Francis Leach

In the new Russia, even dictatorship is a reality show. Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell's Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the glittering, surreal heart of twenty-first-century Russia. It is a world erupting with new money and new power, changing so fast it breaks all sense of reality, home to a form of dictatorship—far subtler than twentieth-century strains—that is rapidly rising to challenge the West. When British producer Peter Pomerantsev plunges into the booming Russian TV industry, he gains access to every nook and corrupt cranny of the country. He is brought to smoky rooms for meetings with propaganda gurus running the nerve-center of the Russian media machine, and visits Siberian mafia-towns and the salons of the international super-rich in London and the US. As the Putin regime becomes more aggressive, Pomerantsev finds himself drawn further into the system. Dazzling yet piercingly insightful, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible is an unforgettable voyage into a country spinning from decadence into madness.

In QAnon and On, Guardian columnist Van Badham delves headfirst into the QAnon conspiracy theory, unpicking the why, how and who behind this century’s most dangerous and far-fetched internet cult. From Gamergate to Pizzagate and beyond to QAnon, internet manipulation and disinformation campaigns have grown to a geopolitical scale and spilled into real life with devastating consequences, entangling everyone from politicians to Hollywood celebrities. But what would motivate followers to so forcefully avoid the facts and surrender instead to made-up stories designed to influence and control? It’s a question that has haunted Van, herself a veteran of social media’s relentless trolling wars. In this daring investigation, Van exposes some of the internet’s most extreme communities to understand conspiracy cults from the inside. QAnon and On is the story of the modern internet, the farscape of political belief and a disinformation pipeline built between the two that poses an ongoing threat to democracy itself. Shocking and mesmerising in equal measure, this book will open our eyes to the dangers of partisan belief.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times) “Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.”—Masha Gessen The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

There have been histories of Australian football before. There has not been one like Carn. Carn tells the story of the Victorian Football League and its successor, the Australian Football League, from 1897 to the present day, by focusing on 50 of the thousands of games which have been played down the decades. Some of these matches have been significant to the game of Australian football; others have been significant to Australia as a whole. Carn recognises that while the game is only a game, it has also always been much more than anything which consumes so much of the nation's attention can't help but reflect something of the nation's character. Carn is a book replete, as the Australian game is, with great yarns and extraordinary people. It is a book for fans of Australian football, and fans of Australia.

Outlining of the history of football through graphic football record sleeves As this fascinating book shows, the football record―which turns out to be a vast subgenre of its own―has more to offer than just music: the sleeves of these seven-inch records outline the history of football in a truly unique way. They tell of promotions, championship titles, finals and ground inaugurations, and document the evolution of equipment (for example, from the heavy brown leather ball to the TV-friendly black-and-white ball); they also show how the typography and imagery changed from one World Cup to another. Each cover is a piece of commercial art and a testament to its time, narrating the history of football in a fun, informative and special fashion. Based on a collection of 930 cases of records from the 1950s to the present, Football Disco! tells the story of clubs such as Botafogo and Boca, Norwich and Nantes, Spartak and Dynamo, and celebrates footballers as pop stars: Pelé and Beckenbauer, Müller and Milla, Hoddle and Waddle, Scifo and Sanchez. Texts on football and music in Italy, Argentina, Germany and England situate the collection in a historical, regional and cultural context.