Explores Reagan's political career, from his role in the California tax revolt to the economic success the United States experienced during his term in office.

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacher Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and he presents extracts from his work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. In one essay, he considers the delicate art of getting sources to tell you what they might not otherwise reveal. In another, he discusses how to use flashback to place a bear encounter in a travel narrative while observing that “readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.” The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising—and revising, and revising. Draft No. 4 is enriched by multiple diagrams and by personal anecdotes and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Throughout, Draft No. 4 is enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world.

To the River is the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One idyllic, midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked. Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape and how ghosts never quite leave the place they love.

Originally published by Viking Penguin, 2014.

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.

Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near.Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan 's fascinating study sets our present conventions into crosscultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing defi nitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as imitation, allusion, authorship, originality and plagiarism .

In February 1917, German U-boats launched a savage unrestricted campaign against both Allied and neutral shipping. At its peak in April, 860,000 tons of Allied merchant shipping was sunk. Britain’s supremacy at sea was being severely challenged and with it the chances of victory in the wider war. Taking up the challenge was Britain’s new First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe, until the previous December C-in-C of the Grand Fleet – famously described by Churchill as the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon. The battle he now faced was equally critical, although the timeline of defeat was a matter of days rather than hours – Britain’s food stocks were dangerously low with wheat reserves down to six weeks and sugar to only two, while wide-scale shortages were crippling the industrial economy. Jellicoe outlined the gravity of the situation with total candor to Rear Admiral William Sims, USN, sent over before America officially declared war by Franklin Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy. The two men already knew each other from service together in China during the Boxer Rebellion, so Jellicoe’s plea for urgent American assistance was taken seriously by Sims. After the USA joined the war in April 1917, together they lobbied Washington for aid, addressing their needs directly to two reluctant Anglophobes at the head of the USN, Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels and Chief of Naval Operations, William Benson. Clearly, a radical new approach to anti-submarine warfare was called for, and Convoy was the leading contender. There were many objections to protecting shipping in this way, some ideological but most practical – a workable system, for example, effectively required state control of both shipping and distribution networks, something inconceivable in normal circumstances. However, Convoy had powerful advocates, including the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who later claimed he had personally forced its adoption on a reluctant Admiralty. This self-serving political myth cast Jellicoe as an opponent of Convoy: nothing could be further from the truth. As both Jellicoe and Sims understood, the key requirement was a rapid increase in the number of destroyers for escort duties. America provided them, the first arriving in Queenstown, Ireland on 4 May and by June 46 were operating in European waters. This was the first step in an Anglo-American campaign that gradually brought the U-boat threat under control and led to its ultimate defeat. This book takes a fresh look at the undersea war as a whole and all the complex factors bearing on the campaign, only one of which was convoy. Its analysis is original, and its conclusions thought-provoking – an important contribution to the naval history of the Great War.

'Fascinating' The Times 'Blakeian in its singularity' New Statesman 'A wonderful adventure' Irish Times 'Rich, complex and original' Tom Holland 'A crisp, ambitious and thoroughly contemporary introduction' Times Literary Supplement Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work - and, crucially, his mind. Taking the reader on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context and shows us how Blake can help us better understand ourselves.

Cielo Drive cuts like a beautiful scar along the bottom of a V-shaped canyon in the hills of Bel Air, off of Benedict. In February, 1969, as she looked out on it from the red farmhouse at 10050 Cielo she and her husband Roman Polanski had just rented, Sharon had no way of knowing that she only had 6 months to live. On the night of August 9th, members of "The Manson Family" would invade that house and murder Sharon and three of her closest friends. But strangely, half a year earlier, she'd had a brush with a different killer. It happened after her younger sister Patti, then 11, looked across at the ominous Spanish-Moorish estate Sharon called "The Haunted House." In "Restless Souls," their remarkable memoir, Alisa Statmen and Brie Tate write that Patti then hiked down and across Cielo, walking up to No. 1436 Bella Drive. There, she encountered an open gate where white pillars bore the name: Falcon Lair. Once the home of Rudolf Valentino, it had been purchased in 1953 by the fabulously wealthy heiress Doris Duke. The wrought iron gates were open when Patti wandered inside. Suddenly, she heard, the caretaker yell, "This is private property!" Startled, she turned and lost her balance, skinning her knee, when just then, a black limo pulled in. A tinted window went down and a tall woman in back lowered her sunglasses to ask who she was. Once she ID'd herself as Patti, whose sister Sharon lived "across in the red barn," Doris knew that this wasn't just any child. She was the sibling of the hottest young star in town. So Doris snapped to the caretaker, "Stop being such an ogre and bring Patti in, so we can clean those scraps. And get me the Polanski's phone number." Later, the Duke staff was bandaging Patti's knee when Sharon arrived, "nervously chewing her lower lip" and apologizing to the blond billionaire who was the 3rd richest woman in the world behind Queen Elizabeth & Queen Juliana. But by then, Sharon Tate was Hollywood royalty herself; her husband Roman, coming off "Rosemary's Baby," was a kind of cinematic prince. So why was she nervous? What would make her bite her lip in the face of a woman whose caretaker's aggressive warning had caused her little sister to draw blood? Since Sharon was killed that summer, we'll never know. But one thing is clear: this wasn't the first time Sharon Tate had been pulled into Doris Duke's orbit. 2 1/2 years earlier, one of Sharon's closest friends, Eduardo Tirella, had been violently killed after Doris crushed him under a two-ton station wagon. At the time, all of Eduardo's friends suspected he'd been murdered. The brutal stabbing of Sharon Tate is the tragic tale of a young woman of great promise cut down in the prime of life. But the same could be said for Eduardo, whose own Hollywood career was just catching fire, when he told the possessive, heiress he was leaving her, just minutes before she ran him down outside the gates of her Newport, RI estate. Because she had the money and power, Doris Duke succeeded in effectively erasing his death from the narrative of her troubled life. For more than 50 years, the real truth behind what happened at Rough Point in 1966 has been hidden. Until now!