'Of course, there is something about the phrase 'political wife' that still evokes an image of a passive, helmet-haired, jam-making woman standing silently behind her husband, either smiling admirably as he asks for votes or frowning firmly as he admits to abusing his power or marriage. When my husband was elected as an MP, I remember being invited to join a Westminster Wives group. The first event they planned was a trip to the Aga Centre for a cookery demonstration.' What is it like to be the wife of a politician in modern- day Britain? Sasha Swire finally lifts the lid. For more than 20 years she has kept a secret diary detailing the trials and tribulations of being a political plus-one, and gives us a ringside seat at the seismic political events of the last decade. Swire detonates the stereotype of the dutiful wife. From shenanigans in Budleigh Salterton to state banquets in Buckingham Palace, gun-toting terrorist-busters in pizza restaurants to dinners in Downing Street sitting next to Boris Johnson, Devon hedges to partying with city hedgies, she observes the great and the not-so-great at the closest of quarters. Painfully revealing and often hilariously funny, here are the friendships and the fall-outs, the general elections and the leadership contests, the scandals and the rivalries. Her secret diary covers not only the rise and the fall of her friends the Camerons, but also the shenanigans surrounding Brexit and the inexorable rise of Boris, concluding at the end when Sir Hugo (as he was by then) left Parliament. Set against a backdrop of country house shooting weekends and boozy dinners at Chequers, but seen through the sceptical eyes of a woman one step removed from the head-butting stags, there is acute political intelligence at work from Lady Swire, wife of Sir Hugo Swire, former MP for East Devon from 2010-2016, a Minister of State for the Northern Ireland Office and Foreign Office and who was the daughter of John Nott. Name dropping index, 527pp, Sunday Times Political Book of the Year. Gripping and appalling in equal measure.

For every Gaelic football fan here is a book offering fascinating insight into the egos, dressing room divides and bad habits from unwelcoming veterans to arseboxing and collapsing human pyramids, to marching to the Hill to startled earwigs and champions, Cotter has it all covered in his well written and insightful read. The raw and hardnosed nature of Gaelic football and the Dublin dressing room at the end of the 1990s jumps from the page. It was a time when Ireland's biggest, richest county went through such a barren period, from political squabbles to general mismanagement behind the scenes which kept the Dubs from taking Sam home for so long. There are also great snippets from interviews with former players and coaches from Bertie Ahern to a host of managers which add great colour to the stories. Dublin has become the dominant force in Gaelic football, setting new standards of skill and efficiency, but it was not very long ago that the county was a byword for underachievement and disorganisation. Every year from 1996 to 2010 the Dubs found new and creative ways of losing, of causing their fans to suffer, and of earning the scorn of the wider GAA public. The book is full of frank, witty and sometimes outrageous stories and analysis from those in the know. 256pp, paperback, colour photos.

Sub-titled 'The Reporters Who Took On A World At War', we meet an astonishing group - glamorous, gutsy and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, on mules with wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendour of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers and Balkan gunrunners, then knocked back doubles late into the night. This mammoth work is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean and Dorothy Thompson, a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters, who in the run-up to World War One took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism. They landed exclusive interviews with Hitler, Franco and Mussolini who sought to persuade them of fascism's inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them, seeking American allies against British imperialism. Churchill, for his part, saw them as his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler. They grabbed front pages across the world, causing Goebbels to rage about 'international liars and counterfeiters'. In their private lives they were committed to the cause of freedom with all its hazards and argued about love, war, sex, death and everything in between and wrote it all down. These fault lines would run through their own marriages and friendships too. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this is a revelatory book about the interwar years and these two New Yorkers, one Chicagan, one Illinois and one Texan together with their outer circle including Marcel Fodor from Hungary, Emily (Mickey) Hahn reporting from Shanghai as of 1935, British diplomat Harold Nicolson reporting from Tehran, Eddy Sackville-West the music critic and Rebecca West among many others. With maps of their travels and a superb sense of how these first-rate correspondents had not just access, time and money, but real influence over world affairs. A monumental tome, 557pp, photos.

Sub-titled 'How Russians, the Rich and the Government Try to Prevent Free Speech and How to Stop Them', the author argues that the British tradition of 'free speech' is a myth. For centuries the law of defamation has worked to cover up misbehaviour by the rich and powerful whose legal mercenaries intimidate those who seek to expose it. Now through misguided judicial development of the laws of privacy, breech of confidence and data protection, a new terror has been added to suppress the supporting of truths of public importance. This is lawfare, in which journalists and authors struggle against unfair rules and a cost burden that runs to the millions. Law schools do not teach freedom of speech, and judges in the Supreme Court do not understand it. Drawing upon the author's unparalleled experience in court rooms over the past 50 years, the book identifies and advocates the reforms that will be necessary before Britain can truly boast that it is a land of free speech rather than a place where free speech can become very expensive. Robertson represented the editors of Oz, Gay News, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, the publishers of Spycatcher and Salman Rushdie and Julian Assange. In 2022 he was sanctioned by the Kremlin. With his typical insight and wit he shows how media law can be a stumbling block, and this is an essential read at a time when so many governments are weaponizing the law to intimidate those who speak truth to power. Is this a battle ever won? 150pp.

