It's a paradox. Liberals are everywhere. In every political party, socialists and conservatives alike. Yet Liberal democracy is struggling across Europe and its new form is yet to be re-born. This book provides a vision of what that re-born version could look like. The authors argue for the current bland, politically correct, compromising Liberalism that comes across as a weak-willed lack of conviction to be reborn as something clearer and fiercer. One that re-discovers its radical roots and is decisive in constructing an open society, that discards the top-down bureaucratic form of...

Exactly a century ago, the soldiers on both sides of the opposing lines came out of the trenches, sang and played football, sometimes for more than a week. It was one of the strangest, most inspiring, most controversial but spontaneous acts of war. But there remain unanswered, and sometimes uncomfortable, questions. This book uses first-hand accounts to answer some of them and explain why these extraordinary events took place.

Rupert Brooke defies categorisation, even a century after his death. He was both romantic and a cynic, a radical and a conservative patriot, a passionate lover and a shy emotional bully with a horror of the physicality of sex. Yet is remains one of the few poets of his generation to still capture people's imagination today. In this brief biography, David Boyle pinpoints the real Brooke and tells the haunting story of the final few weeks of his life - and how quickly after his death he became a legend, and a symbol of something he may not have quite intended.

"There was a moment at the height of the Battle of Shrewsbury when it looked as though everyone, every knight and archer, every nobleman and peasant, would die there on that field of peas outside the city...." The battle that decided the fate of the Lancastrian regime in July 1403 is remembered by Battlefield Church, the medieval place of worship that was built on the site of the battle that killed Harry Hotspur and paved the way for his protege Henry V to become king. It is also remembered as the crisis in William Shakespeare's play Henry IV Part I. But so much else about this critical...

The radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing took the world by storm in the 1960s and 1970s with his ideas about madness, families and people's need for authenticity. At the height of his fame he could fill stadiums like Bob Dylan, and often did so. He became an icon of the movement that held psychiatry to be an agency of repression, his phrases on a million hippy T-shirts. Then he fell from grace, flung out of the medical profession, and his influence has been waning since. His basic ideas have been regarded as having been discredited. Yet, despite this, his influence is also everywhere - but...