Penguin Books Ltd

Everybody wants breathable air, a healthy population, civil and consensual politics. We want a peaceful world, a stable economy. We've always wanted these things. The fundamental point of politics is to deliver them. And yet clearly our political systems are failing. Why is it so hard to get - and keep - the world that we want? The answer is that politics produces a number of traps: democracy, equality, solidarity, security and prosperity.

Red Famine, a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia and Ukraine, it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.

Looks at the nature of religious belief.

Inspired by the trial of a bureaucrat who helped cause the Holocaust, this radical work on the banality of evil stunned the world with its exploration of a regime's moral blindness and one man's insistence that he be absolved all guilty because he was 'only following orders'.

Offers insight into one of the turbulent periods in Ancient Greek history. This book is written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to Underworld to bring back a poet who can help Athens in its darkest hour, and stages a debate to help him decide between the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus and the modernity of Euripides.

Presents an analysis based on a study of over 150 city constitutions, covering a range of political issues in order to establish which types of constitution are best - both ideally and in particular circumstances - and how they may be maintained.

Across town, a child discovers a woman's body buried beneath the beach. Then another victim is found . Yet neither friends nor family had even reported either woman missing. How could their killer be getting away with murder? For Detective Inspector Helen Grace it is chilling evidence that she searching for a monster...