'My mother warned me to look after our John - he was only 17 and too young to go on the marches. I said he'd be fine with his friends. He took shelter at the rubble barricade they shot him in the face. I'd been arrested by the British Army and taken away while trying to get someone else to hospital. The boy we were helping died.' Sub-titled 'A New History of the Day And Its Aftermath by Those Who Were There', the book is dedicated to the people of Derry 'who have never given up in their pursuit of truth, justice and civil rights.' In January 1972, soldiers from Britain's 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment opened fire on a peaceful civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland, leaving 13 dead and 18 injured. Within hours, they informed the world that they had won an 'IRA gun battle', an official narrative that stuck for decades. In 2012, Lord Saville found the British Army fired first, and that most victims were either shot in the back while running away or helping someone in need. Seven of the killed were teenage boys. Oral historian Julieann Campbell's 17 year uncle was the first person killed. Over the years she has recorded dozens of interviews and gathered rare, unseen accounts in order to better understand the tension, confusion and anger of the times. Now 50 years on and for the first time, this remarkable book weaves together the experiences of survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses and politicians to recall events as it was lived and gives extraordinary insight into one of the darkest moments in modern history and a reminder of the true human cost of conflict. It weaves a narrative of personal reflection and testimony from more than 110 speakers affected by the events and 20 of these interviews have never been published before. With archive pictures such as the Springtown Camp January 1964, map of the Bogside area, chapters include Snipers In William Street, Word Spreads, A Cover-Up Begins, Nail Bombs and Hate Mail and The Funerals. 446pp, many illus.

It was the decade of daring Expressionist canvases, of brilliant book design, of the Bauhaus total work of art, of pioneering psychology, of drag balls, cabaret, Metropolis, and Marlene Dietrich's rising star in theatre and silent film. Between the paroxysms of two world wars, Berlin in the 1920s was a carpe diem cultural heyday, replete with groundbreaking art, invention, and thought. This book immerses readers in the freewheeling spirit of Berlin's Weimar age. Through exemplary works in painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic design, photography, and film, we uncover the innovations, ideas, and precious dreams that characterized this unique cultural window. We take in the jazz bars and dance halls; the crowded kinos and flapper fashion; the advances in technology and transport; the radio towers and rumbling trams and trains; the soaring buildings; the cinematic masterworks; and the newly independent women who smoked cigarettes, wore their hair short, and earned their own money. Featured works in this vivid cultural portrait include Hannah Höch's The Journalists; Lotte Jacobi's Hands on Typewriter; Otto Dix's Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden; Peter Behrens's project of the Alexanderplatz; and Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, starring Dietrich as cabaret performer Lola Lola. We see also the economic and political realities which fuelled the era's escapist, idealistic, or reactionary masterworks. Behind the bright lights and glitter dresses, we see the inflation, factory labour, and fragile political consensus that lurked beneath this golden era and would eventually spell its savage end with the rise of National Socialism. New from Taschen, 22 x 26 cm, 96 pages.

Why London? Why now? Swinging London was a journalistic phenomenon of the 1960s, headlined by designers like Mary Quant and stars of pop culture like Mick Jagger. London had been leading international fashion since 1963, when the iconic model Jean Shrimpton first appeared on the cover of Glamour magazine. Mary Quant and Barbara Hulanicki of Biba pioneered affordable women's fashion for London's army of female office workers, but it was the new visibility of men's fashion that came to define the era, with John Stephen setting up his business in Carnaby Street and becoming a centre for the "Mod" movement in men's style. In spite of the general availability of high fashion, there was a class divide in sixties chic, with up-market venues such as Annabel's Club catering to a rich elite in which British aristocracy mixed with highly paid stars such as Michael Caine or photographer David Bailey. Many Londoners, however, will say the decade that was celebrated in journalism passed them by, and each chapter in this fascinating book takes a look at a different aspect of London life during the era. The author's overall argument is that the sixties sand seventies made the rise of Thatcherite ideology inevitable, and that Thatcher herself was following the zeitgeist rather than imposing her own ideas on the culture. There was a darker side to all the pizzazz. At the beginning of the sixties the river Thames was polluted beyond anything our present water lobby could envisage, and the great smog of 1962 led to respiratory problems and deaths from bronchitis. By the end of the decade dockers' earnings were only a third of what they had been ten years before. The bottom fell out of the shipbuilding and docking industry, together with public transport, health and other public services. Inner city areas disproportionately suffered mass unemployment and resulting political disaffection. 588pp, notes, photos in black and white and colour.

