Gleaned from thousands of images, this book offers the best of American print advertising in the age of the "Big Idea." From the height of American consumerism, bold and colourful campaigns paint a fascinating portrait of the 1950s and '60s, as concerns about the Cold War gave way to the carefree booze-and-cigarettes capitalism of the Mad Men era. Digitally remastered for optimum reproduction quality, the ads burst with crisp fonts and colours, as well as a sexy sense of possibility, beguiling their audience to buy everything from guns to Biflex bras and girdles, cars to toothpaste, air travel to home appliances, telephones in all colours and shapes, Knoll modern furniture, HiFs, cigarettes advertised by smoking poodles, Marlboro by babies Marilyn in Playboy, glamous fqshion, cosmetics like Cutex and Neet, Yellow Pages, Martini and alcohol, Hot Oatmeal is Cool, Boy mints Girl and the youth market, Mobil - we want you to live. At turns startling, amusing and inspiring, this panorama of mid-century marketing is at once an evocative period piece and a showcase of design innovation and advertising wit. 15.6 x 21.7 cm, 512 pages. Text in English, French and German. New from Taschen.

Combining stunning visuals of both exciting and rare designs with an insightful text, this history shows the new pathways in fashion design development which have forever changed the way we dress today. It features 75 of the world's most legendary designers, their personal lives and innovative collections over the last century from Hermès, Worth, Burberry, Gucci, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, Hartnell, Dior, Balmain, Cardin, Givenchy, Oscar de la Renta, Ungaro, Armani, Mary Quant, Barbara Hulanicki, Yves Saint Laurent, Issey Miyake, Ralph Lauren, Vivien Westwood, Calvin Klein, Ossie Clark, Jil Sander, Paul Smith, Versace, Donna Karan, Prada, Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier, Helmut Lang, Dries Van Noten, Dolce & Gabbana, John Galliano, Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen and Gareth Pugh among them. Arranged in a broadly chronological order, the book uses boxed features to display key dates, pull quotes and one glamorous full page left hand example of the designer's work, often modelled by celebrities, models or actresses like Yves Saint Laurent's muse Catherine Deneuve wearing a strictly tailored double-breasted velvet coat in 1970. One exceptionally glamorous image is Valentino's last haute couture show in Paris in 2008 with a finale seeing the models wearing identical backless, signature red bias-cut column dresses. Brocade, sequins, florals, denim, Twiggy modelling Biba, Peggy Moffitt wearing a sleeveless mini dress with a central plastic strip and houndstooth patterned boots from 1966, or David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust costumes by Yamamoto, this is a visual feast. 312 huge pages in sturdy softback, 19.7 x 29.2cm.
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Sub-titled 'The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship', since the end of the Cold War, so-called experts have been predicting the eclipse of America's 'special relationship' with Britain. But as events have shown, especially in the wake of 9/11, the political and cultural ties between America and Britain have grown stronger. Hitchens examines the dynamics of this relationship, its many cultural manifestations, from James Bond to Winston Churchill, Brit Kitsch, Vox Americana to nuclear jealousy and Rudyard Kipling, and explains why it still persists. Contrarian, essayist and polemicist, Hitchens notes that the special ingredient is empire, transmitted from an ancient regime which has tried to preserve and renew itself. England has attempted to play Greece to an American Rome, but ironically having encountered the United States to become an equal partner in the business of empire, Britain found itself supplanted. A mordent, episodic, brilliantly lucid history of transatlantic negotiations of power and cultural influence, Hitchens combines irresistible journalistic raciness with a distinction of scholarship. 398pp, paperback.

From one of the most beloved and distinguished historians of the British monarchy, here is a lively, intimately detailed biography of a long-overlooked king who reimagined the Crown in the aftermath of World War I and whose marriage to the regal Queen Mary was an epic partnership. The grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, King George V reigned over the British Empire from 1910 to 1936, a period of unprecedented international turbulence. Yet no one could deny that as a young man, George seemed uninspired. As his biographer Harold Nicolson famously put it, "he did nothing at all but kill animals and stick in stamps." The contrast between him and his flamboyant, hedonistic, playboy father Edward VII could hardly have been greater. However, though it lasted only a quarter-century, George's reign was immensely consequential. He faced a constitutional crisis, the First World War, the fall of 13 European monarchies and the rise of Bolshevism. The suffragette Emily Davison threw herself under his horse at the Derby, he refused asylum to his cousin the Tsar Nicholas II during the Russian Revolution, and he facilitated the first Labour government. And, as Jane Ridley shows, the modern British monarchy would not exist without George; he reinvented the institution, allowing it to survive and thrive when its very existence seemed doomed. The status of the British monarchy today, she argues, is due in large part to him. How this supposedly limited man managed to steer the crown through so many perils and adapt an essentially Victorian institution to the 20th century is a great story in itself. But this book is also a riveting portrait of a royal marriage and family life. Queen Mary played a pivotal role in the reign as well as being an important figure in her own right. Under the couple's stewardship, the crown emerged stronger than ever. George V founded the modern monarchy, and yet his disastrous quarrel with his eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, culminated in the existential crisis of the Abdication only months after his death. Jane Ridley has had unprecedented access to the archives, and for the first time is able to reassess in full the many myths associated with this crucial and dramatic time. She brings us a royal family and world not long vanished, and not so far from our own. Photos, remainder mark, 15.24 x 22.86cm. 560 pages.

