Sub-titled 'A Cultural and Practical Guide for All Business Professionals', this new edition updates and expands valuable cultural and practical information and is necessary reading for all professionals working with or in the Middle East and North Africa. It covers the practical impact of Islam on business, significant changes in recent years, understanding Saudi Vision 2030 and other key initiatives in the region, issues of particular importance to all businesswomen, and for men who might be working with Arab and Muslim businesswomen. It covers business etiquette from handshakes and business cards to dress codes, political and social dos and don'ts, how to communicate effectively including remote and virtual communication, and the practicalities from the initial visit to establishing productive working relationships, including opening an office. Includes overview of geography, demographics, Sunnis and Shi'a law and order, passport and visa, taboos, gift giving and what to do in free time in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Jerusalem, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, UAE and Yemen. 306pp, paperback, charts and graphs.

'What My Listeners Say and Why We Should Take Note' is the premise of this enjoyable memoir from an entertaining raconteur. A keen candidate on Strictly Come Dancing, presenter of Eggheads, Points of View, Crimewatch, interviewer and brother of comedian Tim Vine, on his popular BBC Radio 2 lunchtime show, Jeremy Vine has taken over 25,000 listener calls. He has decided to take stock of the wisdom his listeners have imparted over the airwaves like the man who describes getting an infection on his genitals after touching a fish, a caller arrested for being naked and why he was annoyed about it, a futuristic robot that comes into the studio and won't even turn on, a man who cooks and eats dolphin live on air in 2015, George aged 75 describing his sex life, a caller admitting to having shot and killed several cats, an item about the murder of a village goose, possibly by a sniper, and a caller not happy about cows living outside a nightclub in Bristol. It's clearer than ever before that caller wisdom is far more valuable than most of what we hear from 'the experts'. Totally unvarnished and unspun, the ordinary person turns out to be not so ordinary after all and here are the moments of truth from the world of politics, war, Brexit - and it always helps to make people laugh. A hilarious account of Jeremy Vine's life, by way of musings on everything including love, lollipop ladies, Len Goodman and poisonous plants. 340pp, paperback, colour photos.

With a Prime Minister who is constantly quoting the classics it comes as no surprise that our politicians can learn a thing or two from their Roman ancestors. Take the most famous backstabber of them all, Caesar's friend Brutus, who famously raised his dagger along with the other assassins on the fatal Ides of March. Boris Johnson may have been equally surprised that his trusty ally Michael Gove wielded the dagger in the 2016 leadership contest, since Gove had vowed that he himself had no interest in the top job. At the last moment he decided to stand against his chum, but support was slow in coming in. "He couldn't wipe the blood off his dagger that quickly", as one MP said to the author, a political journalist with access to a series of unattributable indiscretions. Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, is an admirer of Caesar's heir Octavian for the way he took control of the narrative in a time of crisis, and Nick Clegg in the 2010 coalition government is compared with Crassus in Octavian's triumvirate, the passenger whom no-one remembers. Jeremy Corbyn is compared with Nero, who like Corbyn had no interest in securing his country's defence. During Theresa May's premiership Jacob Rees-Mogg told the author that he was part of her "Praetorian Guard". The author lost no time in pointing out that the Praetorian Guard did not always back the emperor they were supposed to be protecting, and so it proved with Mogg, who was soon having to deny that he was leading a coup against May. This book examineS what today's politicos can learn from their Roman predecessors. How did they climb the greasy pole? How did they handle the rough and tumble? What can Boudicca teach us about Brexit? What could Emperor Hadrian teach President Trump about walls? In unpretentious prose our contemporary politicians are measured against the unscrupulous leaders of the ancient world and found morally to be even worse. A witty and erudite book from a journalist who is himself a classicist. 265pp, bibliography.