Based on the TV programme The Why Workshop, this is a mind-bending collection of impossible questions viewers ask, from "Why are dusters yellow?" to "How do plant seeds know which way is Up?". For instance, why is loss of memory linked to having a baby? The answer is that the mother's brain undergoes changes to make it more emotionally sensitive, and as the authors point out, a baby will appreciate a mother who understands why it's crying rather than one who can recite 100 digits of pi. Why do men go bald? The cause is the male hormone testosterone, and an ancient Egyptian remedy was a medicinal lotion made of boiled porcupine quills, or alternatively a female greyhound's leg fried in oil with a donkey's hoof. So how and when did it become the norm to have three meals a day? The Romans only had lunch, and for the next two millennia it was two meals, but the Industrial Revolution with its longer working hours created a demand for three meals for working people. Now, you'll never get this one: in 1896, what was the 937th most popular name for a baby boy in America? Startlingly, it was Josephine. And the answers to the questions in the first sentence are that we don't know why dusters are yellow. Seed cells have microscopic balls called statoliths which drop to the bottom, so if that is where the roots should be, the stems grow in the opposite direction. Happy quizzing. 237pp, line drawings.

'If you're lucky enough to go to Fontevrault Abbey near Chinon in France, you can pay your respects to Eleanor of Aquitaine, who died in 1204. There is a splendid carving which shows her reading even though she is dead, while her husband King Henry II appears to be lying beside her wondering if he locked the front door.' Here are many amuse-bouches for the mind, a whole year's worth of entertainment to dip into, with quotes from famous authors and a miscellany of history and information beginning with New Year celebrations in Babylon 2300BC, the Chinese New Year, and the poem of the month January by Edith Nesbit. There are resolutions, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell becoming Britain's first woman doctor and Maria Montessori opening her first school. On 5th February 1848 Belle Starr, the notorious American outlaw known as the Bandit Queen, was born. No one was ever charged with her murder. Dandara was an Afro-Brazilian warrior who committed suicide on 6th February 1694. The entries can be a few pages long to a few lines long covering April Fools, fishy festivals, the rules of mullet tossing, revolutionary women, a quick Caesar trivia quiz, National Aviation Day 19th August, the suffragists and politicians. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for the President of the United States, was born on 23rd September 1838 and the Chinese revolutionary and feminist writer Qiu Jin was born on 8th November 1875. 4th December is the International Day of Banks and the cosmetics empire businesswoman Elizabeth Arden was born on 31st December 1881. Why the Almanac has 2021 on the front you should ask the publisher, because this fun slightly feminist compendium can be dipped into over and over as we enjoy our lovely friend Sandys gentle humour, excellent research and QI facts. 360pp, line art.

This impressive pictorial history puts Britain's World War II in a global context, starting with the fact that a total of 60 million died, the majority civilians. Stanley Baldwin, the prime minister between the wars, said that "if you want to save yourselves you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy". The Blitz is central to British perception of the war, yet the Allied combined bomber offensive against Germany inflicted far more damage. The people who worked and fought for the Allied war effort were more diverse than is remembered today, with Punjabis, Nigerians and Canadians playing a key role, to name a few. The book starts with several pages of notes and maps explaining the Japanese push to expand its empire, which already included the Chinese province of Manchuria. This section is followed by the creation of Mussolini's empire, the rise of Nazism in the Weimar Republic, and the effective death of German democracy as Hitler assumed the dictatorship. An antisemitic kindergarten book and a photo of the 1934 Nuremberg rally underline the inter-war menace, while a die-cast Hurricane in the Dinky Toys range is a sign of Britain's growing defences. Although Jews could leave Germany they were unable to take money and possessions, which meant other countries were unwilling to admit them. Celia Horwitz, a Kindertransport girl, receives a letter from "Papi" whom she will never see again. The invasion of Norway found the Allies without adequate resources, and a photo of Rommel in the Battle of France shows that the Germans themselves were using Czech tanks. There are thumbnail features on individuals throughout, including Muhammed Akbar Khan, seen here in a fine portrait, who led his force of Muslim Punjabis and Pashtuns to safety in the evacuation of Dunkirk. A grim chapter on the Holocaust gives the locations and numbers exterminated at the different camps. Quality Thames & Hudson heavyweight 288 pages in conjunction with the IWM. Photos in colour and black and white on every page.