Popular culture

The speeches of Queen Elizabeth II hold a special place in many people's hearts across the world. During her 70-year reign she delivered many poignant, touching, and inspirational speeches, always with a warmth and sincerity, many of which have been collected in this volume.

After the sudden death of his father, Nick Blackburn embarks on a singular, labyrinthine journey to understand his loss. How do you create an existence when all you can see is a void? 'The Reactor' is a memoir about absence and creative possibilities, assembled like the pieces of a puzzle. Throug...

We live in a pop age gone loco for retro and crazy for commemoration. But what happens when we run out of past? Are we heading toward a sort of cultural-ecological catastrophe, where the archival stream of pop history has been exhausted? Simon Reynolds argues that we have indeed reached a tipping...

The 1980s were about big ideas writ large - new money, new style, gender fluidity, gay pride, attritional politics, the 'special relationship', nuclear fear, AIDS, cocaine, ecstasy, tabloid royalty, the rise of urban pop, and ultimately geopolitical chaos. Using a big narrative approach, Dylan Jo...

'I Am Not Your Baby Mother' was a landmark publication in 2020. A thought-provoking, urgent and inspirational guide to life as a Black British mum, it was an important call-to-arms allowing mothers to take control and scrap the parenting rulebook to do it their own way. 'Sista Sister' goes furthe...

In 2012, Jon Ronson's online identity was stolen. Jon publicly confronted the imposters, a trio of academics who had created a Jon Ronson Twitter bot obsessed by unlikely food combinations and weird sex. At first, Jon was delighted to find strangers all over the world uniting to support him in hi...

Sophie Ellis-Bextor's kitchen discos became a source of much needed escapism, catharsis and sequined joy for a swathe of the population during lockdown. From knackered mothers and fed up fathers, to cooped up partiers with nowhere to go, Sophie's gloriously chaotic Friday kitchen performances hav...

At the beginning of 2022, after eight years of political reporting in the US, Jon Sopel returned home to the UK - and having spent almost a third of his career abroad, he found a very different place to the one he left. In 'Strangeland', his first book since launching the global hit podcast The N...

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, 'Taking a Long Look' illuminates o...

In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell. What went wrong? 'Talking to Strangers' is all about what happens when we encounter pe...