Sub-titled 'Our Story In Numbers as Told by the Office for National Statistics' from the Census 2021. What official data past and present tells us about our nation is who we are, what we do and where we live. For the past 200 years, the Census has charted our jobs, home lives and strange cultural habits with questions on occupation, housing, religion, travel and the family. The Census findings have informed the economy, politics and every other national matter and the data collected forms the single most valuable on-going historical resource of modern times. In 1841 there were 734 female midwives working in Britain, along with 9 artificial eye makers, 20 peg makers, six stamp makers and one bee dealer. Fast forward nearly two centuries and there are 51,000 midwives working in the UK, and not a single eye maker in sight! Here is the lowdown on our relationships, cultural beliefs and of course recent findings on COVID-19. There is a great deal on the popularity of 'traditional' names, the trend towards informality with names, the way in which we use the Internet is changing, the gap between what young people wanted to do and how much they envisaged earning and the reality of how they ended up. In 2016 the top five jobs that 16-21 year olds wanted to do included artistic, literary and media (writer, actor, producer), teaching, health professional, police officer or nursing. House building and skyscrapers, working hours and education, a fascinating slice of mass observation. 298pp, diagrams.

Love him or loath him, the journalist Piers Morgan shouts loud a rallying cry for a united future to consider what really matters in life. It's time to get back some common sense, time to cancel the cancel culture. If you think NHS heroes and Captain Sir Tom Moore are the real stars of our society, not the self-obsessed, tone-deaf celebrities and royal renegades, then this is the book for you. Piers Morgan is sickened by the cancel-culture bullies, destroying people's careers and lives and from feminism to masculinity, racism to gender, body image to veganism, mental health to competitiveness at school, the right to free speech and expressing an honestly held opinion he believes are being crushed at the altar of 'woke' political correctness. COVID-19 shed shocking light on the problems that plague our country. Stockpilers and lockdown cheats revealed our grotesque levels of self-interest. Millennials flocked to parks for picnics, proving the rank hypocrisy of the supposedly 'socially conscious'. The virtue-signalling woke brigade continued their furious assault on free speech, shutting down debate on important issues like gender, racism and feminism. The global pandemic has exposed in the UK deep divisions within society and laid bare a toxic culture war and here Morgan also holds the government to often ferocious account over its handling of the crisis. Yet he also on balance sees that Coronavirus has showcased our strengths, selfless bravery in the heroic efforts of our healthcare staff, a greater appreciation of migrant workers, the return of local community spirit and inspiring, noble acts from members of the public. From Wuhan to PPE, Harry and Meghan and Black Lives Matter and attacks on statues, Boris and Donald, here is a book of January to July. Morgan has strong opinions and is utterly truthful in where he points his aim.

Stalin's daughter was a difficult, complicated and deeply sympathetic woman. In one of the most momentous events of the Cold War, Svetlana Alliluyeve, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, abandoned her life in Moscow in 1967, arriving in New York to a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side is Peter Horvath, a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle Svetlana into America. She is a contradictory celebrity, charismatic and headstrong, lonely and alienated by her adopted country's radically different society. Persuading herself that all she yearns for is a simple American life, she attempts to settle into a suburban existence, but when this dream ends in disillusionment, she reaches out to Peter. He is the one person who understands how the chains of her past still hold her prisoner. As their relationship deepens, unfolding under the eyes of her CIA minders, their private lives cease to be their own. The author's father was in fact that young lawyer who escorted Svetlana to the US, and he has drawn upon private papers and years of extensive research to recreate this story of one woman's search for a place to belong. Fictionalised into an excellent novel. 268pp, paperback.