World War II was global warfare on an unimaginable scale, generating suffering, deprivation and death of almost limitless dimensions. Not even the Great War saw such barbaric cruelty and atrocity. 100 million men, and a smaller number of women, entered the theatre of war fighting with weapons that had been honed in the earlier conflict, while bombing, deportation, requisitioning and theft completely overturned domestic structure and infrastructure. Coercion, torture and genocide were carried out by regular servicemen and women and the police. The author goes beyond the view of war that sees Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese military as causes of crisis, and looks at the broader historical forces that prompted the Axis states to undertake imperial territorial conquest. The conflict goes back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 and continued a decade after "Victory in Europe" in 1945, with its course being influenced by the civil wars raging in China, Ukraine, Italy and Greece. The author is a major authority on World War II and his argument in this magisterial book is that the long Second World War was the last imperial war. Imperial crises frame the origins and course of the conflict and the outcome ended half a millennium of colonialism. The books starts with the fracturing of trade and finance in the 1920s combined with growing nationalist ideology, particularly in Germany where Hitler blamed the Jews for frustrating his ambitions. The hostility of both the US and Soviet Union, on opposite sides, to the survival of traditional colonial empires was key to the eventual outcome. The progress of the war provides the author with a frame for thematic chapters exploring the wider experience of the conflict. How did states mobilise the colossal manpower and material resources? How did states, parties and individuals justify extreme barbarity? What did the war do emotionally and psychologically to those sucked into it? Along the way the author examines issues such as the role of the BBC and intelligence services, and the contribution of partisans and resistance fighters, particularly in the Pacific where barbarity was extreme. Almost a third of the female partisans in Italy were wounded or killed. A huge 990pp, illus.

Raised in Iraq in the 1950s, serving as a minister in the post-Saddam government and now a visiting fellow at Princeton, Allawi is supremely well-placed to comment on the rise of the Islamic world in global politics. The gap between the sacred and secular is as much of a key to the crisis in Islam as it has been for Western societies. In the 1950s Allawi grew up in a community where the ruling cultural and political class had moved away from overt identification with Islam. Women rarely wore the hijab, and the pilgrimage to Mecca was mainly for older people. Then the 1960s were dominated by populist and nationalist ideologies, and by the end of the 1970s militant Islam seemed unstoppable, with a radical jihad-inspired culture initially focused on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There followed the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the rise of the Taliban, civil wars in Sudan and Algeria, the eruption of global terror and the invasion of Iraq. The author found that only a few of the Muslims he encountered in the political arena could resonate with the spiritual or ethical aspects of Islam, and he traces the origins of change right back to rulers such as Tippu Sultan in Mysore at the end of the 18th century. The divisions within and between Muslims led to extreme violence, particularly the Wahhabi-inspired Islamists. In this wide-ranging book the author argues first that Islam is different from other civilisations, particularly the globalising world order, because it has to recognise the role of the transcendent. Secondly, he tracks the changes that have occurred in Islam's self-understanding in the past two centuries, for instance the science of tafsir, modernising the understanding of the Quran, of which Sayyid Qutb was a leading exponent, seeking Quranic sanction for fighting tyranny. Qutb was key in giving radical Islam legitimacy in the eyes of the public. He then deals with the outer effects of the erosion of Islamic civilisation in terms of institutions and economic life, raising the question of whether a uniquely Islamic order can ever be recreated. 304pp.

With exemplary Cases From Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, the author starts this compelling study with the story of her grandfather Morris Greenfield and the way he survived the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. Somehow he finally made it to the United States in 1930, fleeing from the onset of the Holocaust. Morris was not a rebel, but put his talents to adapting. Anti-semitism was a fact of his life, but it failed to crush him. Jewish children were excluded from the school in his Russian village, but the Orthodox priest sneaked him into class. In 1907 he was drafted and found himself in Vladivostok, where the antisemitism he encountered prompted him to desert and head for America, travelling by train and crossing to Shanghai, then taking a German ship to Naples and New York. He was supported by his brother who was already there and had sent him money, but returned to visit his widowed mother and found himself in a military prison. Morris got away during the civil war and survived a series of picaresque adventures hand to mouth, supplying authorities with commodities in return for protection, and finally with his wife returned to America for good. In the main part of the book the author considers three more cases in which anti-semitism constituted a challenge not only to Jews but also to gentiles confronted with its extreme consequences. Frequently Jews were caught up in the bind between fighting for civil rights within their native country, and asserting the right to their own communal and cultural identity within the nation state. The first of the author's three examples focuses on the resistance of early 20th century Russian intellectuals against discrimination, in partnership with Jewish leaders and the newly created state Duma. The second follows the 1927 Paris trial of Russin-born Sholem Schwarzbard who shot and killed the ex-Ukrainian leader as an act of vengeance on behalf of Jews. The trial focused on whether this was justified. Finally the author examines reactions to the legacy of Andrzej Bobkowski when his memoirs were revealed to have had anti-semitic elements edited out. 260pp, paperback.

