed the way we looked at art in Ways of Seeing; as a storyteller and political activist he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants and the oppressed around the world. In 1953 he wrote: "Far from dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics." He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January, 2017. In A Writer of Our Time, Joshua Sperling places Berger's life and works within the historical narrative of postwar Britain and beyond. The book also explores, through the work, the larger questions that vexed a generation: the purpose of art, the nature of creative freedom, the meaning of commitment. Drawing on extensive interviews, close readings and a wealth of archival sources only recently made available, the book brings the many different faces of John Berger together and shows him as one of the most vital, and brilliant, thinkers and storytellers of our time.

Analyses of why precise dates and quantities of time become critical to transactions over citizenship rights in liberal democracies.