Your Disobedient Servant

An account of Civil Service in Britain by Leslie Chapman served in the Ministry of Works from 1967 for more than thirty years.

From the tragic massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, to signing the Treaty of Rome when Britain entered the Common Market, Barbara Hosking was there. This is the story of a Cornish scholarship girl with no contacts who ended up in the corridors of power. It is also the very personal story of her struggle with her sexuality as a bewildered teenager, and as a young woman in the 1950s, a time when being gay could mean social ostracism. Born during the General Strike in 1926, Barbara Hosking worked her way through London's typing pools in the 1950s to executive posts in the Labour Party, then to No. 10 as a press officer to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Between working on a copper mine in the African bush, pioneering British breakfast television and negotiating the complexities of government, hers has been a life of breadth and bravery. Looking back at the age of ninety-one, this is Barbara Hosking's unheard-of account of the innermost workings of politics and the media amid the turbulence of twentieth-century Britain.

Narrative on television and scholarly narrative reveal the secret underbelly of politics and political science

The journalist and writer Andrés Garrido Torres was born in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2007, at the age of twenty-one, he traveled to London, where he stayed for a few years, having the opportunity to conduct some interviews for this book and attend various concerts such as The Sex Pistols in Brixton (2007) and Hammersmith (2008). Punk: The Future Never Comes, is a series of exclusive interviews with various artists from the UK punk movement. These artists of the punk revolution are the last link in the foundation of the legend of the artist misunderstood in their time, but admired by the following generations.

A historical novel about the births, lives, and related missions of Jesus and John the Baptist

The Repose of the Spirits is a translation of one of the earliest and most comprehensive treatises on Sufism in the Persian language. Written by Aḥmad Sam'ānī, an expert in Islamic law from a famous Central Asian scholarly family in about the year 1135, it is one of the handful of early Sufi texts available in English and is by far the most accessible. It also may well be the longest and the most accurately translated. Ostensibly a commentary on the divine names, it avoids the abstract discourse of theological nitpicking and explains the human significance of the names with a delightful mix of Quranic verses and sayings of the Prophet and various past teachers, interspersed with original interpretations of the received wisdom. Unlike the usual books on the divine names (such as that of al-Ghazali), The Repose of the Spirits reminds the reader of the later poetical tradition, especially the work of Rumi. The prose is richly embroidered with imagery and interspersed with a great variety of Arabic and Persian poetry. What is especially remarkable is the manner in which the author speaks to his readers about their own personal situations, explaining why they are driven by a love affair with God, a God who is full of compassion and good humor, whether they know it or not. William C. Chittick's masterful new translation brings this work to an English-language audience for the first time.