In 1936 the abdication of King Edward VIII in order to marry Wallis Simpson dramatically divided public opinion. One of the King's high-profile supporters was Winston Churchill, who had tears in his eyes when he visited Edward as he prepared to leave his flamboyant Windsor residence Fort Belvedere for the last time. A friend of the Duke remarked that "there was nothing in him which understood the intellectual or spiritual sides of life", and several people, including Wallis, described him as never having progressed beyond boyhood. Wallis confided to a friend, "Can you imagine a more terrible fate than to have to live up publicly to the legend of a love you don't feel?" This fascinating book tells the story of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they now became, in the years following the abdication. Edward initially stayed with the Rothschilds, running up huge bills which no-one knew who was supposed to pay for. The Rothschilds' patience disappeared when Edward started to play the bagpipes at 3 am. Following marriage to Wallis, the couple travelled round Europe staying with friends, some of whom were Fascists. Wallis's lawyer worked for Hitler's top officials and the couple's Nazi sympathies were viewed with alarm. The couple were not to be invited to any embassy. In August 1939 the Duke telegraphed Hitler asking him not to go to war, to which Hitler replied that the "correct channel" must be found. When war broke out, Mountbatten took his destroyer across the channel to collect the couple. The Duke was reluctantly despatched to be governor of the Bahamas. En route they stayed in Portugal, where their security was ordered to shoot them if they fell into German hands during visits to the casino. In the Bahamas the couple lived a rackety lifestyle which included an unsolved murder in their entourage, and after the war they followed a monotonously swinging lifestyle in Paris. Archive photos, 410 pages.

For over two centuries, the 'Irish question' has dogged UK politics. Although the Good Friday Agreement carved a fragile peace from the bloodshed of the Troubles, the Brexit process has shown a largely uncomprehending British audience just how uneasy that peace always was, and thrown new light on Northern Ireland's uncertain constitutional status. Remote from the British mainland in its politics, economy and cultural attitudes, Northern Ireland is in effect an antechamber, its place within the UK conditional on the border poll guaranteed by the peace process. As shifting demographic trends erode the once-dominant Protestant-Unionist majority, making a future referendum a racing certainty, the reunification of Ireland becomes a question of not if but when, and how. In this new, fully updated edition, Kevin Meagher argues that a reasoned, pragmatic discussion about Britain's relationship with its nearest neighbour is now long overdue and questions that have remained unasked and perhaps unthought must now be answered. A well argued book in terms of economics and the effect of the Scottish breakaway. 234pp, paperback.

Mariella Novotny was found dead with her face in a bowl of milk pudding in February 1983. She was in the process of writing her memoirs. 'It's dynamite!' Christine Keeler said, 'I think it was murder...most probably by the CIA.' In 1961, Mariella was an underage hooker engaging in sexual relations with President John F. Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world. She was believed to be part of a vice ring set up by an alleged Communist agent who was also a well-known British film producer. FBI officers called their investigation 'The Bow-Tie Case'. Two years later the young 'Monroe lookalike' played a major part in another sex scandal with implications for national security - the Profumo Affair. Mariella was the hostess of the Man in the Mask party. She was a close friend of Stephen Ward, the osteopath and pander to high society, another putative whistle-blower who died in suspicious circumstances. In the late 1960s, she gave birth to the illegitimate child of Eddie Chapman (Agent Zigzag), England's most successful wartime double agent. Between 1975 and 1978 she was working undercover for Operation Countryman, an investigation into police corruption in the Flying Squad. Her chief target was the author's grandfather, Charlie Taylor, a London conman who had high-ranking officers in his deep pockets. Mariella brought them all down. An excerpt from the chapter entitled Black Power and Rotting Hill: 'Michael came to London. He worked his way into the veins of criminal society. In Notting Hill, he managed prostitutes, ran gambling houses, sold drugs and collected rent for the property racketeer Peter Rachman, who had already had a go at bedding Mariella and blackmailing Hod.' Includes colour photos including Soho in the early 60s and Mariella on her wedding day to Hod Dibben. 253 pages.