"3... 2... 1... We have lift off!" It was thirty two minutes past the hour and Apollo 11 saw humanity take a giant leap forward as the mission took off, shown on live television across the world. From 1903 when man was considering places "a place beyond the sky", to the "space age" between 1964 and 1966 and the "final frontier" between 1970 and 1979, this book offers readers the history of our journey from Cape Canaveral to the Moon. Transport yourself to 16 July, 1969: the day that saw nearly a million people gathered in Florida to wave off the first humans flying of to try and land on the moon, 239,000 miles away, and on which the US space team would beat the Russians who had been first to launch an artificial satellite, to fly past the Moon and the first orbit around the earth (during a 180-minute flight). Relive the excitement (and stress) of the landing as Neil Armstrong hovered above the Moon's surface to gently find the best landing spot more than half a minute passed the projected touchdown time and with the descent engine's fuel running dangerously low as it only had a few seconds of propellant remaining - all while Houston remained out of the know until Armstrong announced on the transmitter "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed". Learn about figures such as John F Kennedy, President of the United States, who realised that publicising flights on television would transform America's attitude towards spaceflight the way it had towards politics during the Cold War, and Wernher von Braun in the early days of the US space programme, the German rocket engineer who experimented with confiscated German V-2s on test range at White Sands, New Mexico, launching them as high as one hundred miles above the Earth. There also stunning photographs to pique the imagination, from the iconic image of Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface with Armstrong reflected in the mirror visor and the portrait of a grinning Armstrong in the lunar module after landing on the moon, to an action shot of the first Saturn V moon rocket being launched into space on 9 November 1967, astronaut Ed White floating at zero gravity after becoming the first American to walk in space during the June 1965 Gemini 4 mission, and an amusing image of what a human settlement on the Moon in 2024 may look like as part of the General Motors' Futurama exhibit at the 1964 - 1965 New York World's Fair. Soar above the Earth with this brilliant history that collates Cold War history, American politics and epic space travel in this fascinating book. Paperback, colour and black and white photographs, 370pp.

Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. But some of his suggestions (progressive income tax, abolition of child labour, free education for all children) are now accepted with little question. In a world where capitalism is no longer held in check by fear of a communist alternative, 'The Communist Manifesto' (with Socialism Utopian and Scientific, Engels's brief and clear exposition of Marxist thought) is essential reading. 394pp in paperback.

Kenneth Clark and Mary Beard both presented television programmes entitled "Civilisation", 50 years apart, and both admitted the difficulty of defining what the term actually means. The author of this book, which examines the concept as it has played out in Europe since World War II, comments that "civilisation" is most often invoked at times of cultural and moral breakdown, for instance at the end of the War or after 9/11. Unlike the 19th century missionary approach to civilisation, the post-war understanding was shaped by insecurity and the daunting task of starting over. Disillusionment with western values prompted curiosity about other civilisations, and the birth of the United Nations immediately after the war was an ambitious experiment in internationalism. The New York Post went so far as to call it "the most important human gathering since the Last Supper", representing as it did a transition to the language of individual rights and collective security. The author discusses the effect of the loss of empire in western and eastern Europe, Africa, and the Soviet Union, and the consequent repurposing of the concept of civilisation for political ends. An example is the way Eastern Europeans have championed the preservation of indigenous Third World traditions in the name of anti-imperialism and international fellowship. The material the author uses includes interviews and telling cultural artefacts such as west German guide books about how to behave in different situations, and he does not hesitate to challenge the narrative of the EU being a peacekeeping response to racial arrogance and totalitarianism. 536pp, black and white photos.

Sub-titled 'Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans and the End of the Chinese Miracle' this is a penetrating examination of the country's opaque financial system and the complex factors of demographic shifts, urbanisation, industrialisation and over-reliance on debt-fuelled investments. This has brought the county to the brink of crisis. Anchored by stories of China's cities and its people, from factory workers and displaced farmers, to government officials and entrepreneurs, the narrative will take readers inside zombie companies, start-ups and regulatory institutions as McMahon explains how things got so bad, why fixing the problems is so hard, and what the economic outlook means for China and the rest of the world. China was once dominated by four state-owned banks. President Xi Jinping issued an urgent call for reform that gave the country until 2020 to transform its economy, yet the inner workings of its financial system are still very much a mystery to most outsiders. Until this book. Now more than ever, as the country's slowing economy is being felt around the globe, it is essential to understand how China allowed its economy to become so mired in debt. An informed analysis animated by anecdotes and characters, some colourful, some verging on tragic. A most engaging economy lesson. 256pp, large softback.